ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 11, 1995 TAG: 9512110033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HUGH KEY
SAMUEL Johnson wrote, ``Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.''
My Nov. 6 letter to the editor (``Exposing public-school myths'') made some folks uneasy, for they have attacked me rather than trying to deal with facts as I presented them. It's unfortunate that my source citation -``Virginia Statistical Abstract, 1994-'95 edition,'' Center for Public Service, University of Virginia - was left off when my letter was printed.
For those who don't keep every newspaper you receive, I offered three ``myths'' and documented them:
Pupil-teacher ratios in public schools are too high. (At 14.7 pupils per full-time-equivalent teaching position, the ratio is about half what most people think.)
Rising enrollments have public schools bursting at the seams. (Fifth Planning District enrollment dropped from 40,769 in '86-'87 to 38,801 in '92-'93, the most recent data included.)
All teachers deserve higher salaries. (Virginia's 65,000 classroom teachers average $32,800 in salary.)
Teachers, like all occupations and professions, vary in ability and efficiency. Some no doubt deserve more, and some less, than the standard union contract they sign.
The first attack came from Alex L. Martin III (Nov. 22 letter, ``Strains on students and teachers are not school myths''). He asserts that `` ... empirical educational research strongly supports a class enrollment of 12 to 14 students,'' but cites no such research. He asserts that the data I quote for pupil-teacher ratio ``are obviously derived by seeking a direct ratio between student and teacher totals, which includes administrative personnel classroom teachers.
Martin ignores the fact that open enrollment allows any student attendance almost anywhere (but may not provide transportation outside geographic assignment zones). He states that consolidation of all Roanoke Valley schools into one district ``would impact positively upon our welfare and our posterity,'' while offering no evidence to support such an assertion. He asserts that national, state and local teacher associations are not unions. Courts, legislatures and common sense agree that they are, in fact, labor unions.
The second attack came from Lois Ann Cox (Nov. 30 letter, ``Fifteen kids per class? Dream on'') who says she's a mathematics teacher at Salem High School. She questions whether I'm ignorant or lying when I offer readily available, published statistical information that she probably hasn't seen. In 1991-'92, Salem had 3,561 pupils and 251 full-time-equivalent teachers for a pupil-teacher ratio of 14.2. People of reasonable intellect can read and understand such published enrollment data without having spent 32 years in classrooms.
Cox claims ``these figures are distorted because they include 37 special-education classes ... '' Does she believe that special-education students aren't really students, and their classes are not really classes? How else to explain her stated view that class-size statistics shouldn't include them?
And what does my personal stamina have to do with anything? What extraordinary stamina does it take to work a seven-hour day (7:50 a.m. through 2:50 p.m., including lunch) for 182 scheduled days per year in your chosen occupation? That's 36.4 five-day work weeks, folks, or 1,274 actual classroom hours (including lunch). Most jobs and professions consider eight-hour-day (not including lunch), five-day-week, 50-work-week years to be standard. That's 2,000 work hours, or 57 percent more hours than a teacher working every class period spends in class. Many teachers, and many others in the work world, work more than scheduled minimum requirements, of course.
Lissy Runyon wrote an excellent commentary (Dec. 3, ``What's right with the schools''). She presents a tremendous amount of information in an understandable way. She makes the point that today's schools are faced with a far more diverse student population, with very different educational needs than was true even a few years ago. I feel that diversity could best be addressed by diverse providers of educational services rather than assuming that any monolithic government system is best for all. That is the point of education reform, whatever the label placed on a particular piece of it. Individual needs may be best served by individual choice, in education as in every other aspect of life.
Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp, wrote several years ago: ``Americans have always been wary of any concentration of power, and with good reason. Any government-private complex tends to increase the concentration of power, and its formation should be a fire bell in the night. When that complex persists in its newspeak and others have trouble getting a word in edgewise, we have on a national scale what Lincoln warned of in 1854: `If a man will stand up and assert, and re-assert that two and two do not make four, I know of nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.'''
Public-school policy is too important to leave solely in the hands of a government-private union complex. Civility will go a long way toward encouraging discussion. Deliberate attempts at intimidating or denigrating those with views different from your own are the hallmark of schoolyard bullies, not adults interested in improving educational quality for posterity. Can we discuss without rancor?
Hugh Key is a businessman and chairman of the Roanoke County Republican Party.
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