‘Schools Fail, Not Our Children’

In response to “Schools Fail, Not Our Children,” by Robert Gehl, Editorial Page, Nov. 4:

Let me be the first to not support Robert Gehl for superintendent of public instruction. His diatribe against any state involvement with education makes his wish to be superintendent of public instruction as oxymoronic as having a Quaker be secretary of defense.

Gehl blames all of public education’s problems today on the fact that schools are run by the government. He states that American kids come in dead last in certain test scores when compared with other industrialized countries. But these other industrialized countries, such as Japan and West Germany, have an educational system also run by the government. In Japan the highest quality secondary schools are public not private. And West Germany has far fewer private K-12 schools than does the U.S.

In addition, he complains about our dropping national achievement scores (such as the SAT) over the past 20 years. But it was the same government (public) schools of the late 1950s that provided us with the highest SAT scores.

All countries of the world recognize that the government has a major responsibility with respect to basic education of its citizenry and the U.S. is no exception. There are many things we as a country might do to improve our public schools, but privatizing them as Gehl suggests is not one of them.

LARRY J. SHAW

La Mesa