Money for Education Is Needed at Home

As a public school teacher I find it absolutely bewildering that the U.S. government can donate $100 million to Pakistan’s education system when our own education system is in dire need of money (“Dollars to Help Pupils in Pakistan,” April 14). Here in California alone we face millions of dollars in budget cuts, which will include teaching positions and reduction of 20-to-1 classrooms.

How is it possible that we can spend billions of dollars helping other countries and waging war, while we continue to cut education spending here in our own country and at the same time insist on “raising the bar” for our children with little financial support? In the end, the teachers take the blame for low test scores and high dropout rates. We cannot successfully do our jobs without the proper funding. Where is this funding? It seems to have gone to the power companies and other countries.

Ellen Moshein

Los Angeles

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Some $80 billion has been given to President Bush to avenge his father, help Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company -- and for oil. Meanwhile, on the home front, schools are having major funding problems and teachers are being given pink slips. My elementary-age children had a note sent home requesting donations for the military, yet they have also been told to conserve paper. (What about the paper used to request military donations?)

I refused to donate, and I told my daughter there used to be an old cliche that went something like this: Suppose all the schools had all the money they needed and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale? Something is definitely wrong when schoolchildren are requested to support the military while education is being cut back. Way to go, Mr. Education President!

Leslie N. Herschler

Garden Grove