Looking for Answers to L.A.’s Problem Schools

Re “L.A. Unified Launches New Crackdown,” March 1: Here’s an idea. Let’s reassign those terrible teachers at those failing high schools to top-performing high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and reassign those terrific teachers in those top schools to the failing schools. You know, a blockbuster trade.

In one year we’ll be surprised to see that those terrible teachers have become great ones, and the great ones have become terrible.

No Child Left Behind ... ludicrous! Come to think of it, shouldn’t the newly crowned great teachers receive merit pay, and those terrible teachers be fired or reassigned?

Larry Friedman

Thousand Oaks

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It seems to me that the LAUSD’s plan to address the problem of low-performing high schools unfairly places the blame on teachers and administrators for student underachievement. If high school students are not meeting state achievement standards, then perhaps they were not prepared for the rigors of high school during their junior high school years, or their elementary school years before that.

In fact, many low-income and minority students enter kindergarten ill prepared for the academic demands that await them even at this level. Study after study has demonstrated that children who participate in a quality preschool program from age 3 or 4 are more successful at every successive level of their schooling. It is time to seriously consider how we might include preschool as a key component of the free and appropriate educational package offered to every student in California.

Marian Sunabe

South Pasadena