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Saturday, May 24, 2003

Hesitation in improving the funding of education will hurt us

I couldn't agree more with retired Post-Gazette Editor John G. Craig Jr.'s recommendation that we develop a set of indices to help us make decisions in southwestern Pennsylvania ("Just the Facts," April 27). As a businessperson, I can attest to the importance of using hard data to identify problems and choose solutions.

But there is one area where we do not have to wait any longer for solid statistics: the quality of education that we are providing to our region's children. Consider the following facts from Allegheny County alone:

Forty-five percent of fifth-graders are less than proficient on the state math test, and four in 10 are less than proficient on the reading test.

The gap between what our wealthiest and poorest school districts spend is stunning. Quaker Valley is able to invest $10,796 per student. But just a short drive away in McKeesport, the community can afford to spend only $7,860 per student -- a difference of almost $60,000 for a classroom of 20 students.

Our communities pay 44 percent more in local property taxes than we did a decade ago, largely because the state has not been paying its fair share of education costs for the past 25 years.

The longer we hesitate, the further behind Pennsylvania gets. If we want to improve this state's economy and make it a better place to live, we need to make changes now. Gov. Rendell's Plan for a New Pennsylvania addresses these challenges by lowering property taxes state-wide, making targeted investments in our schools and creating more equity in how we fund education. These facts speak for themselves; we simply can't afford to wait any longer to do something about them.

DAVID J. MALONE
Chairman
Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board
Downtown

Resist 'e-mailese'

Ellen Goodman, in her May 14 column ("Slammer for Spammers?"), certainly told it like it is. Complaints about spam are getting more and more numerous.

I wish to bring up another "plague" that has affected e-mail; I call it "e-mailese." By this I mean that those writing e-mail have mangled the English language. Proper spelling has given way to phonic spelling and abbreviations. No more capital letters at the beginning of a sentence (or for proper names) and often no more periods at the end; sometimes no punctuation at all! Acronyms, real or made up on the spot, are not uncommon.

The result, aside from such abominable revisionism, is that the message is hard to read until you learn the new language.

Sorry, but give me pure English, and resist the urge to make e-mailese a part of the new computer technology!

L. ARTHUR LASSMAN
O'Hara

Challenge this trend

"It all comes from, I would argue, the right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution."

The statement above, by Sen. Rick Santorum, is obviously taken out of context; I'll make that admission straight away. But I challenge you to insert the statement in any other context that makes you feel comfortable as an American.

The statement is indicative of a very uncomfortable trend among our elected officials, the idea that for the government to properly protect us they need to know everything about us. I lived in an environment very similar to this in Spain in 1975.

Franco was still the dictator, the Catholic Church was the sanctioned religion and people were well trained as to what could be said in public and the torture that you would endure if you forgot. The economy was mediocre, mobility across economic classes was nonexistent and the press was well controlled. The cities were very safe and crime was low, but interestingly, so was the spirit of the population.

My second year in Spain, Franco died and the country underwent a planned transition to democracy. The jails were emptied of the "created criminals," violators of the laws created to protect the populations from themselves and the ideas and behaviors that weren't deemed in line with the dictator's ideas of "traditional family values." A good friend of mine, a lawyer whose father was a highly placed official and had great wealth without freedom, said that "the change to democracy was like a gray cloth being removed from our country"; he understood the advantages that a liberal and tolerant society provides to all.

I am proud to see that Spain's economy has now reached a level of performance surpassing Germany and France. This was clearly made possible through this strange link to freedom and tolerance.

Freedom is a difficult concept to explain or understand, but the things that make it work are often repulsive to some. The United States has come to understand that contradiction and as a result has become the greatest country in the world. As an individual who has lived in both environments and had the advantage of seeing the before and after, I ask that the government stop asking us to give up our freedom and independence along with reducing our tolerance.

JOSEPH F. STAFURA
South Side

Infringing on freedom

Brenda Nichol is correct -- the Pennsylvania School Code, under which she was suspended from her job without pay for wearing a cross, should be deemed unconstitutional ("Judge Hears About Cross-Wearing Suit," May 13).

The First Amendment cuts both ways on religion. It gives us "freedom from" religion, preventing the government or any of its proxies (like public schools) from imposing a state religion like the one from which many of the founders of this country fled. I assume that was the purpose of this statute (although the fact that it dates from an era when school prayer was standard makes me wonder); the thought must have been that wearing a cross, even if one never called attention to it, was tantamount to a teacher endorsing a particular religion to her students.

However, there is also a freedom to freely practice one's religion. Wearing a cross is a relatively mild example; there is plenty of more obvious religious garb, from the kippah (skullcap) that I and my fellow Jews wear to the turbans worn by Sikhs to the headscarves or veils worn by Muslim women.

For many, this garb does not simply make a statement -- it is a matter of religious obligation. A teacher adhering to one of these faiths would be forced to choose between breaking the state law and committing a sin in the eyes of her faith. Americans aren't supposed to have to make such choices.

Prayer in schools and various other forms of publicly sponsored religion have been eliminated because they were correctly perceived as forcing the majority religion on minorities like myself. What happened to Brenda Nichol carries the idea of "freedom from" establishment of religion too far, to where it violates her personal "freedom for" religion.

Let her wear her cross; as long as she doesn't ask her students to wear them as well, she's doing nothing wrong.

JONATHAN WEINKLE
Squirrel Hill