Letters

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2001

Carrot Sticks

Matthew Miller's account of the challenges facing Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer ("The Super," June 2001) does a good job of shedding light on the complexities of school reform. And yet, Miller undercuts that analysis with simplistic solutions that are not supported by any facts within the story.

The teacher shortage in Los Angeles is one of the most severe in the nation. Miller's answer: dangle a carrot for a few people through merit pay. How does one contend with the social, political, and economic complexities of a district that serves 725,000 students? Miller's answer: throw a new bone of contention into the mix with private-school tuition vouchers.

Let's give Romer credit for his courage and experience in crafting imperfect solutions to real world situations. Simple solutions can only be implemented when the real world melts away.

BOB CHASE, PRESIDENT
National Education Association
Washington, D. C.

Temper, Temper

While Matthew Miller ("The Super," June 2001) may suffer from a case of Roy Romer hero- worship, those of us who know what he did to the Denver public schools have long since recovered. Romer did not successfully mediate teacher talks in Denver. Instead, as governor, he invoked an ancient state law giving the executive the absolute right to intervene in labor disputes. Romer dictated a "site-based management" scheme into the Denver teachers contract and declared that this would improve student achievement. Not.

In the 10 years since, the school system has fragmented and the ability of the elected board and its superintendent to manage the schools has been limited by the decentralization created by Romer and embedded in the teachers' contract. How ironic that he now laments the power of the teacher unions; 10 years ago, he complained about the "central bureaucracy." I hope that L.A. schools can survive a Romer temper tantrum; I don't think Denver's did.

JOANNE MARIE ROLL
Denver, Colo.

Meg-alomania

Somebody finally said it, and leave it up to The Washington Monthly's Timothy Noah to do it: Whatever her other talents may have been, Meg Greenfield was a terrible writer. Among the many writing traps she often fell into, Greenfield wrote the longest sentences of any mid-20th-century journalist in my memory. By the time a reader got to the "period" in one of her sentences, you often had to go back to the beginning to remember what she was talking about in the first place. On reading her columns, I used to play a game of "count-the-words" in her prose. The record: a remarkable 120-word sentence. That's lung power, or in her case, finger power. Perhaps obfuscation was her secret. Now, will somebody please explain to me how Barbara Walters manages to stay on television?

MICHAEL GRACE
Brinklow, Md.

The Devil and Dr. Laura

Hear, hear! Until reading "The Baby Boycott" (June 2001) I thought I was the only woman around who was this pissed off. The only thing you forgot on the list of particulars: What happens when you can't just "find another job" because tax cuts for rich people are way higher on the priority list than universal health coverage for children?

Here's my own personal horror story: When I was about six months pregnant, I fell down a flight of stairs at work and injured my ankle. While I was sitting in the hospital weeping because it hurt so much, the doctor whipped out of his pocket a column by Dr. Laura about the evils of working mothers and refused to treat me until I read it. When I informed the doc that if I didn't work, nobody in my family would have health insurance, he told me that I should be able to make do.

Thanks for an incredibly illuminating article that should be required reading for every man in the country. You guys rock!

CREDENCE FOCO
Via e-mail

A Modest Proposal

I'm starting to get tired of articles which argue that a decreasing birth rate is a bad thing ("The Baby Boycott," June 2001). As far as I'm concerned, in this area, and most other areas of the world, it's an excellent thing.

People have not stopped having babies because of any political, social or employer-initiated action. They've stopped because it's not a particularly good idea. Nowhere on the entire surface of the earth is even one additional human needed for any reason whatever who cannot be supplied from stock elsewhere.

There's much hand-wringing about what a decreasing birth rate will do to the future stability of the economy, both here and overseas, but when the option is posed of, "well, how about loosening immigration?" the truth comes out. "We don't want those people reproducing." There are plenty of people who can move here and support the economy, but unfortunately they're not white and Protestant and educated.

Those people who are going to have children have already shown their tendency to do it in the face of adversity, policy, employment practice, their ability to pay for it, the ability of a community to absorb it, or even good sense. Changing policies will not change birth patterns in any way. A decreasing birth rate may indicate that women are wising up and choosing to live their lives for themselves instead of in response to societal pressures to pop out babies. I applaud this.