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Homework, not money answer for schools

Dear Editor:It’s time once again for a taxpayer shakedown by the [Roaring Fork] School Board and the district office but before you vote, gentle readers, consider several things:The school district’s solution to every problem is always more money from the public. Let’s do our share by encouraging the business community to provide summer jobs for teachers. This will boost the teachers’ income without increasing taxes and help them to appreciate working only part of the year should they choose to decline the offer. How many of you reading this have the entire summer off where you work and still make what an average teacher makes? You don’t? Get yourself some lawn signs right away.The second consideration is from an article in the November 2004 Atlantic Monthly by Jonathan Rauch: “There is a way to raise student achievement that’s sensible, cheap, and straightforward – homework. In 1999, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, two-thirds of 17-year-olds did less than an hour of homework on a typical night. Forty percent did no homework at all.” “Of twenty nations,” says a recent report by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, “the U.S. ranked near the bottom, tied for the next-to-last position”In 2001, 71 percent of high school and middle school students agreed with the proposition that most students in their school ‘[did] the bare minimum to get by’ “Why the silence [about the lack of homework]? Perhaps because no one stands to earn billions of dollars on homework,” Rauch says. “Americans like to view their children as passive recipients of education – as products of the schools. If the product is defective, fix the factory. You will know that Americans are finally serious about education reform when they begin to talk not just about how the schools are failing our children but also how our children are failing their schools.”Our Valley, Our School District’s never-ending propaganda, Summer Jobs for Teachers!Vote NO on 3A and 3B! William M. PerichCarbondale