THE PROBLEM IS IGNORANCE
I
love it when college types write letters claiming to know why urban schools fail
(“The Schools’ problem? Concentrated Poverty,” March 30). It is particularly
laughable when the observations come from folks who have jobs as trainers,
staff-development experts, professional writers, consultants, or others who
talk like farmers claiming to know how to cultivate poor, minority children.
What they always suggest is a clean,
easy way to solve the problem: Take all of the kids who are lacking the proper
soil and put them in a garden with roses and they will bare fruit. Wrong! The
process will never be that simple. Improving urban schools will not involve
moving the plants. It will involve getting a new farm, and that process will
not be so neat.
If you want kids to blossom in
school you can’t be afraid to get knee deep in shit. Manure stinks, and all of
the nice people who enjoy microphones, catered conferences, conventions, book
signings, and panel discussions should stay away from the soil. Intellectuals
who sit around in their forums end up with harmful collective think. What they need to do is ask the people who are on
the front lines. Ask the families (mostly moms and grandparents), or the urban
teachers, if more money or integration is the best way to improve urban
schools. Some may say yes, but most would describe something more immediate,
something that everyone curses but no one dare confront: the school system
itself.
Most schools are not set up to
inspire or bring about change. They are designed to maintain the status quo,
and this is true from one district to the next. They are all structured in the
same way with similar hierarchies. The chain of command is essentially the same
in Pittsford as it is in the city. The difference is that the parents in
suburban districts demand that school leadership continue
to produce. They hold the managers accountable, and although most of these
suburban schools could probably be much better, they remain stable, and that is
good enough for the folks who have the money to make up for the schools
shortcomings. This is not the case in the city.
Most city parents are every bit as
emotional as suburban families but are not as “system savvy,” so the district
leaders in the city can afford to tinker when they should be dismantling. The
three most important players in the equation — the kids, their families, and
the classroom teachers — are unsupported, and many of them have lost hope.
All of the lip service in the world will not change this.
What is needed is a complete
breakdown of what currently exists. Schools must be reinvented from the bottom
up. The emotional element must be brought back into them. Unfortunately, only
two things will cause this to happen. The families could rise up and demand it,
essentially causing a revolution. This is unlikely. The other way would be for
the leaders themselves to give up what they now have. The big salaries, egos,
comfortable chairs, heavy desks, secretaries, golden parachutes, and everything
else must be given up. The teachers, families, and community leaders should be
given control.
This is even less likely to happen.
School leaders like going out to eat, they enjoy vacationing, they have bills
to pay, college tuition, car payments, etc., and they are not going to give
these things up any more than Gollum would give up the ring.
John
Bliss, Nottingham
Road, Rochester (Bliss is a
city school district parent and activist.)
SPELL CHECKED
I agree that the stars of “Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner” deserve more than the current remake, but KathArine the Great
(Hepburn) deserves better than having her name misspelled in a movie review, of
all places (“What a Difference a Generation Makes,” March 30).
Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Rochester
From the editor: You’re right, and we’re
humbled.
REWRITING HISTORY
The Marxist-progressive left in America
has sought for decades to rewrite history to conceal the record of atrocities
perpetrated on their own people by Communist governments the world over. In
“Hero of the Revolution,” (March 30) Arnold Matlin proposes the
following rewrites in the case of Nicaragua:
• The US
opposed the Sandinista government because “It was the threat of a good
example.”
• “The
Sandinistas did great.”
•
“They were brilliant in being able to keep it together for 11 years
despite all these attacks by proxy with the Contras and the economic attacks by
the United States.”
• “If
the Sandinistas had been left alone…Nicaragua
would be a far better place.”
Is that
really how it was?
The
Sandinistas defeated the dictatorial Somoza government of Nicaragua
by force in 1979. They wrote a constitution that provided for voting and the
freedom to form political parties. Soon, Daniel Ortega and the 15-member ruling
junta took complete control of the country. The constitution would have to
wait.
By 1980,
they set up a secret police and made military service mandatory. They forced
the nationalization of more than 50 percent of the nation’s means of
production. They collectivized agriculture. They forced economic central
planning and established press censorship. All the usual Marxist dictatorship
moves. Democracy would have to wait.
In 1981,
Sandinista forces attacked the 150,000 Meskito Indians and other tribes who
lived on tribal homelands along the Atlantic coast. Tribal leaders were
arrested. In 1982, 10,000 Indians were forcibly relocated to the interior.
Bulgarian, East German, and even Palestinian “advisors” conducted
much of the relocation.
Those who
refused to go were left to starve on their lands. Anthropologist Gilles
Battalion described it as “the politics of ethnocide.” As justification
for these atrocities, Tomas Borge, Ortega’s Maoist minister, publicly
announced, “The revolution can tolerate no exceptions.” Caring for
the poor did not apply to Indians.
In 1979, the
first year of the Sandinistas’ regime, they announced Decree 185, which set up
tribunals outside the established legal system for the purpose of trying
political dissidents. In 1982, the UN Human Rights Commission publicly
expressed concern about the large numbers of people who had
“disappeared” or had died “attempting to escape.” By 1983,
Amnesty International documented 3700 political prisoners in Sandinista jails.
The year
1984 brought the long-promised elections. Sandinista thugs caused so much violence
and intimidation that the conservative candidate withdrew. His serious
opposition effectively eliminated, Daniel Ortega was “elected.”
That year
also brought waves of arrests in the countryside. Members of non-Sandinista
political parties were jailed. Fifteen thousand Sandinista special agents,
trained by Cuban G2, detained people indefinitely without charge and used
torture methods including electric batons, stress positions, isolation, mock
executions, and worse to force confessions. Former Somoza guards were never
more than 20 percent of the detainees.
These are
the Sandinista practices and policies that caused a new civil war to begin in
1982, this time against them. It was begun by several groups with differing
ideologies. In the north, former Somoza supporters and true democratic freedom
fighters formed the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, or FDN. In the south,
disenchanted former Sandinistas, anti-collectivization peasants, and Indians
formed the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance, or ARD. These groups also
resorted to atrocities.
They were
eventually aided by the US
under Reagan. The Sandinistas were aided by Cuba,
East Germany,
and North Korea
under their various Communist dictators. In 1985, a trade embargo was begun by
the US with
support from most west European nations. By then, 50 percent of the Sandinista
budget was going for military expenses, as they found it harder and harder to
force their Marxist policies on a resisting populace.
In 1989 the
Berlin wall came down. Communism
was failing in eastern Europe and across the Soviet Union.
In 1990, the Sandinistas also failed. They relinquished power by granting
another election in which they were defeated by Democratic candidates, marking
the first time in 160 years that power had been peacefully transferred in Nicaragua.
With the ouster of the Sandinistas, democracy had finally arrived.
If the
Nicaraguan people thought their country would be a better place with
Sandinistas in power, they would have voted them in in
1990. They didn’t.
Despite Arnold
Matlin’s claims, the Sandinistas were anything but a “good example,”
and did not “do great.” Nor were their atrocities against their own
people, “brilliant.” Nicaragua
is a nation torn not by US
aggression but by the Sandinista government’s aggression against its own
people.
The
Sandinistas’ attempts to force a Marxist dictatorship on the Nicaraguan people:
1) Provoked
a civil war which killed 50,000 people;
2) Led
their original revolutionary goals astray;
3) Delayed
the coming of democracy to Nicaragua
for 11 years.
Arnold
Matlin’s efforts on behalf of the poor in Nicaragua
are heroic. The Sandinista revolution was not.
Chris Nelson, Hendrix Road, West Henrietta
THE CHURCH IN NICARAGUA
Those of us who have known Dr. ArnieMatlin have deep regard and respect for the work he
has done over the years in the poverty-stricken areas of Nicaragua (“Hero of
the Revolution,” March 30).
However,
when I was watching the public-television biography of Pope John Paul II, it
was with some sadness that I learned that similar activities for social service
on the part of the Catholic clergy were considered to be almost an anathema by
the church, and priests were duly punished by banishment.
Bernard A.Yablin,
Winton Road
South, Brighton
WRITING TO CITY
We welcome and encourage readers’ letters for publication.
Send them to: themail@rochester-citynews.com or The Mail, City Newspaper, 250
North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.
Our
guidelines: We don’t publish anonymous letters — and we ask that you include
your street name and city/town/village. We don’t publish letters that have been
sent to other media — and we don’t
publish form letters generated by activist groups. While we don’t restrict
length, letters of under 350 words have a greater
chance of being published. We do edit letters for clarity and brevity. And in
general we don’t publish letters (or longer “op-ed” pieces) from the same
writer more often than about once every two months.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2005.
