LETTER TO CONGRESSMAN BILL ARCHER:
Congressman Bill Archer
Congress of the United States
House of Representatives
7th District, Texas
1135 Longworth
House Office Building
Washington, DC
20515
I am writing to you with a few
suggestions that I have as a school board trustee in Katy Texas.
The “Correction Day” program has caught my eye as being a boon to ridding our
country of boondoggle programs.
As a school board member I
constantly see many things that simply amaze
me. I would like you to scrutinize a few of
these issues, and if you can get rid of these I would be happy to suggest others.
Last year Goals 2000 funding was
extended to the states for the purpose of making President Clinton appear to be helping
with the improvement of education. Each state
then asked individual school districts to make grant proposals to acquire some of this
federal money. I calculated that the funds if
distributed evenly among Texas school children would equate to fifty cents per student, a
fact that told me that this was merely a political project.
I have been successful in preventing my school district’s employees from applying
for these funds, but not without some difficulty.
(I wish you had time to look at some of the grant requests that teachers devised to
get their hands on this money.) This funding,
as well as Goals 2000, needs eliminating. I am
convinced that President Bush was naive when he allowed this program to go forward.
While Congress debates the current
problems, it is allowing an entire generation of young people to be educationally
brainwashed right under its nose, and all the
efforts of Congress will go for naught when these students
mature and have a voice. A return to a
strong traditional academic education should be the first priority of Congress.
I also see a great waste in the
Blue Ribbon program for our public schools.
You, like I participated when Pattison Elementary received this award last fall.
It is a dubious honor, based upon meaningless criteria and reflects nothing in the
way of scholarship or the “goodness” of the school.
At Pattison as well as at the high schools in our district that have applied this
year, $1,500 consultants’ fees are paid to greedy educrats who have found yet another way to
dig into the taxpayers’ pockets under the guise of helping to obtain these awards.
Parents justify this award as being one that brings self-esteem to the students.
However, you and I know the origins of self-esteem, and they are not inherent in
the receipt of a meaningless award or a self-proclaiming sign on the outside of a
school building.
Teachers spend hundreds of hours
to research, write and refine these applications.
They either spend their personal time, or they spend time that takes away from
their students. Teachers do not want to spend
their time in this manner and do not need to be forced to do this work.
And they are forced by egotistical principals who are looking only for
bragging rights among themselves. Our school district even allowed fourteen elementary
principals to meet for an entire day on February 21 under the guise of staff development
to discuss Blue Ribbon Award application procedures!
The Blue Ribbon Award is a joke,
and everyone but the federal government seems to know it.
I would also ask you to look into
a federal law that appears to exempt high school special education students from being
included in determining class rank among graduating seniors. Ordinarily, these students
with their various disabilities which render them unable to compete academically, would
fill in the lower quartile of the ranking. When the artificial practice of removing them
from consideration with regard to class standing is applied, the rest of the class who
have achieved some true academic standing must be distributed over the four quartiles.
This misrepresentation of the actual academic achievement within a class, causes
many students to not be placed at their true standing thus affecting their ability to gain
entrance to the two major universities, the University of Texas and Texas A&M as well as
to many private universities to which they apply.
This fact occurs because the standing of students within every quartile is
affected. This application of the law is arbitrary and unfair
for ninety per cent of our students and should not be allowed to stand.
Thank you for your consideration
of these requests.
Yours truly,
Mary McGarr
(Mrs. Gary L.)