School Choice
A parental choice initiative will be circulating soon. If it passes on the 1992 ballot, parents will be provided the financial wherewithal to choose the schools their children attend.
The urgent need for this desirable reform is exemplified by the unreasonable rejection by San Diego school bureaucrats of teacher Jim Stone’s attractive and effective phonics teaching program (“Animated ABC’s,” Dec. 15). These school officials are ideologically opposed to such direct and systematic teaching of phonics information. They irrationally insist that young children can read literature before they learn how to recognize written words.
The Stone affair adds to the overwhelming evidence that school bureaucrats actually have a negative influence on children’s academic achievement. Passage of the parental choice initiative will lead inevitably to the de-emphasis, if not the elimination of their baleful domination of teachers.
PATRICK GROFF, Retired professor, San Diego State University
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