Letters

But the real question is, “Should they?” When a group of parents, no matter
how well-meaning or informed, get to the point that they can tell the local
principal and his professional staff of administrators how to run our school,
then it’s time to pull the curtain on public education and privatize the whole
mess. At least the Catholic schools understand who’s boss.

—Jennifer W. Solis
Los Angeles

Re: “The Parent Trap” [August 16–22]. Howard Blume’s commentary about
the Title One parent committees was right on the mark. After having attended
18 consecutive District Advisory Council meetings at Belmont High School, my
dad has asked that he not be re-elected, so that he will not have to endure
another year of absolutely wasted time.

These parent organizations, which masquerade as input to the educational bureaucracy,
exist only because the regulations that give millions of dollars to our poverty-demographic
schools mandate some semblance of parental advisory. The cruel joke on the participating
parents is that they are led to believe that their opinions actually count for
something. They don't!

So what purpose do these committees really serve? The most beneficial result
of the DACs are the seminars that are held two or three times a year for all
LAUSD parents to come and learn how to better prepare their kids for success
at school. Unfortunately, only a very tiny percentage of the parents take advantage
of these conclaves. Most of the attendees are local parent leaders, who probably
already have successful students.

A few parents, like Oscar Almaguer and Francisco Torrero, have done considerable
research to make themselves, and others, knowledgeable about school budgets
and policy. But if they try to use this knowledge to influence how things are
done, they are rewarded by being slapped down hard. Despite the fact that both
of them have devoted hundreds of hours a year attending parent meetings, both
were spuriously removed by the district staff for “missing three meetings.”
Francisco was forced to step down as District F DAC chairman/president last
month because he had gone to Florida to attend a national education convention,
and missed three meetings within that month. His travel to this conclave was
endorsed and paid for by school and grant funds, but apparently that fact did
not excuse his absences.

In the past 18 months of District F meetings of the DAC, there has never been
a single vote on any consequential matter, other than electing officers. The
meetings are held to have these parent leaders sit for three hours, listening
to the local superintendent and his staff tell how things in the district “are
getting better.” Test scores are analyzed, budgets are explained, wonderful
plans of new programs that will help our kids are touted. If you leave before
the three hours, no matter what reason, you are counted absent. All the wonderful
solutions to our educational failures are examined in great detail — except
the one problem, which is too politically sensitive to discuss, the fact that
most of LAUSD's students don't know English, and that's the language in which
all other subjects are taught. The DAC meetings, at least in District F, which
covers from downtown to East Los Angeles, are conducted primarily in Spanish.
The interpretation for the few English speaking attendees is uniformly poor,
since the translators are mostly Spanish speakers who have problem keeping up
word for word.

When Mr. Almaguer got up in front of the LAUSD board meeting last month and
complained that his parent committee was not consulted when Governor Romer's
contract was extended for two years, I almost doubled over laughing. The fact
that Almaguer said it with a straight face says volumes about how he and the
others have been deluded into thinking that parents actually have a voice in
the system. But the real question is “Should they?”

When a group of parents, no matter how well meaning or informed, get to the
point that they can tell the local principal and his professional staff of administrators
how to run our school, then it's time to pull the curtain on public education,
and privatize the whole mess. At least the Catholic schools understand who's
boss.

—Jennifer W. Solaris
Los Angeles

FIRST STRIKE

Marc Cooper, in “Move
Over, Mike Dukakis” [August 16–22], conveniently omits the strongest (and
maybe the only) argument for going to war against Iraq — to prevent Iraq from
becoming a nuclear power under Saddam Hussein. Cooper’s misguided isolationist
approach does no good for the people of Iraq living under Hussein’s dictatorial
rule, nor does it bode well for the real international threat such weapons of
mass destruction would pose under Saddam’s control. To say that “Maybe we should
be spending more energy worrying about the withered state of our own democracy”
strikes me as selfish, narcissistic and the existential definition of the “me/us”
generation. Does he seriously expect us to entertain the idea that the state
of our democracy needs attention ahead of Iraq, where public and private criticism
of the state is punishable by death?

—Elliot Semmelman
Los Angeles

MOUSE HOUSE GROUSE

Being a recently retired 20-year veteran of Disney
Feature Animation (1981–2001), I thoroughly enjoyed Nikki Finke’s article “Something
Fishy: Reeling in Michael Eisner” [August 16–22], which lambastes Mr. Eisner
for his terrible mismanagement of the Walt Disney Co. Personally, it is that
very gross mismanagement, which has been going on much longer than the article
cites, that helped me make the difficult decision to leave my beloved craft
of Disney-quality character animation at only 44 years of age and in the prime
of my creativity. I could not stand to see what that company and its highly
questionable leadership was doing to a unique art form and tradition.

—Dave Pruiksma
Altadena

ONE FOOT IN THE GROOVE

Re: “Into the
Groove” [August 16–22]. Erin Aubry Kaplan ends her column by noting Janet
Jackson’s modesty about her legs. Somehow, without disparaging the work of either
Kaplan or Jackson, I wonder if Kaplan is aware of Jackson’s birth defect that
left her with one leg shorter than the other.

That unfortunate episode of genetic bad luck aside, as an African-American/black/post-Negro
male plus native Angeleno, I believe Kaplan’s social commentaries are regularly
brilliant, and even when I don’t agree with her I respect her reasoning and
that of the rest of the Weekly’s news staffers.

—Eric Ernest
Winnetka

FIND AND REPLACE

I suppose peppering articles with four-letter
expletives shows what a freethinking, liberal-minded, devil-may-care attitude
your writers have. But, of course, there is a downside. There always is.

To protect the young from foul-mouthed obscenities and porno sites, the use
of filters is getting more and more prevalent — to such an extent that adverts
for chardonnay may get blocked because a filter objects to the phrase contained
from letter 2 to 7. Meanwhile, all your online articles that contain actual
bad language go down the same tube as the porno promotions.

Now, if you could put a filter at your end of the Internet, one that would
change obscenities into exclamation points or some such, every article would
get through, and we adults will still understand how very audacious and refreshing
your columnists were in their original writing.

A win-win all-round, if you ask me. (And please don’t think I have anything
against potty-mouths. They tend to be so very, very witty.)

—Bill Robinson
San Clemente

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