printable versionIn Print and On the Air
DEBORAH STIPEK, dean of the School of Education, has backed Proposition 82, the statewide free preschool initiative, in an opinion piece published May 21 in the San Jose Mercury News. Stipek wrote that spending $6,000 for a year of high-quality preschool is six times less than the $34,000 it costs taxpayers to support a prison inmate. "Studies have shown that children who had the advantage of a quality preschool experience are less likely to be convicted of crimes and also less likely to repeat a grade in school and to require special education services," Stipek wrote. She also argued that the push for universal quality preschool needs to be something in which all Californians are invested. "If we want more of our children to develop the academic skills they will need to become working, tax-paying citizens rather than prison inmates, and if we want California to thrive economically, we need to invest in the education of the next generation," Stipek wrote.
JONATHAN FARLEY, a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, wrote in a May 16 New York Times op-ed that gathering telephone company customer records is unlikely to help win the war on terrorism. This type of spying program "seems to be based on a false assumption: that you can work out who might be a terrorist based on calling patterns," he wrote. But math can play a role in fighting terrorism. In September 2004, 10 months before the London Underground bombings, Gordon Woo, a mathematician and risk-assessment consultant, gave a speech warning that London was a hotbed of jihadist radicalism. "But Dr. Woo didn't anticipate violence just using math; he also used his knowledge of London neighborhoods," Farley wrote. "That's what law enforcement should have been doing then and should be doing now: using some common sense and knowledge of terrorists, not playing math games."
DIANE RAVITCH, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times May 22 that California's school textbooks are full of skewed history. Unlike any other state, California since 1976 has mandated that instructional materials used in schools must provide positive portrayals of specified groups. "That means, for example, that textbooks must instill a 'sense of pride' in students' heritages and may not include 'adverse reflection' on any group," Ravitch wrote. "Cultural or lifestyle differences may not be portrayed as 'undesirable.'" Such social-content guidelines should be abolished, Ravitch argued. "They put the state Board of Education into the absurd position of deciding which facts are historically accurate and which should be included or excluded, a responsibility for which it is manifestly unqualified," she wrote. "What the state should expect of publishers is that they produce books that are as honest and accurate as possible. Such narratives would be far likelier to instill humility, a recognition of human folly, an understanding of conflict and differences and a sense of our common humanity rather than a sense of pride."