NY’s Students Betrayed: Spelling Out What’s Wrong

I noticed a particular article that claimed The Post shamed students who wrote letters in support of their schools (“Deer NY Post: Your Stoopid,” Feb.23).

The Post didn’t shame those students. The shame is that those students have been led to believe their writing is fine. It isn’t. For that, the school should be ashamed.

The letterwriting campaign was fostered within the school by a staff member. Perhaps that staff member should have taken the time to proofread the letters written by highschool students.

A teacher who encourages students to write letters to a newspaper should realize that those letters are public. If he were not looking to further embarrass his students, he should have helped educate them, not use them as part of a publicity campaign, especially one that backfired on the school.

Rob Schimenz

Levittown

As I read the letters written by the students at Murry Bergtraum HS, my first reaction was amusement, followed by anger and then sadness.

The plain and simple truth is that our entire publicschool system is a colossal failure. While the cry from politicians and the teachers’ union is always for more money, doubling spending on each child would yield no better results.

The dumbing down of the curriculum, social promotion and mediocre teachers who, thanks to union work rules, cannot be held accountable for poor results have succeeded in turning out a generation of morons.

Ken Rosen

Brooklyn

lI find it ironic that The Post would think the lesson from Murry Bergtraum’s woes is less school regulation in the form of charter schools (“Opting for Failure,” Editorial, Feb. 25).

As one who worked at Murry Bergtraum HS for 23 years, I saw the decline because of a wholesale abandonment of regulations and union rules by dictator principals and a setup for failure policy from Bloomberg/Klein.

Charter schools have been shown to be failures (CREDO study out of Stanford U.). Only those with wealthy benefactors, and exceptions to the rules public schools have to play by, show strong performance, like the public schools in the suburbs. Your cure will kill schools.

John Elfrank-Dana UFT Chapter Leader Murry Bergtraum HS

Manhattan

Murry Bergtraum students protest the characterization of their school as a “failure factory.”

Messages filled with grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors were sad proof of the unwanted characterization.

The letters beg the question: Where were the educators to proofread these communiques before dissemination? That might have spared their students embarrassment.

The children should be commended for taking a position and expressing it. However, if “blended learning” typically produces these results, its lack of value is obvious.

Ray Arroyo

Westwood, NJ

I was reading the students’ letters and was so saddened. I could write letters grammatically correct in 7th grade at St. Jerome’s Boys School in the South Bronx.

It’s just completely inconceivable that these kids are passed from grade to grade without an elementary education. The millions upon millions of dollars wasted on public education in this country is just appalling.

Contract it out to the charter schools and parochial schools, who can, and are, doing an outstanding job.

Walter Murray

Clearwater, Fla.

There is nothing honorable in belittling people with shortcomings.

To do so shows a certain lack of class. It very well may be that the students at Murry Bergtraum are receiving less than a good education, but life is more than what one learns in a classroom.

Manners, decency and character show the true meaning of a person — far more than writing a letter that has correct grammar.

Gary Schwartz

For t Lee, NJ