LETTERS.

Why Not Profile Parents?

I was disappointed to find virtually no reference to the word "parent" and certainly no coverage of a program emphasizing parents' responsibility for their child's behavior at school in an issue of your magazine (February 2000) devoted to school violence.

Your cover story, "Profiling Bad Apples," a reference to dangerous students, makes no reference to profiling parents, even though we were all educated to know that bad apples don't fall far from the tree.

Your contributing authors have apparently all come to the conclusion that one size does not fit all. They go on to delineate the specifics of a wide array of school safety approaches ranging from school police and closed-circuit television to neurologically informed leadership.

When I was an elementary and high school student primarily during the 1950s, there was little danger of school violence or other disruptive student behavior because school authorities had a secret weapon--parents. Whatever high expectations teachers had for student conduct and effort were supported at home.

Ironically, as student behavior has worsened, school administrators have turned increasingly toward unilateral, elaborate and enormously expensive school devices and away from the more powerful, simple and low-cost method of parent-school collaboration.

Schools would do best to go back to the basics. They should arrange for staff training by an expert in parenting, family functioning, behavior management of children by adults and teacher-parent communication.

J. BRIEN O'CALLAGHAN

Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Family Therapist,

Bethel, Conn.

Class Size Initiative

I enjoyed Kari Arfstrom's Federal Dateline column on the federal government's efforts to reduce class size ("Small Districts Overlooked by Class Size Initiative," February 2000) and the proposed blocking of federal grant monies for small, rural school districts.

As superintendent of a 102-student district in Illinois, I obtained a waiver of the requirement to use no more than 15 percent of our class-size-reduction allocation for professional development for the current school year. This waiver offered our small district an alternative approach to improving student learning within the constraints of the law's intent.

Opportunities for increased local decision-making responsibilities and locally directed school reform initiatives relative to federal programs is particularly important at the small, rural school level. With the waiver, we have used all money from that federal initiative for professional development related to our school improvement plan.

It's incumbent on all of us to write our senators in Washington (as the bill already has passed in the House) about the Rural Education Initiative Act (S. 1225).

LYNN BERTINO NEVILLE

Superintendent,

South Wilmington Consolidated Grade School District 74,

South Wilmington, Ill.

Re: Kari Arfstrom's Federal Dateline column:

I like what is being proposed as our rural K-12 district has about 280 students, and we get $9,256 for class size reduction. Our 2nd grade has 31 children so we hired a half-time teacher and split the class for afternoon phonics, language and reading and are using our general fund monies to cover the added cost above the class size dollars.

It's too bad we couldn't get a miniscule amount of the large-school reduction dollars that would have allowed us to fund at least one teacher's beginning salary per school.

DENNIS BARRETTE

Superintendent,

Dollar Bay-Tamarack City Area Schools,

Dollar Bay, Mich.

Off Base on Preschool

Someone once said if you want to know the truth about the emperor's clothes, don't ask the tailors. So perhaps it's not surprising that a magazine called The School Administrator spent 10 pages (January 2000) uncritically endorsing the expansion of preschool in public schools.

Better research would have shown there is no reason to think public preschool will benefit children. It is a well-established fact that the benefits of preschool are fleeting. Research on preschool programs from Head Start to Georgia's universal prekindergarten program show that any initial benefits of preschool wash out by 1st or 2nd grade. The net gain to children is zero.

Researchers continue to search for ways to improve children's long-term prospects, but the answer will not be found in universal preschool.

DARCY A. OLSEN 

Director of Education and Child Policy,

Cato Institute,

Washington, D.C.

Kudos for Early Childhood

I found it gratifying to read a professional journal for school leadership that recognizes the importance of the early years of life (January 2000). In fact, AASA should produce a poster or a bumper sticker featuring the opening line of Joseph Cirasuolo's President's Corner column: "There are few times in the life of a child when the impact of wealth is as apparent as from birth to age 5."

The relative absence of growth-fostering experiences in the lives of children living in poverty unjustly condemns those children to a lifelong struggle to achieve parity in educational and vocational opportunity with their more privileged age mates.

The importance of the early years for establishing successful learning histories has been amply documented. Yet paradoxically, school administrators often have rejected invitations to be in the vanguard of the design and development of programs that include the early years and that embrace parents as partners in the process.

Your profiling of creative administrators who have done this is commendable.

The importance of having the educational establishment acknowledge that education does not begin at five years but at birth, and then of devising creative funding formulae to support programs for the early years, are seldom considered as falling within the province of school reform. Yet reform that ignores this need can have little hope of success.

BETTYE CALDWELL

Professor of Pediatrics,

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences,

Arkansas Children's Hospital,

Little Rock, Ark.