One thing can fix schools: parental involvement

To the editor:

Vin Suprynowicz's Sunday column proves that newspapers are better at reporting news than interpreting it ("Promote quality education -- slash funding").

Wow, that's great thinking. Put government funding levels back to what they were in 1958, without changing any of the physical realities that exist today. Real good idea. Did Mr. Suprynowicz ever stop to think about the size of Las Vegas' population at that time, let alone the rest of the state?

Here is an example of his thinking: Let's set the prices of everything back to their 1958 levels, and, to be fair, let's leave salaries just where they are.

All of Mr. Suprynowicz's ideas about education require something that is sadly lacking in today's society. What's that, you ask? Simple, it's called parental involvement. If the parents don't care about education, their children won't care, either. In the days of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, etc., people, parents included, actually cared about education. Now, Mom and Pop are so busy earning a living, they don't have time to take care of the kids, let alone their educational needs.

Far too many parents treat schools as a free baby-sitting service. They drop them off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. Some children will walk to and from school with even less parental involvement.

It is easy for people "in charge" to say the schools are failing. It is so easy to beat the saddle (schools) because you can't beat the horse (parents). In my educational career -- more than 30 years -- I have never seen a student fail or have discipline problems when the parents were involved with the child's education.

Fred H. Freeman

HENDERSON

Brain exercise

To the editor:

You have published quite a few letters regarding the high failure rate of Clark County high school students on their math tests. It appears most of the blame falls upon the teachers and their failure to teach the basics of math. I wonder if this is completely true.

Each year, I read the reports of student failure rates on the High School Proficiency Exam, and the same schools seem to have the highest percentage of passing students. Yet with these math tests, those schools, while they did a little better than average, still had very high rates of failure. It causes one to wonder whether the newly prepared test could have been what has been called a "bad test" -- poorly conceived and poorly administered.

Of course, I am too old to understand the new way of teaching math. It has been 73 years since I took Algebra I. Yet I was able to solve the sample problems published in the newspaper in my head. I am sure I would have failed them on the test because I did not show how I reached the answer.

My only experience with the new method of teaching math came when my daughter started taking algebra. She asked me to explain a problem. I created a problem and then showed her how to solve it using the way I was taught. She came home the next day almost in tears, telling me she got all of the math homework problems wrong. I went over her answers and they were all correct. It seemed, even though the answers were right, they were marked wrong because she did not show how she got them. When I was a student, we were allowed to use our brain to solve problems instead of performing every function in writing.

No wonder kids hate math. The way it is taught is boring. Why not give the children a chance to exercise their brains?

Ray Steele

NORTH LAS VEGAS

A Strip bailout?

To the editor:

In response to your Sunday article, "Trump's second tower may wait":

I drove by the north Strip recently for the first time, I guess, since football season, and the west side, from the Fashion Show mall to Slots A Fun/Circus Circus still looks like Hiroshima at the end of World War II (not that Slots A Fun and Circus Circus do a whole lot for the current aesthetics).

And now I learn even The Donald is having construction doubts.

In this current cycle of hard economic times, I am proposing a government (code: taxpayer) bailout for Las Vegas real estate developers. If the government (code: taxpayer) can bail out New York investment banking companies where employees were receiving six- and seven-figure bonuses when times were good, surely there are enough tax dollars left to come to the aid of the Strip.

I'm not asking for much. Just put the Stardust and Westward Ho back until things turn around.

Jeff Jones

LAS VEGAS

Ignorant dunces

To the editor:

The Review-Journal editorial board is ignorant. Ignorant about science.

In your Tuesday editorial on global climate change, the staff's dunce caps are in full view of the city. Shame on their science teachers, who never taught editors the difference between weather and climate.

When looking at global temperature patterns, data from a few years is no indicator of climate. This was clearly stated in the United Nations World Meteorological Organization's news release on recent temperature data; the same news release that was seriously misquoted by the Review-Journal.

In fact, the Review-Journal does not even understand basic math. When looking at the past 10 years of global data, the resulting average is skewed heavily by the record spike in 1998 temperatures. Perhaps the members of the editorial board were day-dreaming in school that day.

What is the real agenda of the editors? Are they trying to justify driving around in their living room-size Hummers? Their editorial claims that concerns about global warming have caused increased energy costs. The editorial provides no evidence for this claim, because there simply is no correlation between the two. Rising energy costs are due in large part to a failed energy policy at both the national, state and local level.

Clearly the editorial board members flunked both science and math. Their poorly written editorial also shows they weren't the brightest in their Journalism 101 classes, either.

Doug Lombardi

LAS VEGAS

Unfair checks

To the editor:

In my opinion, Nevada's rising unemployment rate could be drastically reduced if our attorney general would help job seekers with the issue of employer credit checks.

I've lived in Nevada for several years and have heard over and over how many people cannot secure employment because they have bad credit. But how are they supposed to improve their credit if they can't get a job? Does this mean they are never to work again? I'm sure the job search for many people would have ended months and maybe several years ago had it not been for this problem.

Things have to change. One solution would be for the state to prohibit employers from requiring credit checks on job applicants.

Can they require background checks? Yes. Can they require drug tests? Of course. But there are limits. Please help Nevada's unemployment rate by stopping this unfair invasion of privacy. Help us break through the credit history barrier and get us off the unemployment dole.

A. TROWBRIDGE

LAS VEGAS