DISTURBED IN DENVER

I found a two-month-old copy of a Denver Post, which taught me that school officials there were disturbed.

First of all, I want to remark that it seems to be ONLY school officials = administrators (not to be confused with EDUCATORS)in LARGE CITIES that become disturbed. Apparently their counterparts in places like Duluth, Minnesota; Worland, Wyoming; and Norman, Oklahoma roll along in comparative tranquility. I wish someone would esxplain to me why it is mainly city schooools that promote ulcers. What the devil is prominent in them to make them centers of educational dyspepsia? Someone out to study large cities and deduce why their students are such a never-ending problem. Whatever is it about cities that make oligophrenic students?

The data for Denver's several high schools showed that their percents of studets requiring "remedial classes while in college" ranged from 47% to 99%!

An initial, obvious question is a simple one; if a kid can't do college-level work why is he or she allowed into one? Aren't colege entrance exams and requirements good enough to discriminate between people sufficiently capable to get along there and those that are not? Why admit a blockhead that's earmarked for failure? Isn't that WHY we have examinations? Are many of these Worst Lady Princeton admissions; i.e., fail but get accepted anyway? Why waste resources that might be used to make good students better? They, after all, are our nation's hope.

The short answer is that in many states the public colleges must accept any blockhead that graduates high school and is able to eke out a pass on a trivial entrance exam - note well what gets admitted solely to frolic on the football, basketball, etc. teams and then ask yourself how difficult it must be to slip in. Since high schools pass along every blockhead that wastes space in them, the blockheads get into college. Of course, my solution to that nonsense is to mainytain standards and keep the duds out of universities. Even more basically, I would deprive blockheads of high school diplomas if they don't deserve them.

A second simple question of the same type is, if a blockhead infiltrates a college and can't cut it, why don't THOSE educationj officials just bounce him or her out on his or her - ear. Wonder why this country resembles the last minutes of the Titanic? Figure it out, or are you a blockhead, too?

Denver's pedagogical savants, at any rate, have decided exactly what are needed; "turnaround strategies for exising schools and opening new schools to address the lapses." This, taxpayers will be dismayed to learn, translates easily as spending MORE MONEY, which is the chant of inept people that can't do the jobs with the resources given them. Furthermore, anyone remember - was anyone ever TAUGHT - the aphorism about silk purses and sows' ears?

STOP FLUSHING OUR MONEY! Don't imagine for a second that the bucks to waste on Denver's, doomed "turnaround strategies" will come solely from Denver pockets or even from Colorado pockets, because the feds are always willing to spend YOUR $ in the decades-old, HOPELESS cause of refuting that aphorism. Did your state vote for this idiocy?