To the Editor:
Harold O. Levy’s proposal leaves out essential considerations for improving the educational process. Perhaps a better approach for reducing truancy than the proposal for using “high-pressure sales tactics” is to examine the quality and relevancy of instruction in schools that have high rates of truancy.
Mr. Levy mentions President Obama’s calling for parents to get more involved in their children’s studies. In fact, many parents get involved. Identifying the socioeconomic conditions that uninvolved parents face should lead us to conceive of the educational process as extending far beyond formal schooling and taking into account institutions and cultural dynamics that function as strategic barriers to more effective schools.
To put the matter more plainly, let us be reminded that poverty is an educational process. Jobs for all at living wages, please.
Richard La Brecque
Bradenton, Fla., June 8, 2009
The writer is professor emeritus of policy studies in education, University of Kentucky.
