To the Editor:
I read with despair two items about education March 24. While both authors offered an educational ''silver bullet'' as a solution to the ills of education, neither appeared to have an understanding why many students fail at school.
Syndicated columnist David Brooks proposes that an open school setting, where 60 students in a big room with four teachers, is a ''grand theory to transform schools.'' This open classroom was also a ''grand theory'' 40 years ago. In the 1970s the Liverpool School District built three new ''open'' classroom buildings without walls.
While this ''grand theory'' did work for a few children, for many reasons it failed to meet the needs of the majority of the students.
Theresa Poisin, in her letter, ''They Can Finish,'' basically reiterates the 1980s educational maxim that ''all children can learn.'' While Poisin legitimately questions why some students don't succeed in school, she too offers up a silver bullet: ''the most powerful message a (dropout) student should receive is that self-investment in one's education can vastly improve one's quality of life.'' However, this message of a ''better life'' is meaningless to many students who have lived their entire life in poverty and will not entice many dropouts back to school.
In order to be successful, educators actually need an armory full of thousands of different kinds of silver bullets. Syracuse's ''Say Yes to Education'' is one of those silver bullets; so is the Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection, and so is the FOCUS program in Liverpool.
These programs, however, are expensive, and they only help a handful of students.
All children can learn! Educators in the trenches know what is needed to educate every child. Society, however, does not want to pay for the resources needed to do the job. If we continue to think that there is one magic, inexpensive silver bullet that will solve all the problems that educators face, we will continue to fail our most vulnerable children.