The Issue: Teachers’ unions’ resistance to the expansion of charter schools in New York.
The road to success begins with education. A school system that continues to fail generations of youngsters can no longer be defended (“Union splurge on anti-charter pols,” Feb. 26).
By any measure, charter schools are superior to United Federation of Teachers-run schools, especially in black and brown communities.
It’s time to allow parents who want their kids to do better to have charters as a choice to educate their children. Teachers and politicians should be supportive of superior education for New York City’s youngsters.
Mel Young
Boca Raton, Fla.
It is an absolute travesty that the teachers’ unions and politicians who are supported by those unions are using their power to diminish the expansion of charter schools.
Charter schools give parents the ability to escape failing regular public schools in their areas and give their kids a chance to get a real education.
The unions and politicians are betraying the trust of the people. If you want students to stay in regular public schools, improve the quality of those schools so the parents don’t have to look elsewhere.
It’s about competition, and the unions are too afraid to compete. What cowards.
Robert DiNardo
Farmingdale
Charter schools yield better outcomes for disadvantaged students than public schools.
Pushback from the UFT always includes the accusation that charter schools cherry-pick students and especially benefit from a student population with more motivated parents. I propose an experiment: Let a well-established charter-school network, perhaps Success Academy, take over a failing New York City elementary school — lock, stock and students.
There can be no claim of selection bias, especially for those students already enrolled at the time of the takeover. Let’s see what happens to student scores over, say, three years. Is Success Academy up for the challenge? Is the UFT willing to put its self-serving theories to the test?
Lawrence Bodenstein
Manhattan
Teachers unions are the most powerful groups in the United States.
However, they use this power to keep children in failing schools and push progressive, failing ideas. If our children are to succeed, they need better schools and better teachers.
J.J. Levine
Miami Beach, Fla.
The Issue: Sensitivity experts removing passages and words that might be offensive from James Bond novels.
I don’t believe anyone should be ridiculed or mocked because of skin color, place of birth, what they believe in or whom they pray to (“Bond, Changed Bond,” Feb. 27).
But the community of sensitivity experts is desperately trying to rewrite history by re-wording and/or deleting certain phrases or sections from James Bond novels.
In regards to that, and obviously to the woke movement which initiated the sensitivity edits, I give a famous and well-known one-finger salute.
I can assure you that I — and many others who are like-minded — have had enough of this nonsensical garbage.
Ralph A. Manente
Yonkers
Leave James Bond alone. Every sentence, phrase and word is sacred to the work of Ian Fleming.
The works of the past are honest markers of the time in which they were created. To alter these markers in any way is to alter the truth of our past.
The markers of the past, the written works of authors gone before, are not ours to alter.
Those who are offended by the written works of dead authors have the clean slate of the present moment to write something new.
Denise Saupe
Minneapolis, Minn.
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