V. Racanelli
Brooklyn, NY
Tim Cavanaugh replies: Bill Donohue confirms that he is America's premier insult comic, though I would have preferred he call me a "hockey puck" rather than a jackass. I'm also relieved he only wants the government to force programmers to cancel offensive shows; for a second there I thought he was in favor of censorship. The Catholic League's war on cartoon characters speaks for itself.v
I doubt V. Racanelli's and Bill Dal Cerro's claims that Mafia pictures have real-life consequences for Italian Americans. Activists frequently note Mob fiction became more popular as the actual Mob withered and the Italian-American community produced enough notables to fill several Who's Who volumes. This is a familiar trajectory; westerns really caught on once the West was paved.
Special Ed Confidential
I just read Lisa Snell's "Special Education Confidential" (December). Bravo! I am a speech pathologist who worked for 25 years in public schools here in west central Florida. It is just as she describes it. I left special education in disgust over the lunacy of it all. We had to pack the kids in to generate funds for our salary. It was an unwritten law we all followed.
Please keep up the good work and shine the light on the crooked aspects of the education bureaucracy. How about taking on the textbook industry and their conspiracy to shake the American public down?
Jim Duffey
St.Petersburg, FL
Lisa Snell should be a lot more cautious in her attitude toward special education. I am a parent of two children with disabilities. One child has ADHD, L.D., and Asperger's Syndrome; the other child has spina bifida, ADHD, L.D., and speech and language disabilities. I have been an advocate for almost 20 years and I can attest that never once in those years have I ever had a parent say they looked forward to the fight they knew would be waged to get the proper education for their child!
The article does a real disservice to those children who do have learning differences. It is difficult enough for parents to get our children properly diagnosed by the school system and then put on individual educational plans without Snell suggesting that perhaps most of them do not actually have a disability.
Snell used her nephew Clayton as an example of a student who might have been diagnosed as learning disabled because he was not properly taught how to read in kindergarten. But did her sister ever actually have Clayton evaluated? If not, that's sad, because as Clayton gets into the higher grades, a true learning disability might raise its ugly head.
Phonemic awareness and sound symbol segmentation, mentioned by Snell, are generally the preferred method used to teach reading to the special education student. That might be why Clayton picked up on the reading and improved his scores so quickly.
Carole Nelson
Medford, MA
As a former high school industrial education teacher, I fully agree with Lisa Snell's article. Academia dumping phonics in favor of "whole language" and other failed concepts is the reason that many kids cannot read.
These days high school graduates often require high school remedial work as college freshmen because they lack reading and comprehension skills. If products of the academic college preparation track can't read, consider those students not attending college. One problem the manufacturing industry is facing is employees and applicants who are unable to read simple instructions.
Richard Becker
Broomfield, CO
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