Perspective: Take aim at reading skills early on

As a member of the School Advisory Council at Dunedin High School for the past three years, I found your article on the possibility of low FCAT reading scores preventing the graduation of numerous students to be of great interest.

The real problem is not in the high schools. It is in the grade schools and the middle schools that feed students into our high schools. High schools should not have to, and are not equipped to teach basic reading. The students who are promoted into high school without adequate reading skills are the basis for a total reduced level of high school education. Being able to read is the basis for success in high school. Testing for reading skills must start in grade school and continue through middle school. Students who do not have the basic minimum reading capabilities should not be sent on to high school.

In 2000, tests indicated that the eighth-grade students at one of the middle schools feeding Dunedin High tested at the 29th percentile in reading on a nationwide scale. Of the students sent on to Dunedin High, 7 percent should not have been promoted. They were "social promotions."

The promoting of students into high school who do not have the required reading skills only dilutes the education available to all freshmen students. The teachers must lower their levels of teaching to accommodate these students. The reading problem starts in our grade school and must be corrected prior to the high schools days.

I strongly endorse the testing of students as early as the fourth grade and continuing through middle school to ensure that we are developing the required skills in reading prior to high school. It would be a shame to allow students to graduate and proceed on into college and the business world who were lacking basic reading skills.
-- Neal Popham, Dunedin

Quarrel is with law

Re: Teenage sex, the law and a prosecutor's dilemma, May 20.

In his column, Philip Gailey mentions that Beverly Andringa is the executive assistant state attorney who oversees the prosecution of sex crimes. Then he say that if the Chris Boudreau case had come to Andringa's desk for a decision, she would have declined to prosecute. But there was no explanation why it did not come to her desk or how she would have handled it (not how she would have not handled it).

Gailey really has a quarrel with the Legislature and the sex law that should be amended. But instead he takes on the prosecutor who is doing his best to decide when to act and when not to act and to try to administer fairly an outdated law.

In criticizing the law (he says it is broken, an unfortunate description) Gailey doesn't face up to his responsibility to advise specifically. It is easy to say that the revised law should separate juvenile sex cases from those involving adults preying on minors. But what kind of language should the new statute have to do this? Who is an adult? Age 18 or over? Who is a minor? Under age 18? What is preying?

Finally, Gailey has focused public attention unfairly on an honest, capable, forthright public official who was doing his best to exercise his lawful discretion under an inadequate statute. To wind up comparing this situation to the disgraceful, lying, irresponsible but unpunished conduct of a recently departed national figure is distracting and irrelevant.
-- John E. Armstrong, St. Petersburg

Acknowledge God's hand

Re: New form of creationism shouldn't be in school curriculum, May 20.

Robyn Blumner says "Religion has nothing to fear from evolution" while she herself seems to fear the ideas of people who do not agree with her about the "legitimacy" of evolution.

She says, "Intelligent Design theorists are not easily dismissed." That's the best line in her whole column. The reason they are not easily dismissed is that their ideas make so much sense, not only to ordinary people but to scientists who are intellectually honest.

When I was in the eighth grade and evolution was taught, I just accepted the notion that public schools would not mention creation because that was "religion," not "science." Now I realize the "science" of evolution has definite weaknesses. Even fossil experts will admit that transitional life forms are extremely rare. And some would say those rare examples take some imagination to believe.

In contrast, the idea that the various life forms were the result of design, not chance, is at least as believable as the so-called scientific explanation. Maybe you can't prove it with today's scientific methods, but you can't disprove it either. For me, "Intelligent Design" (a.k.a. God) is written all over the amazingly complex life forms we see all around us. And a great number of people hold this view.

With all the talk about inclusiveness and free expression of ideas, isn't it about time the textbooks at least acknowledge that "life may be the result of the purposeful, intelligent design of a creator"? Why do the evolutionists want to censor this viewpoint?
-- Nancy Ayers, Belleair Beach

Evolution is in trouble

Re: New form of creationism shouldn't be in school curriculum.

If Robyn Blumner doesn't think anything should be taught in a public high school biology class unless it can be backed up with "well-grounded scientific proof" then she had better start campaigning for the removal of all evolutionary teaching from the classroom. It is a scientific fact that neither evolution nor creation can ever be "proven" in the strict scientific sense.

Evolution is a theory in trouble. It is every bit as much a philosophical belief as creation. And as for Blumner's stating that "evangelical Christians and fundamentalists of other faiths should finally realize that science is not atheistic or anti-religious" -- most of us do recognize that fact. It is the anti-religious media, along with the public education system, which skews most of the information on the evolution/creation debate and promotes evolution as scientific fact, that we have difficulty with. Most classroom material on the subject is woefully out of date.

Blumner goes on to say that "religion has nothing to fear from evolution." That is true! Religion has nothing to fear from evolution because evolution simply isn't true. But if Blumner is trying to say that evolution and the Bible are compatible, that is not true.

The Bible teaches that death did not enter the world until after Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. Evolution, on the other hand, says Adam (man) was the result of millions of years of death and mutation. Aristotle said two opposing ideas can't both be true at the same time. Either evolution is true or the Bible is, but they do not agree. Intelligent Design is not a new idea, but it is catching on. If Blumner continues to hold to her old-fashioned, ideological beliefs, in spite of growing scientific movement in the opposite direction, she may one day find she has put her own "religious" beliefs over science: the very thing she accuses Christians of doing.
-- J.R. Carrel Sr., minister, Northeast Christian Church, St. Petersburg

Let's be free to decide

Re: Pornography destroys relationships, letter, May 20.

The debate over whether pornography is harmful or beneficial has raged for centuries. Pornography has been falsely blamed for inciting the weak-minded to rape or promiscuity. Advocates of this view have asserted that the public is incapable of deciding what is healthy to read or to view and must be protected for the sake of the weakest among us. Research has proven the opposite is true.

Rather than inciting sexual feelings, reading or viewing pornography provides an outlet for these feelings and reduces the need for other outlets. The misguided overprotectiveness of pornography's opponents seeks to deny the individual the right to choose what is beneficial.

Pornography has been blamed for ripping couples apart. They call to mind the porn-crazed voyeur who prefers porn to the real thing. While it is true that too much of anything is probably bad, this is the "protect-the-public-for-the-sake-of- the-weakest-among-us" argument revisited. The opponents of pornography ignore the couples who are actually drawn together by it. Some couples view pornography together as a prelude to other things. Those who benefit from pornography should not be "protected" from it for the sake of those who do not.

Let me decide for myself what I choose to read or view. Heaven forbid that I should seek to choose for someone else.
-- Philipp Michel "Mike" Reichold, Largo

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