Monopoly bargaining strangles attempts to reform D.C. schools

Re: “Wasting money at D.C. schools,” Aug. 22

Ms. Jonetta Rose Barras was right on target. However, the root of union officials’ stranglehold on District schools is their special privilege known as monopoly bargaining. Until parents, school administrators and members of the school board are able to refuse teacher union officials’ outrageous contract demands, D.C.’s school children will continue to suffer.

D.C. government officials must repeal these union special privileges so that good teachers have the freedom to do what is right for D.C. schoolchildren — instead of being led by the nose by union officials.

Cathy Jones
Concerned Educators Against Forced Unionism
Springfield

Congress has low ratings because it’s not doing much

Congress’ approval rating is dropping mainly because congressional Democrats have shown too little interest in doing anything about the Bush administration’s serious damage to our country’s economy, civil liberties, the global warming and energy crisis, national security, our armed forces and international image, women’s rights, the separation of powers, the federal judiciary, etc. — not to mention the disastrous Iraq war and the neglect in cleaning up Afghanistan and al Qaeda.

If the Dems want to win the White House next year and expand their majority in Congress, they are going to have to show some results, and sooner rather than later.

Edd Doerr
Silver Spring

U.S. should appeal to masses, not elites

Re: “America not winning larger war of ideas,” Think Tanking, Aug. 22

Robert R. Reilly incisively critiques American public diplomacy for failing to competently “engage in the war of ideas” by defending and promoting American ideals in the wider world. He then lists four steps we should take, one of which is to target other countries’ “elites” — since “trying to use ideas to influence people who do not think is an exercise in futility.”

During the Cold War, such an approach made sense because most elites perceived communism’s French Revolution-like radical egalitarianism as inherently incompatible with them. Communism gave rise to a thuggish faux elite to serve, however poorly, the function a true elite performs for a society. The true elite was forced to play along, even covertly insinuating itself into various Communist Party apparats until effectively taking them over. This is why communism fell so quickly in the Soviet Union and its client states; it was brought down from within.

However, attempting to repeat such an approach nowadays is doomed precisely because other countries’ elites fully understand that the United States has sipped from the same French cup. They realize how fully egalitarian notions such as “equal protection” have pervaded our society, with schools abolishing track systems and universities adopting open admissions. Compare this with societies that deny students college admission after sixth grade!

The virulent hostility our native intellectuals have to the American system is also not lost on foreign elites. Various explanations have been offered, to which I will add their seething resentment at the prospect of being outvoted by uneducated, unwashed masses of high school dropouts.

In any system imposed on non-Islamic countries by our fiercest Islamic nemeses, foreign elites understand they will enjoy higher status than their counterparts in today’s America. That is why the U.S. has always targeted the common people of foreign lands with new ideas in culture, dress, technology, etc.

It is precisely these things that appeal to “people who do not think” — and where the U.S has the greatest competitive advantage — while our Sept. 11 adversary, sitting in his cave in Afghanistan with his cadre of British doctors, has more in common with those foreign elites.

Dino Drudi
Washington

Bush didn’t know everything either

Re: “Mere inexperience isn’t Obama’s biggest issue,” Aug. 22

Reading Jay Ambrose’s musing about Sen. Barack Obama’s inexperience, naiveté and immaturity, I cannot help but wonder whether Mr. Ambrose had similar reservations eight years ago about the current White House occupant, who reportedly was so intellectually incurious about foreign affairs and geography that Condoleezza Rice was dispatched for emergency tutorial duties.

Craig Taylor
Alexandria