My "150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address"

[L Verge]

Ironically, those same types of comments are heard here at the museum from teachers in the metropolitan D.C. area; and my mentoring teacher daughter hears and has the same comments. You aren't going to pin the blame on FoxNews on this one. There are even some liberals who are concerned about the future of American education -- and I used to be one of them. Now I'm a centrist and concerned even more.

I didn't like No Child Left Behind either. Good teachers who can cut it in the classroom know how to include all levels of learning abilities. Unfortunately, good teachers are becoming harder to find because the school systems and the pay scales are not commensurate with the qualities expected in good teachers - so they leave the system.

To me (and this will cause a flare-up, I know), problems began when the p.c. crowd decided that children of varying abilities should not be separated according to those abilities. We used to call it the track system where high abilities were in one class, average students in another, and remedials and special needs in another. That became viewed as discrimination, and a class of 35 would contain all levels. The "experts" (many of whom never entered a classroom) kept saying that the high achievers would inspire the slow achievers to do better. Teachers contended that the opposite would happen. The latter is certainly what happened in my school system.