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Bird Replies
To the editor:
Because of my absence from the county for several weeks in May, I have been unable to make an earlier reply to Mr. Nelson Phelps Lane’s open letter in the May 9 edition of the News. Mr. Lane’s letter either expressed a failure to understand the point at issue between us, or deliberately fuzzed it up to make his case look better.
The subject matter of the meeting on April 29, at which the events in question took place, was the school budget. The public spoke - mostly in favor of the budget recommended by the school board-and then Mr. Lane spoke - raising questions about methods of reducing the budget and taking note of the rising cost of what he termed the “total school overhead,” the decline of the school population, and the seeming drop in “productivity.” These questions were indeed relevant to the budget, and no one at the meeting suggested otherwise, despite the clear implication in Mr. Lane’s letter to the contrary. As each of the questions was raised, it was addressed by members of the staff and school board.
It was only after that, whey Mr. Lane read the article by a Mr. Patrick Buchanan, that he stepped right out of the ball park. The article purported to compare the school systems of New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. It made the point that N.H. teachers’ salaries were among the lowest in the nation, while the achievement of N.H. students, as measured by SAT scores, were the highest. Since comparable data for D.C. teachers’ salaries and student achievement were at the opposite extremes, Mr. Buchanan concluded, on these facts alone, that to increase the level of teachers’ salaries would have no bearing on student achievement.
In a court of law, there is a presiding officer who is empowered to rule on, among other things, the admissibility of evidence That is, for evidence to be considered, it must at least be shown to be relevant to the issue, on the theory that consideration of irrelevant material would be both confusing and a waste of the Court’s time.
N.H. is a state that is almost entirely rural, with a significant amount of high tech industry and many public and private schools and colleges. It is very different from D.C., which is and entirely urban jurisdiction with a high percentage of underprivileged stu
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