The headline reads: "Education Plan Said $100 Million Shy." Some people seem to think that any problem will go away if you throw enough money at it.

When a solution is being sought for a problem, it's quite common to ignore the obvious. Although the efficiency of public education has declined sharply, there are schools all around us that are turning out students who function academically at a very high level. Why could not our experts in public education study these schools and adopt their methods where applicable?

It would probably not be possible for the public schools to match the teacher-pupil ratio or the percentage of truly dedicated teachers. But the public school system would do well to copy the system used for teaching reading, the conduct code and the concentration on basics. And most of these schools operate on a shoestring.

Note: Studies of successful schools have shown that parent participation is important.

The National Association of Christian Educators and Citizens for Excellence in Education (NACE/CEE) is an organization committed to helping parents improve their local public schools. For information contact Bob Simonds, P 0 Box 3200, Costa Mesa, CA 92628.

It's a good thing that the failure of our educational system has finally been brought out into the open. It should be obvious what to do about it. When a house is falling down you don't start fixing the roof. You begin with the foundation. Reading is the foundation of education. Every other subject demands it. When there are 23 million Americans -- one in five adults -- who are functionally illiterate, there must be something wrong with our teaching of reading.

Some of us old-timers can remember when we were taught to read by learning what the letters say FIRST! And we learned to read. Now most children in the public schools are taught by the see-and-say method, which in many cases amounts to guess-and miss. Those with photographic minds can learn to read but the others can't, so they get frustrated and unruly. Some schools, mainly private schools, are teaching phonics first and turning out good readers. Why can't our public schools do likewise?

Our schools could be improved by the elimination of material that doesn't belong there anyway. Why should a teacher be required to waste time asking a pupil if he is more like a rose or a daisy (Values Clarification, page 95) when she should be teaching him to read and write and spell?

The Constitution does not give the oversight of education to the U S Government. When we regain local control of our schools, with a minimum of supervision by the State, and turn thumbs down on the educational junk food handed out by federal government educationists, schools will again be what they were originally intended to be, places of learning.

Some educators are upset because, they say, parents are trying to censor the educational materials used in the public school classrooms. Some parents are upset because the educators have already censored the materials. Censored out are God, prayer, the Bible, morality, patriotism, honesty, kindness, obedience to parents and respect for authority.

Educators also complain that the parents want to run the schools. Who else should? It is the parents who provide the children and a sizable chunk of the finances that keep the schools going. They are held responsible for the way the children turn out. Originally the parents did run the schools through their elected representatives, the school board. Now school boards have less and less authority and the U S Government pretty much tells the schools what they can do. This is unconstitutional.

If our founding fathers could have looked ahead to our time, perhaps the first amendment of the Constitution would have been worded a little differently: "Congress or the Supreme Court shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Of course, according to the Constitution, the power to make laws was given to Congress! The Supreme Court has usurped much of that power In the ruling on the Alabama law that allowed a moment of silence for meditation or prayer at the beginning of the school day, the Court overstepped on two counts Their ruling prohibits the free exercise of religion It also violated Title X, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the right to stick its collective noses into the business of how the States run their schools!

The Court ruling is the Alabama case was supposed to be neutral, as far as religion is concerned It's neutral like doctors are to smallpox!

If Christians don't stand up for their rights-and I mean legally and prayerfully, not hatefully and destructively-we will soon find that we don't have any Right now (summer of 1985, when this was written,) in Charlotte, NC there is a big debate about whether it is legal for school teachers to read their Bibles at school, silently, in their free time!

We read much today about the terrible illiteracy problem, but the few who are aware of the cause, and who advocate the only successful cure, are brushed aside by the educational elite.

When public educators dumped the phonetic method of teaching down the drain, our high national rate of literacy went with it The advent of "Dick and Jane" marked the beginning of the present problem Private schools, home schools, and the few public schools that use the "phonics first" method of teaching reading still produce good readers.

Advocates of the "see and say" method of teaching reading say that the non-phonetic words in our language make phonetic teaching impractical Actually they are a very small percentage of the words we use, almost all of them have some phonetic elements, and most of them can be taught by using one of two simple explanations that can be understood by a five-year-old.

1. Silent letters: After the child realizes that the different letters have their own sounds and has learned the short vowel sounds and most of the consonants, he is ready for the "lazy letter" explanation "Some letters are lazy They don't say or do anything to help make the word We really should put them in a rocking chair but that would take too much room, so we will just take off the rockers and make a cage for them." Write the word with the silent letter in parenthesis, as "g(u)ess." After the child has seen it like that a few times, he will know what it is without the parenthesis.
2. Tricky words: Some words try to play tricks on us The letters don't say what they should But we'll play tricks on them! We'll write the word underneath the way it sounds!" Under "said" write [sed] After seeing it that way a few times the child will recognize it without the extra help Write [cum] under "come" and [laff] under "laugh." [Wuz] under "was" is helpful to start with, but later the child should be taught that sometimes "a" has the "uh" sound and that quite often "s" sounds like "z".

I've been reading strange things in the newspaper. Some concerned parents succeeded temporarily in having certain books removed from the schools in Alabama, and some children in Tennessee were not forced to continue reading certain books. So People for the American Way spokesmen stated that the religious right was waging "a frightening and growing assault on the freedom to learn in America."

Would you believe it? Children can't learn in school unless they can use certain textbooks endorsed by People for the American Way!

I must have been terribly deprived! I grew up without books that told me how to cast a magic spell, or that lying was sometimes better than telling the truth, or that sex before marriage was OK But I must have learned something because I can read and write and spell, and I don't think my grammar is too bad.

I wasn't taught in school that it's degrading for a woman to be a wife and mother, so I've been happily married for almost 37 years and have 5 children and 8 lovely grandchildren I wasn't taught that socialism is better than free enterprise, or that Russia is a better country than the USA, or at least as good. So I love my country, and I'm happy living in it. Yet children today are kept so busy learning those nice little extras that many of them don't have time to learn to read and spell. That seems to be all right with People for the American Way. I noticed that there had been 53 complaints about educational materials in the 1986-87 school year. Only 53? A tot of parents must not know what is going on!

Are children the property of the State, or do parents have the right to direct their education? Consider the following Supreme Court rulings:

1. Pierce vs. Society of Sisters (1925) "The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any power of the State to standardize its children -- the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations."
2. Wisconsin vs. Yoder (1972) "The primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established without debate as an enduring American tradition."
3. Prince vs. Massachusetts "It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child resides first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparations for obligations the State can neither supply or hinder."
4. Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District: "In our system, state operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are 'persons' under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the states must respect -- in our system students must not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate."

Our State leaders seem to be working toward making all of Arkansas one big school district, centrally controlled, supposedly to improve education.

But not all educators agree that "bigger is better." Chicagoans United to Reform Education (CURE) have drawn up a set of reform proposals which they hope will become law. These include the following:

Schools must be run by and be accountable to their neighborhoods. School governing councils at each school will be composed of parents, community representatives and teachers. They will have power over hiring and firing, money, curriculum and school improvement. One of their most important powers will be to select the school's principal, who will play the key role in running the school and will be held accountable. Principals will not be retained if they are inefficient.

Teachers will have increased flexibility to do their job well. They will not be bound by hundreds of requirements handed down by distant administrative officials, but will function as professionals and will be held accountable for their work, as professionals are.

School systems must drastically cut the bureaucracy. Money now wasted on hiring overseers to over-see the overseers will be used to improve the schools instead.

Parents must be able to choose the public schools they wish their children to attend. Children will learn more when they and their parents are satisfied with the school.

These suggestions for reform were put together after extensive investigation as to what makes some schools successful.

A letter published Feb 2 infers that private schools are coming into being to escape segregation. But I believe a comprehensive poll today would show that parents are sending their children to private schools because there is:

1. Teaching in some public schools designed to destroy the moral values which parents want their children to hold, and
2. A deterioration in the quality of education.

Some books advocate pre-marital sex. Others are so filthy they couldn't be read over the radio. Values Clarification courses, taught in many schools, are designed to do away with the idea of right and wrong. I'm not guessing about these things I have proof.

Just because it is a private school does not guarantee that the quality of education will be better, although tests have shown that it usually is. But if one school is not satisfactory, parents can remove their child and enroll him in a better school if one is available. With a public school monopoly, no such choice is possible. Competition always makes for a better product. If the public schools will shape up and get back to basics, they won't need to fear competition from the private schools.

There's a new sex ed course that is being used as a pilot program in some schools. It teaches teens the advantage of saving sex for marriage, and for those who are already "caught" it explains why adoption is better than abortion.

The program's overall objective is for students to realize that true sexual freedom includes the freedom to say "No" outside of marriage. It explains the physical, psychological and emotional risks associated with premarital sexual activity.

If this were adopted in Junior and Senior high schools across the nation, there would be a dramatic decrease in the number of teen pregnancies and abortions, and there should be less teen suicides as well.

Some parents may wish to get the parents' and students' books to help their teen-agers. Parents who can only say "Don't!" to teen--age sex will find answers to the question, "Why not?"

In addition to the books mentioned above, there is one for teachers. For information write to:

Project Sex Respect
1850 E Ridgewood Lane
Glenview IL 60025

A letter published on Tuesday, March 19, indicates that many parents are woefully ignorant about the sex education taught in most schools. They think that it deals only with the biological facts of reproduction.

Years ago, when the present type of sex education was just getting a foothold, Val Davajan, a distinguished professor of obstetrics and gynecology, stated: "To think that sex can be taught without some kind of moral code is absolutely absurd. Sex education is designed for promoting promiscuity and destroying the moral standards of this nation."

Dr Melvin Anchell is a human sexuality expert His report, "A Psychoanalytic Look at Today's Sex Education: A Guide for the Perplexed," links public school sex education programs to rises in teenage depression, suicide, pregnancy and drug use. He states: "Sex education programs from kindergarten through high school continuously downgrade the intimate, affectionate, monogamous nature of human sexuality." He added that exposing 6 to 12-year-old children to sex education programs can make the child less educable, block his development of compassion, weaken the mental barriers controlling base sexual instincts, thereby making the child more vulnerable to perversion later in life.

In a commonly used student health book, two young men are pictured embracing. The caption underneath reads: "Research shows that homosexuals can lead lives that are as full and healthy as those of heterosexuals."

Can sex education be at least partly to blame for the AIDS epidemic?

"What ever happened to sex education?" asks the May issue of Reader's Digest, noting that the course has been discontinued in some schools. I think I can tell why. Too many parents found out that it isn't just a course about the basic facts of reproduction, taught to boys and girls separately. It is a co-ed class studying the intimate details of sex activity, taught in such a way as to encourage experimentation.

The Reader's Digest article implies that sex education courses are designed to discourage sexual experimentation. At the end, under "Possible sources of advice," Planned parenthood and Seicus are listed. I can prove to anyone who cares to call me about it that these organizations promote teenage sex.

I watched a program advocating sex education on the Arkansas Education Network a little over a year ago (The same source that recently stated flatly that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth.) The statement was made that sexually active teenagers should be taught how to avoid pregnancy without abstaining. And since such teaching would be given to all, it will naturally increase the number of sexually active teenagers. Especially when they are taught that there is no moral wrongdoing involved.

Recently a teacher in a Catholic school gave an assignment to research other religions That seemed harmless enough, but some of the students decided to research Satanism. A 14-year-old boy, who had written his paper on Hinduism, decided that this subject was more interesting and began to study it. In a few weeks his whole personality changed. He told a friend of a vision in which Satan appeared to him and told him to kill his family. He stabbed his mother to death and tried to kill his father and brother by burning down the house. Then he killed himself with his boy scout knife.

Dabbling in the occult is dangerous Yet many public schools are steering children in that direction. A first-grade boy came home with this assignment:

Dress up like a witch, act out an "incantation," cast a spell on someone, feel the power of a real witch, create as many incantations and spells as you can.

Horrified, the mother went to the principal, who agreed that the material was inappropriate and discontinued its use. So one concerned mother kept thirty children from what could have been a very harmful experience.