There's no evidence in this op-ed that public school bureaucracy has anything to do with kids at poor, urban schools getting into college. A guidance department at such a high school is hardly a bureaucracy. In my experience, having attended and worked at a poor, urban school, I can say that guidance is a small suite of offices or cubicles with maybe one counselor per several hundred students and two support staff. These counselors have increasingly taken over the role of student psychologist for students who have no access to therapy. And with the rise in 504s and IEPs, guidance counselors' workload has increased.

This is not to excuse incompetence. But we must be sure that the "poor, urban schools" have the number of counselors necessary for the workload. (

For once I find myself at least in partial agreement with "Luther Blissett".

Naomi Riley had a snide piece a few weeks back about people who get Ph.D.'s, essentially ending the piece with an insinuation that conservatives are too good for Ph.D. programs.

In this week's column she is dumping on the public shcools. I'm getting kind of tired of this kind of stuff in the Wall Street Journal. A week ago or so, there was another piece by William McGurn in which he compared the treatment of black students in public schools to Bull Connor.

I am very certain there is a lot to criticize in the public schools especially in the slums. But at many of these schools, the teachers and staff are overburdened and driven practically out of their minds, from what I can tell. Yeah, the counselors and teachers at these places probably don't have time to "mentor" their hundreds of charges the way a counselor at a tony private school might mentor the snotheads at the Wall St. Journal.

The teachers, even the English teachers, might write the kind of English in this article. Well, maybe they grew up speaking some strange dialect and never learned any better.

A misfortune, no doubt. But I think it's in extremely poor taste for Miz Naomi Schaeffer Riley to be broadcasting this in the Wall St. Journal, humiliating (anonymously, to be sure) somebody who after all was genuinely trying to help her niece.

Luther, the guidance department may consist of only one or two people, but those one or two people are selected by the bureaucracy, are evaluated by that bureaucracy, and are bound by the rules of that bureaucracy. They aren't autonomous agents.

Mike, I don't understand the objection to her article. By analogy, suppose some company was running petrochemical plants incompetently and putting them in danger of explosion...also suppose there was no effective regulatory agency to which appeal could be made. If a journalist observes a near-explosion at one of these plants, should she refrain from writing about it in order to avoid humiliating the manager and employees involved?

David -- Let's continue the analogy a bit further.

Let's suppose the journalist is a privileged citizen of an advanced country making an excursion to an impoverished third-world country. And suppose the petrochmeical plant was producing fuel without which the impoverished citizens of that country would otherwise do without, and suppose it was producing fertilizer without which they would starve.

And suppose the management of the plant was doing its best, but it was nowhere near developed-world standards.

And suppose one of the workers at that plant had gone out of her way to try to help the journalist's impoverished niece get to a first-world place to learn how a petrcochemical plant should really be run. (Let's not worry about why the journalist doesn't take her niece out of that country if it's so awful.)

If I were the journalist, I would not treat the worker that way, trying to humiliate her. I would not accuse the plant, its workers, and its management of being "incompetent and lazy".

And if I worked at the plant, I would think long and hard about trying to help the niece in the future, I'd become very wary of outsiders, and maybe of trying to help anybody.

Mike...nicely done.

But I don't think the management of our "petrochemical plant" is doing its best, or if it is, it is composed of the wrong people. While the plant has many hard-working and dedicated employees, its management is really good at only one thing: getting political support to make life for competitors and achieve a fairly monopolistic position. They aren't really very good at producing food and fertilizer, wasting vast amounts of raw materials that someone else might actually be able to do something with.

Moreover, most of them are educated--and they insist that their senior employees be educated--in bizarre universities which teach a version of chemistry inferior to that known to the medieval alchemists.

The plant is owned by a very large and loosly-managed conglomerate, and plant management has resolutely tried to ensure that top management and the Board are kept as far away as possible from the details of the operations.

So yes, I think it's appropriate to point out to the Board that the third-shift operator is confusing the steam pressure gauge and the temperature gauge, and the janitor has tied down the safety valve because he doesn't like the irritating sound of escaping steam. It should indeed be noted that the fault is most likely not with the employees, but with the plant management.

"It should indeed be noted that the fault is most likely not with the employees, but with the plant management."

Fine -- But that's not what the article did, it is a very privileged Harvard-educated upper-class woman attacking the grunts at the bottom of the heap, who in all likelihood are trying to make the best of a very tough situation. one for which I don't see any easy answers.

I've been in similar situations, watched
a Nobel-prize winning physicist dump on school science teachers and principals in a public forum. (With the teachers and principal present!) It made me sick, and you know what, it didn't do any good with the school personnel, and got little sympathy among the audience for the scientists. To the contrary.

I've also learned, maybe the hard way, that in teaching it doesn't do much good to tell the students how lazy and stupid they are -- maybe especially if there's some truth to it!

I don't think it does much good either with the people running these slum schools. Somebody has to start with the students and schools as they are. Maybe too much even to say in public "you go with the schools you have".

Mike:

I can't agree with you that Ms. Riley's WSJ opinion piece--illustrated by personal anecdote--was in poor taste. Perhaps you were so distracted by indignation that Ms. Riley would fault "somebody who after all was genuinely trying to help her niece" that you neglected to note several details in Jazmine's story, aside from the fact that is customarily a service obligation for teachers and professors to write evaluations for their students. First, Jazmine's teacher apparently ignored her first two requests and only responded to her third request for a recommendation. Next, her teacher scribbled out a hand-written evaluation featuring the emotive and defective gibberish excerpted above. Add to this the teacher's unwillingness not only to reconsider or revise the evaluation, but even to type it out! Where's the genuine favor in any of this? And that was only the first stage of Jazmine and her family's application ordeal. Though one can't lay all the blame on semi-literate teachers and incompetent school counselors for the wretched return US taxpayers and their children receive from their public schools, they must nevertheless own up honestly to their deficiencies.