| Letters
Parental Involvement
Joan Capuzzi Giresi’s
paean to the KIPP schools (“Earning
Their Wings,” spring 2004) is well deserved, but it
omits one crucial factor that leads readers to draw a false
conclusion about the replicability of the program for other
disadvantaged students. Whenever parents enroll
their children in KIPP or any other academic school, they
constitute a self-selected group. There is no evidence to
date that what works so effectively at KIPP will work as
well for disadvantaged students whose parents are not as
motivated or involved in their children’s education.
This observation needs to be kept in mind when the Heritage
Foundation asserts that KIPP and 21 other high-poverty schools
with solid academic achievement demonstrate that all schools
in the country can perform as well.
During the 28 years that
I taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the
nation’s second largest, I saw
firsthand the importance of this distinction. Parental involvement
is indispensable for success in the classroom. Teachers are
not miracle workers. Without support from the home, it is
highly unlikely that even the best teachers can overcome
the deficits in socialization, motivation, and intellectual
development that too many inner-city students in particular
bring to school. KIPP stands as a model to be imitated, but
that is not the same as maintaining that it is the answer.
Walt Gardner, C’57, Los Angeles, CA
Well Told Tales
A participant from one of
my past classes in organizational dynamics passed on to me “Did
You Hear the
One About…?” (Dean’s Column, spring 2004).
I thought Dean Preston would appreciate knowing that for
seven years I’ve been offering just this wisdom to
our master’s
degree students in my course Stories in Organizations: Tools
for Executive Development.
The literature on stories and business
is burgeoning, happily. As a former English department chair
who found her way to what I was told is “the real world,” I’m
living out my own dream of bringing literature, in a way,
to adult life. In my consulting practice and in the programs
I
teach and direct at Wharton Executive Education, corporate
professionals have enjoyed recognizing how good leading and
good managing also include a “liberal dose of stories.”
A
link between hard science and stories, by the way, can be
found in a piece from the New York Times Book Review (April
18, 2004, p.13). The author quotes Nobel laureate Peter Medawar
as noting that scientific theories “begin, if you like,
as stories, and the purpose of the critical or rectifying
episode in scientific reasoning is precisely to find out
whether or
not these stories are about real life.”
Janet Greco,
Ambler, PA
Center for Organizational Dynamics
Poetry of the World
In Tom Devaney’s outstanding article about translator
Edith Grossman, CW’57 (“Aiming the Lance of Language,” spring
2004) a concern is raised about whether there is a readership
for translations
of poetry in the U.S. High quality translations like Ms. Grossman’s,
which have become available in recent years, are a source of
enormous joy and education for me and for my friends with whom
I share my discoveries. I assure you there certainly is a market,
indeed, a craving for poetry translation.
One day, casually
browsing in a bookstore, I came across a dual-language version
of Pablo Neruda’s wonderful book,
The Captain’s Verses, and that was the beginning of my
discovery of Latin American poetry. Haiku has been added, along
with the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish winner of
the 1996 Nobel prize. There have been many more voices of poets
and countries since.
Each culture is revealed in the work of
its poets, and I feel more “a citizen of the world” by
studying these translations. I encourage Ms. Grossman and others
to keep the faith by making these translations a part of our
body of literature. Trean Korbelak Blumenthal, CW’61,
Metuchen, NJ |
