Thursday, March 17, 2011

Praying for better test scores

According to a March 14 article in The Baltimore Sun, "Prayers at city school before tests criticized" by Erica L. Green, the principal of a Baltimore City public school used prayer to help prepare students for standardized testing. Because, you know, students' praying to God for help on tests has been a well-tested (heh) and highly successful strategy. The better you pray, the better the scores. Right?

Here's a copy of the flier that the school distributed:


According to The Sun, "Local officials said they will use the incident as an opportunity to emphasize to school leaders appropriate school-sponsored events." Which is good.

What is not good was the response of Jimmy Gittings, president of the city principals' union. 

According to The Sun, Gittings said:
"The only individuals I hold accountable for these injustices for Ms. Yon [the school principal] are the narrow-minded politicians from some 50 years ago, for removing prayer from our schools. Once prayer was removed from our schools, the respect for our teachers and administrators has been increasingly out of control."
The Sun added:
Gittings, a proponent of prayer in schools, said he fully supported Yon's actions. He said he was aware that it wasn't constitutional, but he still believed in the message.

So the head of Baltimore's principals' union not only believes in the power of prayer, but he also believes in public school-sanctioned prayer, and he doesn't believe in the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. Nor apparently does he understand why school-sanctioned prayer is unconstitutional, or if he does, he doesn't care. And he thinks school prayer was removed by "narrow-minded politicians." Wonderful. Just the person we should want representing those in charge of educating our children.  

1 comment:

  1. If that were my school district, I'd have already written a letter to the editor.

    Ridiculous.

    ReplyDelete