Letters for Friday, October 16, 2009

•Job well done

• Not good enough

• Quit wasting time and money

Job well done

I would like to take this time to thank the Department of Transportation Highways Division for doing such a good job on our state highways. Also, I would like to thank Ray McCormick, District Engineer, Willy Ortal, Maintenance Engineer, and Randy Silva, Construction and Maintenance Supervisor. Most of all the maintenance crew for doing a fabulous job on our state highways.

Randy Silva and his crew take care of the north side of the island which covers 50-plus miles between Lihu‘e  and Ha‘ena. With a shortage of workers, we have to give them credit where credit is due. I believe they are doing their best to keep our state highways safe for the people of Kaua‘i and our visitors alike.

We need to look at both the negative side and the positive side of things. We all have feelings, special thanks to the gang for keeping our highways safe to drive.

Jerome Freitas, Kealia

Not good enough

My husband and I often visit Kaua‘i as we love the island, its energy and ambience.

This visit, however, has been a nightmare with a great deal of our time spent in hour-plus long traffic jams created by the road work and tree clearing at Princeville and beyond.

Although the signs say that work will end at 3 p.m. — it doesn’t with traffic backed up for miles to the Hanalei bridge and further.

Signs or information should be available to residents and visitors alike that delays will last an hour or more and that the likelihood of missing planes, getting to appointments, picking up kids or getting home from work is 100 percent.

What gets us is the absolute failure of the authorities to institute any traffic management. No one should be forced to sit for hours waiting.

What happens to kids or others who need to go to the toilet ? What about emergencies ?

We were here four months ago when exactly the same road work was going on at Princeville. This latest effort is just a repeat performance.

With most beaches unfit for swimming, snorkeling at the moment, the possibilities of getting to ‘Anini or down south are remote. Who wants to sit in a traffic jam for two hours?

Not good enough, Kaua‘i authorities. A great way to turn away visitors and infuriate the community.

Sue Arnold, Hanalei

Quit wasting time and money

To suggest, as many do, that the quality of a student’s education is proportionate to the amount of time spent in a classroom is absurd (as proven by the presence of many highly literate and well-developed homeschoolers throughout society).

To mistake the one for the other is yet another example of this culture’s pathological tendency to sacrifice quality for quantity and to somehow assume that enough of the latter will make up for the loss of the former. It was tried with food, with manufactured goods, and also with education. But it isn’t possible.

If Hawai‘i’s public schools have failed our children, then increasing the amount of classroom time will not fix the problem. Even if doing so would prove to increase test scores or some other such empirical measurement of “scholastic achievement,” it would not necessarily make it worthwhile. After all, tests, no matter how well designed, can only ever measure test-taking ability, not educational progress.

Here is yet another attempt to quantify quality. Everyone learns differently. A youth good at taking tests does not a successful adult make. People are constantly looking back on their school years with a kind of relief, as though considering themselves lucky to have made it through the education system still sane, and joking about how much they hated being in school, or how they never remember anything they learned in school, or how what they did learn never served them later on as adults. And yet the charade continues with the next generations.

How about, instead of all this, decreasing the amount of classroom time even further and getting rid of standardized testing (a waste of time and money)? And how about spending the savings, along with the additional funds needed so badly, toward reforming the school system, paying teachers a respectable salary that will attract more talent to the field, and actually finding ways to increase the quality of our children’s education in general and inspire them to learn.

Or, failing that, how about privatizing all of the schools and instead providing education vouchers to all parents of school-age children, to be spent however they best see fit to serve their children’s learning needs? Institutions and programs that failed students would naturally wither and disappear, while those that found ways to be successful would thrive and continue to serve the community.

Sky Roversi-Deal, Kilauea