Letters

The clergy and congregation of St. Peter’s Epis-copal Church in Freehold would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to a special group of people who have helped us with our community suppers over the years.

We could not run our outreach program without the generosity of a handful of business people and restaurateurs who have opened their hearts — and in some cases their kitchens — to us.

Several area restaurants provide food for us without fail whenever we ask: Basile’s at 536 Park Ave., Freehold, Eric’s at 25 Broad Street, Freehold, Frankie Feds on Route 33 in Freehold Township, and Goodfellas at 31 E. Main St., Freehold, all provide an invaluable contribution to our suppers. I hope your readers will frequent these generous establishments.

The Five Star Cafe from Freehold High School is another big supporter of ours. Every spring as part of their education in culinary arts and hospitality management, the young men and women of Five Star prepare wonderful meals for our suppers. They not only deliver the meals to our kitchen, they also serve our guests and clean up afterward. These young people exemplify the kind of values we would all like instilled in our children.

ShopRite Associates, of ShopRite in Freehold Township, have consistently hosted several suppers each year.

Tom Saker and his co-workers from ShopRite prepare and serve food for up to 200 diners. They are a cheerful group of people dedicated to this important volunteer service.

Thank you for allowing St. Peter’s to use your newspaper as a forum for expressing our gratitude to these wonderful people and organizations. We are all blessed by their selfless giving.

The Rev. Catherine Esposito

deacon

St. Peter’s Episcopal Church

Freehold Borough

Reforms are needed in the cost of New Jersey’s K-12 education

Much has been made concerning property tax reform pertaining to alleviating local public school budgets. Property tax reform may be putting the cart before the horse. What is first needed is reform in the cost of public school (K-12) education. New Jersey spends more dollars per pupil on K-12 education than any other state. Yet, New Jersey is far from the top on academic achievement. Cost-of-education reform is needed, starting with a clean slate.

First, New Jersey’s state constitution calls for a “thorough and efficient” education for all K-12 children. This definition is flawed and meaningless because it cannot be quantified nor measured.

What does thorough and efficient mean? If school district A offers three foreign languages with a budget of $15,000 per student and school district B offers two languages with a budget of $11,000 per student, which is more thorough?

If school district A achieves a grade point average of 3.5 with 20 students per class at $15,000 per student and school district B achieves 3.2 with 30 students per class at $11,000 per student, which is more efficient?

Clearly, a new definition is needed that establishes measurable and quantifiable standards across the state.

Second, New Jersey is obsessed with local control. Local control results in massive duplication and redundancy in school administration and costs. Every district has its own superintendent, business manager, curriculum director, etc.

K-12 schools are owned at the county or state level in most other states in the United States. In addition, local control is meaningless in New Jersey because most budgets that get voted down by the municipality are reinstated by the county superintendent. New Jersey needs K-12 ownership and accountability at a minimum at the county level with uniform curricula across the county and/or state.

Third, K-12 teachers need to conform to the same employment standards that those in private enterprise do. That is, performance measurement and salary based on merit and performance. The current policy of three years to gain tenure and all teachers rewarded the same based on years of service and education degree level must be eliminated.

Excellent teachers should be rewarded with excellent salaries, good teachers with good salaries, average teachers with average salaries, and below average teachers weeded out. Tenure must also be eliminated. K-12 public school teachers must work in the real world of private enterprise as do private school teachers.

Fourth, the New Jersey State Legislature must get some “guts” and stand up to the New Jersey Education Association, which currently has the Legislature in its pocket. The NJEA is the most regressive special interest organization I have ever seen. It opposes any form of education reform and performance measurement. It is the single biggest obstacle to cost-of-education reform in New Jersey.

Until we get cost-of-education reform, property tax reform will just pass the cost on to some other tax. It is like pushing in on the balloon — it just pops out elsewhere.

Gregory M. Cinque

Millstone Township

American educators must stop celebrating mediocrity

One of the late summer rites of passage in educational circles is the announcement just before Labor Day of the SAT scores of entering college freshmen. The College Board rents a room in the National Press Club, provides Danish pastries for the press, hires a Washington public relation firm, presents student success stories, and then unveils the scores in the verbal and math sections. Soon there will also be a more comprehensive discussion of the new writing section.

The results have at times a dreary regularity. The scores vary very little, and there continues to be an appreciable gap between the scores of white and Asian students, and blacks and Latinos. Whites average 524; Asians 523; blacks 422; Puerto Ricans 447 on the verbal. On the math test, Asians average 584; whites 536; blacks 425; Puerto Ricans 451.

The gap between students from wealthier families and students from poorer families shows that the wealthier score 40 percent higher than students from poorer families. Race and class — those are becoming even more the defining contours of the once celebrated American dream.

After the state of New York, New Jersey has the highest percentage of students taking the SAT, some 86 percent of college-bound students. Other states have students take the rival ACT test, and many colleges do not require any national standardized tests at all.

With all the talk and expenditures directed at educational reform since the 1970s, one would have thought that the scores would shoot up. But this year, the average verbal scores stayed the same, 508, and the math score went up a modest three points to 520.

For New Jersey, the scores were 503 and 517 respectively. Remarkably, state officials praised the results; remarkably, the College Board spokespeople also praised the results for the state and the nation. Expectations are modest indeed.

Of course, standardized tests are only one index of college preparedness.

High school records and the nature of the courses a student takes are an even better indicator of one’s freshman college year. But even then, the picture is not bright.

The ACT, which provides its test for many midwestern and western colleges and universities, reports than many who plan on going to college are just not ready. Only about one-half of this year’s high school graduates have the reading skills necessary to succeed in advanced work, and even a smaller percentage are ready to take college-level math and science courses.

Indeed, about one in four of the 1.2 million students the ACT tested possessed the skills in the four core areas: English, reading, math and science. It appears that many students in high school are not taking demanding courses in high school, as the ACT and others have recommended.

In part, this weakness is apparent in the continuing decline in the number of students who plan to major in engineering, computer science, and education. At first, it would seem that we do not know what should be taught in the first place. But the ACT, the College Board, and the major research universities of America have all separately come out with very specific curricular recommendations.

Any high school student, parent, or educator can know what should be taught at each grade level in junior and senior high school in each core subject. The state of California has consulted with its university, state college, and community college faculties and come forth with clear statements of prescriptions as well.

So the problem is not that we do not know what to teach, or how to teach it. What superintendents and schools boards need to do is to follow these very clear and rather common guidelines. And we need to stop observing the summer’s last rites of passage where educators continue to celebrate mediocrity.

Michael P. Riccards

executive director

Hall Institute of

Public Policy-New Jersey

Trenton

Manalapan man likes developer’s proposal for Village

I would like to express my views on the controversial Villages at Manalapan project. I am totally in favor of the development of this site and by no means would I consider it a mega mall.

Like many other residents of Manal-apan, my wife and I moved here from another part of the state to find some peace and open spaces where one could walk and appreciate the surroundings.

To my utter dismay, poorly designed development has encroached on many of the open spaces. Many of these spaces were filled with clusters of homes in communities for adults only.

My wife and I, now childless (both our kids have moved on) and in our 50s, would love to move to a real neighborhood with shops, fine restaurants and places we could walk to while enjoying the great outdoors.

I believe the proposed project so many folks seem to be against is just what the doctor ordered if you wish to truly enjoy a full life. I am tired of seeing so many adult communities sprouting out simply because they would not have kids taxing our school system.

While I believe that is important, it should not be the prevailing consideration. I love the fresh breath of life that children and people of all ages contribute to a true village. The project would be designed to minimize the impact on our school system.

The economic windfall the project would bring will help maintain the fiscal viability of our town.

Why should residents of Manalapan continue to buy products and services that will benefit nearby towns rather than go to our own coffers? The new roads will be intelligently designed so that traffic is not unduly burdensome to the people living in the area.

Lastly, I believe we must take politics out of this equation. We need to stop saying “not in my back yard.” We need to continue to develop our own culture in a vibrant atmosphere that citizens of Manalapan can be proud of.

It is time we had our own stores, restaurants and the entertainment venues that seem so innovative and appealing to folks who want more from a home than just a box with windows. I believe folks want a village.

Antonio Luciano

Manalapan

Class questions non-use of hyphen in sports terminology

On Oct. 26 you published an intriguing article about cross-country that was interesting and well written, but the author was apparently not aware that cross-country was spelled incorrectly.

This had left us somewhat confused, as we had cross-country as one of our unit spelling words in school a very short time before the article was published. Our spelling book and various dictionaries all have cross-country spelled with a hyphen, which was seemingly forgotten in your article.

We can see how easy it is to make that mistake. We may have done it a short while ago if our spelling book did not have that word in it.

The Chicago Manual of Style, which has been a standard reference tool for authors, editors, copywriters and proofreaders for over 75 years explains as follows:

“Of ten spelling questions that arise in writing or editing, nine are probably concerned with compound words. … A fast sailing ship, for example, is ambiguous. Does the phrase mean a sailing ship with a general characteristic of fleetness or a ship that at the moment is sailing fast? Since the latter construction is intended, we write a fast-sailing ship, and our reader does not have to pause over it.”

Likewise, cross country may mean a cross or irritated country, a country with many crosses in it, a country that is famous for its crosses, or a sport. Since the sport form is intended, we should add a hyphen, making it cross-country. This implies “across a country,” which is the literal meaning of the sport cross-country.

Thank you for the wonderful article.

Mrs. Rosen’s sixth-grade class

Howell Middle School North

Howell

Editor’s note: We appreciate our readers’ keen observations on the finer points of grammar and spelling. Greater Media Newspapers, however, follows The Associ-ated Press Stylebook, which does not use a hyphen in cross country. The entry in the “Sports Guidelines” section explains, “No hyphen, an exception to Webster’s New World based on the practices of U.S. and international governing bodies for the sport.”

Congregation thanks municipality for help on holiday

On behalf of the executive board, board of trustees and entire membership of Congregation Ohev Shalom/Marlboro Jewish Center, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the Marlboro Township leadership for their unbelievable help during the power outage this past Yom Kippur.

A very special and sincere thank you goes to Mayor Robert Kleinberg, who went above and beyond the call of duty during this crisis. His hands-on assistance and guidance enabled the clergy to continue to conduct services for nearly 3,000 worshippers who attend services during this very sacred holiday.

We also sincerely appreciate the assistance of Bob DiMarco, director of public works; Chief Robert Holmes, chief of police; and Jerry Riccardi, of PSE&G.

These three men worked tirelessly throughout the morning to ensure that we had backup power to conduct our High Holy Day services.

We appreciate their hard work and efforts, which resulted in the electrical service restored to all three of our locations by 12:30 p.m.

We would also like to thank Chris Cardelfe and the Marlboro Home Depot for their generosity in supplying lights, fans and generators, which were so important to us while our power was out.

Thank you all for everything you have done.

Tom Salzer

president

Marlboro Jewish Center

Marlboro