Dear Letters Editor,
Enough with the "tsk, tsks" about conservative reaction to Obama's scheduled speech to schoolchildren nationwide. Their backlash is justified. Tim Rutten conveniently forgets to mention what precipitated the reaction in the first place, which was not the speech per se but the timing of the speech (the middle of a school day), the presumption of participation, and the accompanying lesson plans supplied by the Department of Education (children would have been asked to respond to prompts like, "Write a letter to yourself about what you can do to help the president.") These questions have since been "revised" to appear more innocuous, but the damage was done. It's bad enough that classroom teachers are now in a mad "race to the top" in order to meet federal education standards. But to ask them to set aside class time and adjust their lesson plans for an "inspirational message" from the president says more about how out of touch the Obama administration is with what's going on in the so-called trenches than what it says about conservatives.
Now, of course, any of these original concerns have been eclipsed because Obama, back-pedaling in response to the conservative outcry, gave what amounted to a pep-talk to students, so harmless that even rabidly partisan conservatives like Newt Gingrich commended it. I feel our comments reflected the views of the average classroom teacher and it would have been nice if the Times had included at least this perspective rather than focusing on the "paranoia" aspect.
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