Letters to the Editor | July 18, 2023

Jeff and Janine Yass get a full-page op-ed to extoll the wonders of school vouchers. Allow me to set them straight. Children in well-funded public schools do great. Well-funded public schools drive up property values, qualify students for local jobs, and keep neighborhoods safer. Pennsylvania’s system of funding has been deemed to be unconstitutional because schools with majority-Black and brown students are underfunded. The reason Philadelphia schools perform poorly is because of persistent underfunding. When Gov. Tom Corbett cut the education budget by close to $1 billion in 2011, poor districts suffered the most. The steady progress that Pennsylvania children had been showing became history.

Is the single mother with three children who the Yasses are proposing could spend half the amount allocated per child on better schools also going to receive money to buy a home in a better neighborhood? I’m not sure how their proposal is going to make her child’s commute home any safer. Most districts don’t bus outside their boundaries. In fact, most poor people don’t have the luxury of being able to transport their kids to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Will every school a parent chooses accept their child? How will the low test scores those children bring be accepted in, say, suburban Lower Merion schools? Educational freedom means having safe, well-maintained, fully staffed public schools that accept all children — right in your own neighborhood — regardless of race, disability, or economic status.

Beth Logue, Philadelphia, elizabeth.logue44@gmail.com

I don’t know if there was a causal connection between the safety lapses at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and the fact that its CEO, Donald Mueller, worked remotely from his home in Tennessee. But I do know that it is important for the boss to spend time on the “factory floor,” a principle I first heard during a succession of blue-collar summer jobs in Berks County. I heard it again in the Army, under the heading “mingling with the troops.” I saw its impact throughout my career.

I laughed when I read that it is an “evolving debate” among health-care analysts as to whether the residency of a hospital CEO matters. The analysts, few of whom ever ran any organization, are trying to apply their customary metrics to things not easily quantified. Many things change, but basic human nature doesn’t. There is no substitute for routine personal contact with employees as an expression of care and concern and as a means of gauging attitudes and morale. The greater the stress an institution is under, the more important it becomes. Mueller should get out on the wards and talk to staff. It will be time well spent.

David Plymyer, Catonsville, Md.

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