Joshua Purvis’ column about Oregon public schools, coupled with the recent article concerning the Springfield Public Schools board’s apparent inability to act like a functioning school board, is, to this writer, a terribly sad commentary on the state of Oregon education.

I do not live in either Eugene or Springfield, but reading about the craziness of our politics throughout Oregon — and, more locally, Nicole De Graff’s resignation from the Springfield school board — demonstrates how what happens in Washington, D.C., filters down to relatively small school districts here in the Willamette Valley. Worst of all, our children are clearly getting shortchanged when one looks at Oregon’s educational outcomes versus the rest of the country.

Dead last in math and reading among U.S. fourth graders? Really? A so-called teachers’ union that spends its time lobbying the Legislature for more money — and working to quash a Mississippi schools turnaround that switched to using actual letter grades (A-F) on actual report cards and created an explosion of positive educational outcomes?

What we have here is nest-feathering at the expense of producing children who are ill-equipped to deal with an increasingly complex world. Will we ever learn that throwing money at our schools will never produce brighter, more engaged students?

Maybe someday we will understand that teaching is as much an art as it is an occupation. Bring back letter grades, for criminy sake.

Bob Burns
Walterville