JoePa's culture protected football program

Dick Farrell
December 12, 2011
326

Following up on a couple of things this week *** A few weeks ago, I asked and then answered: Is Joe Paterno (longtime head coach of the Penn State football team) a father figure? Hardly. Psu4ster took me to task with his/her online comment posted under my commentary on the Bargain Hunters Web site. I am a graduate of thee Pennsylvania State University and I'd like to first make it completely clear that my thoughts, prayers and biggest concerns lie with the victims and their families, he/she wrote. With that being said, I do not agree with your comment about Paterno not being a father figure. I grew up in Pennsylvania and know the unbelievable amount of good Joe Paterno has done for the state, Penn State students, faculty, staff as well as student athletes he has coached and molded into productive citizens. He has donated millions of dollars to the university and the last time I checked, the university figures that Coach Paterno and his wife have helped raise $3.5 billion for the university. You, as well as the rest of the media, have condemned Coach Paterno before any official facts have been brought to light Well, Psu4ster, I didnt condemn Paterno. I said he was hardly a father figure and I based that on available information – some of it official (i.e. grand jury indictment of alleged abuser Jerry Sandusky) – and some of which came to light in the aftermath. And last Monday, a team of Associated Press reporters posted a story that concluded the culture of Penn State was to protect its football program above everything else, including, apparently, the rogue ex-coach who was abusing children over at least a 12-year period. And while the official allegations, so far, target only three people – Sandusky, along with the schools athletic director and a since-retired senior vice president, who are both charged with perjury and failure to report a 2002 sexual abuse complaint – an investigation by the Associated Press suggests that blame also rests on Penn State as an institution and the entrenched traditions of now-fired head football coach Joe Paterno, the AP said. In addition, the AP investigation, which included scores of interviews and a review of the limited number of available documents, also reveals new details in the Sandusky case: the special handling of a 1998 sexual abuse complaint by child welfare workers; a clash between investigators over what the evidence showed at that time; extraordinary retirement perks that gave Sandusky access to places on campus where he is accused of abusing children; a determination by a nearby county child-welfare agency that Sandusky sexually abused a boy in 2008 in a case that sparked the state criminal case; and a passionate defense of Paterno's role by his wife and her vigorous assertion that his university superiors are responsible for any mistakes in the handling of the 2002 abuse complaint. So, despite Psu4sters impassioned defense of Paterno, I remain convinced that JoePa is a rather lousy father figure. *** Its in vogue these days to blame the public schools for all the ills in the education system. I have maintained that the anger is misdirected and that by far the biggest problem lies not with teachers or their schools, but with students parents and homes. Or lack thereof. In other words, all the talk about No Child Left Behind, charter schools, district report cards and all those hot button issues politicians are prone to talk about are actually a lot of hooey. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times recently, Helen F. Ladd a professor of public policy and economics at Duke, and Edward B. Fiske, a former education editor of the New York Times and author of the Fiske Guide to Colleges, argue that policy makers have missed the point. No one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds, they wrote. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control. In fact, Ladd and Fiske point out that poor children do worse academically in all countries than their counterparts who are members of well-to-do families. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country, Ladd and Fisk reported. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty? And not known to the general public, your typical public school educator in Tuscarawas and Holmes counties is donating hard cash at this time of the year so the most disadvantaged of their students can return to their respective schools in January in shoes that dont leak, dresses that arent torn and a coat that actually zips up. By the way, those are far more important issues to those children than a good grade on a test. Were talking about survival here. And yet the public demands accountability on test scores by those same youngsters who come from homes best described as organized squalor where no one ever read to them before bedtime, or took them to the zoo, or told them they are loved. No child left behind? We dont have an education problem in this country. We have a poverty problem. Why cant we get that? To read more from Dick Farrell, visit him at www.TuscBargainHunter.com.

JoePa's culture protected football program

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