To the editor:

I have to agree with Sen. Kay O’Connor’s reply to Cindy Yulich on the school funding issue, reported in the April 28 Journal-World. While many Kansans are calling for more public education funding and accusing our legislators of “abandoning” public schools, many more of us would like to ask those supporting more funding: How much spending will be enough? $5,000 per pupil? $10,000? The problem is that NO AMOUNT of spending will ever be enough, since public education can never improve to a level of performance expected of it.

As long as they have essentially no competition, government schools will always be inefficiently run education monopolies.

Parents need to practice more child-rearing leadership at home, and spend more time tutoring their own children in areas where they’re struggling and/or where the school education is lacking. Such an approach would be more proactive than expecting all of us to continue pumping more money into public schools.

By the way, Sen. O’Connor’s position on the 19th Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with her reply to Ms. Yulich on the school funding issue. I suspect that inclusion of such an unrelated event in the April 28 article was a deliberate attempt by the Journal-World to portray Sen. O’Connor as being out of touch with Kansans.

Steve Johnson,

Ottawa