There are many pressures on teachers, but the greatest come from outside. Neither principals nor teachers have any appreciable control over who walks through the front door of the school.

Children who arrive without proper materials, or properly dressed and who are otherwise unready to do their very best should be denied entry.

Only then can the issues of instruction and climate be properly addressed. But Dr. Ackerman believes, forgivably, that all children are to be accorded the right to a public education regardless of moral and intellectual stature. She believes, less forgivably, that "victory in the classroom" can be broadly hinted at through preposterous and demeaning initiatives aimed at increased teacher accountability.

She believes, erroneously and altogether unforgivably, that underlying academic failure are teachers not "putting children first." But teachers are not simply "instructional leaders" destined to bow willy-nilly to Dr. Ackerman's whims or to the prevailing winds of political correctness.

As such, there are some behaviors even in Philadelphia which are everywhere and always wrong regardless of intention or circumstance. Dr. Ackerman has, through her remarkable silence on the criminal behavior pervading the schools, relegated principals and their teachers to the trammels of chaos and its vile and iniquitous progenies of tolerance and malevolence by superciliously scorning the primacy of the teacher while at the same time catering to the solicitudes of incompetent moral defectives.

Teachers typically do their work to the best of their ability with the raw materials the world provides, as their arts, talents and fortune allow. So must Dr. Ackerman. There should be a harmonious cooperation between us all. I watched it work many years ago in Quaker education.

Jonathan R. Verlin, Philadelphia