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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 5, 1995)
VIEWPOINTS EOITORIALS. OPINIONS. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Breast cancer becomes part of national agenda ■ OUR OPINION: The disease is not a women's issue, it affects everyone ()f tin? wommi now attending the University, 250 of will die from breast tam er: 022 more will be diagnosed with the disease and live Breast ranter can not be prevented, but early detection assures a higher rate of survival, National Breast Cant er Awareness Month was designed to increase the number of early detections that will save the lives o! thousands of women each year What began as a grass roots movement in the mid 1980s has become a part o! our national agenda. Breast cancer has come out of the closet What remains to be changed, however, is the perception Unit breast r an ter is a women’s issue. Mum.iii nature otten allows us to ignore issues that do not afftK t us <iin*i t iy Senior citizens rarely protest student financial aid cuts, and University stu dents won't 1h> marching toward city hall when Medicare is slashed by the Senate Youth often adds to that apathy as we delude ourselves into believing we will live forever As sm h, our cry for change rises only when our lives or our way of life are threatened. Men overlook breast cancer because women are 20 times more likely to develop breast can cer than men. and young females disregard it her a use women older than 40 are at a higher risk for the disease. We simply dismiss it as "somebody eise’s problem,” Until recently, the mission to move breast cancer off the nation's back burner has been staffed pi imaril) bj women, many of whom are surviving the disease. The Senate rei ently chan neled $200 million for breast earn er research through the Department of Defense, one of the largest allotments for the disease to date I he credit for that increase belongs to the advot ates for breast cancer research and treatment who have lobbied tirelessly for change Breast cancer will undoubtedly affect all of us in our lifetimes According to the Ameri can ('.am er Sot iety. one out of every nine women will develop the disease, hat h year 186,000 American mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers and best friends hear the words. "You have can cer." Awareness month's purpose is to insure the diagnosis is not followed by. And H s loo late. It's often the women in our lives who Ihk onw our primary parents the ones who keep us safe \V<*, as a society. rely heavily on women economically and emotionally. They are often the leaders of our con sciences and our corpora tions. Breast cancer deals a painful blow to hundreds of thousands of American fam ilies. Mach year, more than 46.000 women leave behind the ones who shared life and love with them National Breast Cancer Awareness month is a testa ment to the thousands of women who looked beyond their personal tragedies to make a difference in the lives of others, its greatest achievement would l>e to give all of us a wake-up call. 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Johrt long Ihvom m*»ii £>ii#iif A£*t'ti«>*g mj/i.’ I*» mt (Wt» W Mt2 Clitic Uurtiiw) MI 4J4J Ift.p wJUHAk «>?VT I***' I ’V *#w | # °*u \ 11 r 'tvi rJ CNTfHTAJVtWsjT State should give school choice a chance When II iatom to edut ition, most child ran are captives of a govern ment-run school assigned to them •m i ording in geography The great tragedy of the government school monopoly is that it denies opportunity fur edu cational excellence to children who mast it the most The children of poor and working-class parents Upper-middle class and wealthy parents already have a school choice" of sorts They i an buy botnet in areas served in outstanding publii schools, or they ran w rite a < h« k to a private m hool For example. President Clinton and his wife Hillary send their daughter Chelsea to Washington's exclusive Sidwell Friends Si hool rather than subjei t her to some of the nation's worst school systems liood for the Clintons But for those who are not so fortunate, pri vate school tuition often is I my on d reach Thus, parents will likely have to send their children to si hools they know will fail to provide a qual ity education The met hanics of school choice an! less important than achieving a practical result that makes sure all parents, regardless of economic circumstances, hat e the opportunity to do what they deem host for their children's education Vouchers, charter st hools, diret t payments to schools or lav i redits all an- viable options The crucial element is to make existing per pupil taxpayer subsidies portable among a wide variety of public and private schools, without qualifu at ion. This is the only sure way to make si hools fully accountable to parents and to taxpayers at large Schools that fail to deliver a quality edu cation in a secure environment would stand to lose their subsidies Critics claim school choice fundamentally is anti-public st hoot On the contrary, the strong performance incentive of school choice would result in lietter schools overall — both public and private Schools would have to compete to serve a larger pool of potential students This likely would spark some degree of spe cialization among schools, in» reusing the diver sity of education options Some schools might emphasize m iences, some the arts and still oth ers vocational skills The possibilities are end less. Some critics also claim comprehensive school choice would violate the First Amendment by providing students with finances to attend religious schools. This admit tedly is an unsettled legal issue Vet government already provides significant funds to individuals to attend religious educa •1 Jl'IIl tional institutions tlirougii student loan guaran ty's, (II Hill funds, Poll Grants and. some would argue, the tax-exempt status granted all religious institutions As lung us any aid is tied to the individual student and choice programs do not favor any particular religion, there is no real First Amendment problem. Limited experiments with school choice, using both public and private money, are yield ing encouraging results. The 'll private choice programs affiliated with the Arkansas-based Children's Opportunity Foundation are educating nearly H.000 students and another 13,000 are on wait ing lists powerful testimony to parents' desires The OOF Foundation reports many instances of children who have blossomed academically and socially once removed from basket-case schools and given a chance to succeed. A Milwaukee. Wis., choice program is forcing the public school system to improve, despite protests from the American Civil Liberties Union and other obstructionists. Him? in Oregon, State Superintendent Norma Paulus claims lo support choice — hut only choice among s< hools approved by existing education authorities, such as the [tend Community School. The Bend school is a worthwhile experiment, hut Oregon parents deserve act ess to a much wider range of choic es. Congress could make it much easier for states and communities to enact their own choice pro grams simply by allowing federal money, which is sprinkled throughout state and local educa tion budgets, to be used for choice programs. lhe state, for its part, should embark on a school choice experiment for students currently Assigned to the dozen worst-ranking public schools. Since these schools already are demon strable failures, a choice program could hardly make matters worse — and more likely would force dramatic improvements. Considering what's at stake for the students, it worse than folly to continue to send kids to st hools that will leave them entirely unpre pared for adulthood. It's destructive. Hie burden in the school choice debate ought to 1h* on those who insist on a status quo that so miserably fails children who most need a chance. Hill Witt, a Hepublican businessman from Port land, is set-king the GOP nomination for Stork Hatfield's Senate seat.
