Dear George,
As you know, I compose these letters whilst partaking of the sacred smoke. Some might call my condition stoned; I call it inspired. There is a down side, though. Sometimes I find my mind adrift on a sea of toxic tranquility when it should be attending to details. This is especially true when dealing with the world of numbers, which I dismiss as a Socially Constructed Reality, a view you obviously share given the budget you just submitted to Congress.
However, in a rare display of fairness I must correct some figures in yesterday’s letter. The NYC Board of Education did extend the school day by twenty minutes, but there was an additional slight of hand I failed to mention. The purpose of this additional twenty minutes is to tutor failing students. However, what Chancellor Joe Klein has done is to dismiss the students who don’t need tutoring ten minutes earlier, giving the unfortunates who have to stay a full thirty minutes of instruction which some schools have expanded to thirty-five minutes of instruction by only giving it Monday through Thursday.
So, given the time it takes to move children to their place of instruction and settle down, we might be looking at a net of ten to fifteen minutes of instruction a day. Of course you have to wonder how focused a child will be with his good friend already out of school.
However, the piece de resistance of this whole exercise is that only those schools in which a third or less of the students is at risk will provide tutoring. Inner city schools where the majority of the population is at risk get no tutoring, and they will be dismissed ten minutes earlier so thirty minutes may be allocated for the instruction they will never get.
Yesterday’s letter failed to appreciate Joe’s genius. He is truly a master of unproductive productivity. Suggestions that if Joe were serious about increasing productivity he would initiate year-round schooling must be dismissed as grousing by pissed-off Luddites who cling to the archaic notion that increasing productivity means increasing productivity.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:00:33 PM 
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