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We didn't fully understand the horrors of Nazi Germany until Allied soldiers finally entered the concentration camps. We can't say the same about events unfolding today: We are fully aware of the desperate condition of millions of Syrian refugees. We can't absorb all those refugees, nor should we. But we should do our part. Yet, some want to close our borders to Syrians -- unless they're Christian Syrians. What bigotry, religious bigotry, no less. Using the boy's identity, he fought as a teenager alongside Poles against the Germans. Throughout the war, he feared he would be exposed when he showered. After the war, when the Red Cross reunited him with his mother, he warned her not to let on, for he feared Poles' retribution if they found out he was Jewish.

More than 90 organizations - including a wide variety of educational, human rights, disability and religious groups - issued a \"joint organizational statement\" on the law, advocating major reforms They complain of \"over-emphasizing standardized testing\" and \"narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test-preparation rather than richer academic learning.\" Jan Ressenger of the United Church of Christ and Curtis Ramsey- Lucas of American Baptist Churches USA, protested on the CommonDreams Web site: \"Big-city school districts with enormous needs and responsibilities find they are sanctioned for being less- successful than rich suburban districts.\" The church writers think NCLB \"fails to fully honor children's growth and accomplishments by relying on scores on a single annual standardized test.\"

EDITOR: Peter Schrag's Sunday column, \"Community colleges need more graduates,\" is a narrow view of the goals of Santa Rosa Junior College and does not take into consideration the broader goals expressed in SRJC's mission statement. By defining \"success\" in terms of transferring to a four-year college, receiving an associate degree or some other certificate, Schrag ignores the unique role of community colleges in the California system of higher education.

That's pretty much where the agreement stops. Are Mexicans and other illegal aliens being driven home by tougher enforcement, as immigration restrictionists claim? Or is the decline in illegal aliens - from an estimated 12 million-plus to just over 11 million - a trailing indicator of the recession and accompanying decrease in employment opportunities? the CIS' \"dubious conclusion,\" counters the liberal Immigration Policy Center, \"is undermined not only by an absence of hard data, but by the faulty logic and contradictory statements of the report itself.\" If he's correct, it begs the question of how cruel enforcement has to be to drive the other 11 million out of the country. [Camarota] agrees that because of the political clout of employers, enforcement has hit workers much harder. He also acknowledges that those who have left in the past year - and those who didn't replace them - may be \"low-hanging fruit\" on trees where few easy pickings are left.

This was all taking place in the absence of any evidence of legitimate public health concerns regarding these types of operations, in which the producers sell their products directly to the consumers. [George Smitherman] talked about concerns regarding the sale of unpasteurized milk on a recent occasion, but enforcing current rules should have prevented that. It's all reminiscent of the nutrient management mess of several years ago. Under the terms of that fiasco, farmers were going to have to go to ridiculous lengths to control manure and the runoff from same on their farms because of a link between manure and the Walkerton water tragedy. Why not? How much better would we all be if each small community still had its own dairy? By the way, have you checked the stale dating on dairy products lately? What kind of chemicals and preservatives must they inject so we can get weeks of use out of a carton of coffee creamer? But I digress. We also should be able to eat fresh-baked bread with local ingredients from the local shop, patronize -- many of us are lucky that we still can -- the local butcher shop after its owner patronized local farmers, etc. etc.

The Daily Bulletin recently published a column by Peter Schrag, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. I am not sure how many people were able to digest it, as Mr. Schrag deliberately wrote it in very sophisticated language. However, it was full of misrepresentations of the truth, and at best it was extremely misleading. Scores of research articles have been written and published that confirm the merits of bilingual education; meanwhile, since the passage of Proposition 227, a previously bilingual/literate student population has pitifully become barely monolingual. Mr. Schrag seems to know all of the acronyms to throw around in his column. But I bet he hasn't visited a flowering ELD class lately. He might be hard pressed to find a true bilingual classroom left in California, thanks to Proposition 227, but the teachers are still around - and we haven't given up. In the near future, many educators will travel to Sacramento to let the State Board of Education know that we demand increased funding for our EL students.

Peter Schrag's column concluded, \"Sooner or later we'll probably look back at this (illegal immigration) episode with the same embarrassment and shame as we did the others.\" Schrag's play upon our historical immigration traditions is specious. The inscription at the base of the Statute of Liberty concludes, \"I lift my lamp beside the golden door!\" It says nothing about welcoming people who bypass our entry doors by climbing walls, swimming rivers and sneaking under border fences. An article Saturday (\"Groups rip city, China entry\") made it look like the city of Pasadena turned its back on human rights concerns. The issue involves the Beijing Olympics float in today's Rose Parade, and human rights organizations who see the event as an opportunity to protest abuses in China. The story included criticism of the city for not doing more to help the protesters stage a human rights demonstration, and stated that \"the city made a final offer for a single torchbearer and golf cart to go down Colorado Boulevard before sunrise at 6 a.m.\"

I've been to Paris three times in recent years and in my experience, without exception, the Parisians have been friendly and helpful. Before I went to France I tried to learn a few words of French via a short course on compact disc.

Too many high school graduates arrive at college or the workplace without the ability to compose coherent sentences and paragraphs. In a column published in Sunday Forum, Peter Schrag of the Sacramento Bee noted that three out of four incoming students at state community colleges cannot read or write at the college level. Now comes worrisome results on how local students perform on the new writing section of the SAT college entrance exam. Students from the county's top public high schools perform about as well as private-school students in math, Staff Writer Robert Digitale reported on Friday, but public school students trail substantially behind their private school counterparts when it comes to writing skills.