Teacher friends - I wish I'd written these letters to the NYT (published 28th Feb)

To the Editor:

As your Feb. 22 editorial “Don’t Give Up the Gains in Education” notes, the annual testing requirement in No Child Left Behind was intended to shine a spotlight on the progress of disadvantaged, minority, special needs and English-learning students.

But maintaining that focus does not mean that reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act must promote the same constricted view of annual testing — the same test questions for each child at a single sitting — that has prevailed over the last decade and a half.

The new Elementary and Secondary Education Act should encourage states to use approaches that are less likely to narrow the curriculum and stimulate test prep.

These include question sampling techniques, in which different students receive different questions across the entire curriculum (except perhaps for a core set, unknown in advance, that all students would receive); performance tests, whereby groups perform experiments or tasks working in teams that might incorporate divisions of labor; embedded test questions given throughout the year and aggregated to yield summary scores; and adaptive testing, in which students are permitted to advance through levels of difficulty based on their answers.

The federal language should permit more expansive views of assessment and, optimally, offer incentives for states to study alternative approaches to monitoring student and subgroup progress.

SUSAN H. FUHRMAN
New York

The writer is president of Teachers College, Columbia University.

To the Editor:

Your editorial says, “One proposal being considered in the Senate would allow states to end the annual testing, without which parents would never know how well their children were doing.”

Annual testing has never let me know in a timely fashion how well my child is doing. My child’s teachers, the homework, schoolwork and tests that my child brings home, and access to the parent portal, which includes my child’s academic record, inform me of how well my child is doing.

If I had to wait until September for the results of annual testing to figure out how my child was doing, my child would be “left behind.”

EVELYN SLOCKBOWER
Mahwah, N.J.

To the Editor:

School administrators take many factors into account when evaluating their staff members. Test scores do not. Additionally, test scores are often unreliable indicators of students’ ability and teachers’ knowledge and skill.

If a student is stoned, sleeping through class, truant, abused or refusing to do assigned work, that student is very likely to have low test scores despite the best efforts of award-winning teachers.

Studies confirm that factors outside of school control for 60 percent or more of student achievement. While teachers are the single most important factor within a school, they still control for just 10 to 15 percent of a student’s achievement.

Class sizes, availability of school nurses and social workers, extra help for struggling students, enough books to enable students to take them home to study — these and other factors outside a teacher’s control dramatically affect student test scores.

The overwhelming needs of students and their families are too large for school staff alone to meet. Unfairly blaming teachers does nothing to meet those needs.

It’s time for politicians, parents, businesses, churches and others to all pitch in to help needy students and families. Students can’t thrive at school if they must concentrate on surviving the outside world.

NANCY PAPAS
Indianapolis