Saving Miss Oliver’s

The following is a letter I wrote to the editor, published in the New York Times on March 17, 2009. There were several letters that appeared that day under the heading The Goal: Improve America’s Schools.

To the Editor: 

    Re: “No Picnic for Me Either, by David Brooks (column, March 13)

   Mr. Brooks is exactly right: great teachers build strong relationships with their students on whom they impose high standards.

   Mr. Brooks is also correct in saying that we need to know who these teachers are, and which schools devlop high achievement in their students. Yes, we need data. We need to know, not to guess or hope.

  However, Mr. Brooks ’s faith in the standardized tests by which we gather data strikes me as naive. I taught English for years and have been an educator since 1957 and have yet to discover a better method of assessing my students’ progress in learning how to write than reading their compositions closely, with a red pencil, usually at least twice. If I could have substituted a standardized test for that process, I could have gone to bed a lot earlier each night.

   Could it be that our faith in standardized testing is based on the fact that it costs much less than assessing real work?

   One reading of Mr. Brooks’s column tells me more about his excellence as a writer than a thousand standardized tests.

Stephen Davenport

Oakland, Calif., March 13, 2009