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Letter to the Editor NY Times 6/9/09

Stephen Davenport — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:13:38 +0000

This letter was published in The NY Times on 6/9/09:

To the Editor: (In response to an article about the founder of a charter school paying $125,000 salaries to teachers to assure excelence) What should really amaze us is not that a school is willing to pay $125,000 salaries for great teachers but that this level of compensation is so unusual as to rate front-page placement in a national newspaper. Isn’t it amazing that a whole range of professional and business people, some in their first year of employment, can earn more than the people who taught them how to read, write, compute and think? Isn’t this the way to build our national house on sand?

Letter to the Editor

Stephen Davenport — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:41:40 +0000

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

The Key to Economic Recovery: Education

Stephen Davenport — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:04:12 +0000

In David Leonhardt’s excellent article, The Big Fix, in The New York Times Magazine, February 1, 2009, there is the following stunning statement: “The median male worker (in the USA) is roughly as educated as he was 30 years ago and makes roughly the same hourly pay. The median female worker is far more educated than she was 30 years ago and makes 30 per cent more than she did then.”

Those who assert we should get our economy fixed first and then we can turn to fixing education don’t get it. Shovel ready projects are important and they have the allure of quick pay-back. Likewise, fixing the financial system, but what will these initiatives serve if we do not make the long-term, rewards-later investment in developing the intellectual muscle to do the work on which the economy depends? We can no longer afford to accept a culture in which a kid one day out of law school makes more money that the person who taught him how to read -anymore than we can accept a culture in which the mediocre teacher gets re-hired every year. Without the political will to force change, and the financial sacrifcice to invest the money now, there will be no sustainable economic recovery.

Another quote from David Leonhardt’s article – write your representatives and senators and tell them to read it: “Education helps a society leverage every other investment it makes—. It appears to be the best single bet that a society can make.”