Stanford 9 Tests Health of Our Culture

Your Aug. 16 editorial “It Looks Like Up” reinforces a one-sided view of California students’ low reading scores. Your explanation of poor reading instruction, inadequate bilingual education, a textbook shortage and education fads points fingers only at educators. However, you overlook more entrenched causes for poor reading skills: a culture that values fast-paced, visual entertainment over literacy and the inability of many working parents to spend time reading at home with their children.

Yes, California students should be better readers. However, until all Californians--not just those who are educators by profession--accept the responsibility of making this happen, we all will pay the price of a nonliterate populace.

Chris Davis

Glendale

In a measure of the Stanford 9’s true purpose, I would like to see it given to California’s general population and to its teachers. The results may be shocking. Certainly what we’re measuring here is not so much a school’s performance (which is an extremely complex and costly assessment, known as accreditation) but the educational and socioeconomic status of its clients, which is similar to gauging a doctor’s performance based on the cholesterol levels of his patients.

Though there are greater numbers of inexperienced teachers in the inner cities, L.A.’s classrooms are essentially standardized; the teachers are trained in the same institutions and the textbooks and methods are the same. The real conclusions that can be drawn from these numbers are that younger students may be more easily trained to meet testing criteria, non-English-speaking populations will compromise scores and socioeconomic status matters.

Isn’t it a bit ludicrous that we punish those “failing” inner-city schools for what is essentially a symptom of poverty and social crisis? But the real questions of what we are to do about the growing gap between rich and poor, the overcrowding of our neglected classrooms and the recruitment and retention of quality teachers are neglected in favor of a politically charged statistical buzzword.

Dain Olsen

Los Angeles