Standardized Testing Flunks Basic Education

Re “Reform Bills Could Set Schools Up for Failure,” July 18: Even given The Times’ ongoing vendetta against public school teachers, I find it hard to understand why your reporting on “Texas-style education reform” is so consistently passive and shallow. If your reporter were to check the facts behind the hype, he’d discover that Texas’ success has in great part been thanks to a statistical shell game, where underachieving and problem students are expelled or transferred in large numbers and shifted to what amounts to another set of books.

Beyond that, the politicians in your article arguing for “all students at 100%” need some serious remediation on the operations and functions of the bell curve, the Procrustean bed that education has been condemned to by the vogue of standardized testing. If every student scored between 90% and 100%, those at 90% would be statistical failures, and those at 95% merely average.

If your reporter is daunted by the prospect of explaining percentages versus percentiles to your readership, I’m sure any credentialed math teacher would be happy to help.

Charlie G. Dodson

Teacher, Hill Middle School

Long Beach