Success by the Numbers for AP English Teachers

I would recommend remedial math training for Principal Kavin Dotson of Culver City High School. It certainly wouldn’t take Advanced Placement calculus to do a better job analyzing the statistical success of the two AP English teachers featured in “2 Educators Face Pitfalls of Too Much Success” (July 25). If I correctly read the statistics, AP English classes in 1996 included 60 test-taking students, of whom 70% passed, for a total of 42 students who could potentially receive college credit. The most recent AP English classes included 200 test-taking students of whom 44% passed, for a total of 88 students who could potentially receive college credit. Unless the population of Culver City High School has more than doubled in those few years, it sounds to me like a lot of progress.

Even more incredible to me is that the two teachers more than tripled the number of students exposed to AP English. Simply reaching out for the opportunity of taking AP English is an accom-plishment of which the remaining 112 students can be proud.

Kay Webster

Seal Beach

So Thomas Dase, Culver City’s assistant superintendent for educational services, “always desire(s) that there be more students passing the tests”? The AP English instructors, Nancy Goldberg and Curt Mortenson, started with around 70% of 60 students passing (around 42 students) and ended with 44% of nearly 200 students passing. This would be close to 88 students, of which presumably some were the newly included minority students without honors backgrounds. I don’t know whether the administration values students being introduced to a larger and more coherent world as part of their education, but I must conclude that its representatives can neither express themselves clearly and plainly, nor can they perform basic arithmetic. Practice what you preach.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Claremont

If schools were run rationally, Dotson would be putting young teachers into these two veterans’ classrooms as apprentices so that they could learn how to balance the need to introduce more students to rigorous work with the idea that not everyone, no matter how hard they work, can achieve at the top of the class. Then, in time, these apprentices can take over.

I was an AP teacher for 20 years. The College Board always said that the goal of more students studying rigorous material is to be preferred over the numbers game of how many passed the test. Is this concept too difficult to grasp?

Bill Clawson

Santa Monica