California Test Results

Re “Scores Are In, but Verdict Out,” July 1: Since taking a teaching job in the Los Angeles area (I moved from the Silicon Valley) my students’ test scores have dropped significantly. Would the fact that my L.A.-area students score about 40 points lower than my Silicon Valley students lead Gov. Pete Wilson to believe I have become a poor teacher since moving to L.A.? The fact that he would like to tie test scores to teacher performance would lead me to believe he thinks this to be true.

The majority of my Silicon Valley students were from a middle to high socioeconomic background. Most of my current students come from lower-income homes. I don’t know how to solve the problem of making the socioeconomic lives of my students and their parents better. This is a job for Gov. Wilson. However, I believe I know how to make them better readers. Possibly this will lead them to a brighter future, but not until Wilson quits fighting education. He needs to joins us.

ISABELLE FARRELL

Glendale

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I can’t understand what the resistance to releasing the Stanford 9 results is all about. Just footnote the percentage of non-English speakers for every school and let that be the end of it.

We are just wasting too much energy fighting over how to teach our children when those resources could be better used elsewhere. The best answer would be to let the bilingual issue be settled at the local level, require all schools to take an annual assessment test (such as the Stanford 9) and bring in vouchers. That way disclosure would be mandatory and parents would have the freedom and the right to choose. I honestly believe that bilingual education handicaps children, but I would still allow parents to make the choice.

What could be simpler? Required full disclosure and freedom to choose.

ALEX TODOROVICH

West Covina

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Let’s see if we have the picture. Teachers return in September to find that they suddenly have students with limited English abilities in all their classes. What do they do? They’ve had no training in how to handle such a classroom, so they teach for high standards while limited-English students just do their darndest without understanding the content and/or instructions, or they stop teaching for high standards in order to communicate with their limited-English students and their other students are shortchanged.

With no real immersion programs in place and no systemwide policies or guidelines, we have chaos. In spring we test everybody for academic achievement to see how they do on statewide tests. And the public will believe that scores are low because teachers and schools are not doing their job, not because teaching has been sabotaged by this policy to implement the end of bilingual education. What a wonderful agenda for the destruction of public education in California!

RENATE N. CAINE

Idyllwild