To the Editor:
Re “Don’t Ditch Standardized Tests. Fix Them,” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, nytimes.com, Jan. 17):
Ms. Grose is incorrect when she says, “Without standardized testing, we won’t know where to put the most resources.” I taught in half a dozen schools in two of our nation’s largest school districts, and in my current job training teachers, I’ve been in dozens more. It takes about five minutes in a school building to know if it needs more resources.
And yet, regardless of the ever-changing policy on standardized tests, the same schools across our nation suffer from underfunding year after year. The problem has never been that we don’t know where the gaps are. We simply remain unwilling to fund adequate schools for all our nation’s children.
There may be curricular and pedagogical arguments in favor of testing, but to claim that such tests will finally get us to apportion funds to the schools that need them most is belied by our history. We need to change our mind-set about how we fund schools, not the quality of our measuring sticks.
Jeremy Glazer
Glassboro, N.J.
The writer is an assistant professor of education at Rowan University.
To the Editor:
Jessica Grose doesn’t mention a standardized testing organization that many school districts around the nation use. NWEA, Northwest Evaluation Association, is a nonprofit organization that provides standardized tests in reading, math, language usage and science. Teachers like me use these three times each school year.
