Each week the New York Times letters-to-the-editor page conducts a Sunday public discussion based on one letter published mid-week. Again this time, the exercise may constitute an opportunity for scientists.
This week’s catalyst letter, “Invitation to a Dialogue: Back to School” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/opinion/invitation-to-a-dialogue-back-to-school.html ), comes from Walt Gardner of Los Angeles, identified as "a former teacher whose Reality Check blog is published in Education Week."
Gardner notes that "Common Core State Standards, adopted by all but a handful of states in the last year or so, provide specific guidelines about what should be taught in each grade," and declares that although "this approach has been criticized for usurping local control of education, that objection is far outweighed by the benefits of better preparing students for college." He supports using test scores as "one of multiple measures" of teacher performance. He's glad to see the decay of the seniority system, but worries that it can lead "to favoritism by principals."
He concludes:
Teachers don’t choose a career in the classroom for money, power or fame. What they want more than anything else is to make a difference in the lives of their students. They don’t always succeed, but they deserve more than the unrelenting criticism they’ve endured since the accountability movement began.
The editors have appended their usual note:
We invite readers to respond to this letter for our Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Mr. Gardner’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: [email protected]
Long odds work against getting a Times letter published, of course, but a huge audience sees the letters that do appear. (See the Times’s “How to Submit a Letter to the Editor” page, http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/letters/letters.html .) Here are two theories, for what they’re worth: Pithiness matters hugely, and the de facto deadline is probably first thing Friday morning, 2 September — but a Wednesday or Thursday submission would be even better.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
