Martin,

Thank you for your comments; they are enlightening and bring up several points and/or questions.  

Am I to assume you don&#039;t want to &quot;&hellip;meet testing standards for the &ldquo;more challenged&rdquo; groupings&hellip;&quot;?  You seem to be suggesting that in your note, please let me know if this was misinterpreted. The CT Board of education, and No Child Left Behind requirements, have pretty specific mandates and I am not going to fault our administration for doing what is mandated.  Would you like the State to take over the district?   If more students don&rsquo;t get to Goal or Proficient, there are penalties.  If you don&rsquo;t like this, our admin is not the one to focus on, call your congressman, senator, etc, to improve NCLB so it is less punitive on this point and also rewards for developing more of the highest performers, not just getting everyone to mediocrity at a minimum.  It currently has no goal/requirements for that. 

Secondly, are you stating that flexible grouping &ldquo;&hellip;makes it harder to meet testing standards for the &ldquo;more challenged&rdquo; groupings&hellip;&rdquo; or am I misinterpreting you again, in the way that I have directly quoted what you wrote.  

Lastly you state you want for Stamford  &quot;...whatever has demonstrated to be effective in educating our children...&quot; but then later say &quot;&hellip;ridiculous bias data is gathered and distributed&quot;.  So if evidence is presented to you that shows MST in year 1 was effective in educating, data that is readily available for confirmation at Ctreports.com, data that shows that Grade 6 scores for 90% of the NCLB measurement cohorts increased in year 1 of MST and that the increase doesn&rsquo;t show to be at the detriment of high performers, you simply call it biased and move on with your agenda (there, I said it).  What exactly do you need to see that would convince you of its effectiveness?
Admittedly Math scores &lsquo;lagged&rsquo; a bit in Year 1 of MST (but certainly aren&rsquo;t what SREE and others are making it out to be), so how about we use more than one year of data and have this discussion next September after the 2nd year of MST scores are available??)  

I personally know many people and board members involved in this discussion and who are active in the &ldquo;SREE&rdquo; community; the vast majority are decent people, and I believe want what&rsquo;s best for Stamford.  Not all are &lsquo;decent&rsquo; and not all want what&rsquo;s best for anyone but their population, but the same can be said for the other side and I do believe it is a minority of both sides in this &lsquo;discussion&rsquo; if you can call it that.

But if SREE and its supporters want to avoid the &lsquo;circus&rsquo; and avoid being accused of certain things like bias, racism, etc, it would help if they stopped continually cherry picking limited data, ignoring any positive results seen in MST and refusing to compare their handpicked cherrypicked data to anything relevant (I&rsquo;ve reviewed http://stamfordree.org/CMT-Analysis.pdf  and it is blatantly misleading. As a financial analyst I know a good and a bad, or false, analysis when I see one).  There is not one comparison to prior years/same data for Stamford students so it falls somewhere between meaningless and misleading.

A perfect example of the non-analytical nature of this discussion from the NoToMST side:  The board asks for current Grade 7 math scores from the population of 5th graders, who had lower CMT performance in last year pre-MST, to see how they are doing, find out that some % of them (~35%) are getting D&rsquo;s or F&rsquo;s and state triumphantly  &ldquo;aha&hellip;this proves our point!&rdquo;  
How exactly does this prove anything?  What were the comparative grades for 2010 7th graders, 2009, 2008, in the pre-MST years, who in their 5th grade year were a 1 or 2 in CMTs?  Was it 50% with D or F?  Was it 10%?  I honestly have no idea, but assume you don&rsquo;t either because you didn&rsquo;t ask so there is no way to look at one number on its own and make a conclusion.  If you don&rsquo;t compare a post-MST number to its corresponding pre-MST number, you can conclude absolutely nothing.    So 65% of the CMT 1 and 2&rsquo;s are getting A, B and C&hellip;is this is not a good outcome? Is it better than pre-MST or worse? Let ask the right questions and analyze the data the right way before concluding anything. 

While the idea of a suit by the NAACP is the absolute last thing that Stamford needs today, it also would help if the other side was honest in their debate. Ask the right and complete questions, analyze all the data including prior year&rsquo;s and then you have the right to make statements and conclusion. Or maybe, you even have the right, or responsibility, to change your tune, if the data doesn&rsquo;t support your pre-existing conclusions and beliefs.