April 14, 1982

I particularly enjoyed reading the communication concerns of aera convention researchers as reported in "Researchers Ponder How to Reach Practitioners" (March 31).

I made a list of those who, according to the researchers, are responsible for the gap between educational research and practice. These include: education-school faculties, teachers, students, the public, state education-department offices, the National Diffusion Network, the National Institute of Education, and research journals.

Censorship within a community's schools usually is a tense compromise between the rights of intellectual and academic freedom on one hand and the privileges of the community to educate its children as it sees fit on the other. The danger of overzealous censorship is that students are deprived of valid educational experiences that they should have.

The history of testing in this country and in Europe, where the modern testing movement began, is filled with examples of the misuse and abuse of tests. Various minority groups (whichever group was a popular target at the time) have been wrongly labeled and excluded from full participation in American society on the basis of their scores on a wide variety of instruments designed to assess everything from aptitude to intelligence.