Stephen J. Morello, the director of communications for the New York City Department of Education, wrote an unusually vituperative response to Andrew Wolf’s column about the recent test scores for New York City public schools [“Time for an Accounting,” Letters, June 17, 2004].

Mr. Morello accuses Mr. Wolf of writing either “gibberish or intentional deception”because of his attention to the reported decline in student performance on the state’s fourth-grade reading test.

As Mr.Morello surely knows,the Klein administration pumped massive resources into its “balanced literacy” program for the early grades.

Mr. Morello does not acknowledge that this program is quite controversial, and that the federal Department of Education denied the city more than $30 million in federal funds because of the absence of any research evidence for the effectiveness of this approach.

Thus, Mr.Wolf was quite right to call attention to the three-point drop in the proportion of fourthgrade students who met state standards in reading.

Mr. Morello’s outpouring of statistics about performance in other subjects and grades cannot obscure the fact that a five-year trend of steady improvement for fourthgraders on the state reading test was reversed this year.

Mr. Morello cannot seem to decide whether one-year score changes are significant or not.

Apparently any score improvement, no matter how small, is significant, but any score decline, no matter how large, is not.

It might be best for all of us if the Department of Education’s communications director simply released the facts about student performance without picking and choosing among them, highlighting those that reflect well on his employers and minimizing those that do not. And one would hope that the department’s spokesperson would adopt a civil tone,rather than insulting those who raise questions. He sets a bad example for our students.