Some teachers in Tennessee Arkansas and Mississippi paid surrogates between $1500 and $3000 to take the Praxis exam for them the passing of which is necessary for teacher certification in 40 states.
When Ive written about our listing mis-education system my focus has mainly been on rampant political correctness on how students learn few of the right things partially because of emphasis on teaching the wrong things. Yet theres another problem: in some cases the teachers couldnt teach the right things even if they wanted to they dont know them.
Professor Walter Williams treated this in his latest syndicated column Dishonest Educators." He introduces the topic by talking about the fairly recent cheating scandals in places such as Atlanta Philadelphia Houston New York Detroit and other large cities (in areas that not coincidentally also have high rates of vote fraud and other criminality). These are shocking instances in which teachers would commit transgressions such as reading answers aloud in class during the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. How did they justify this? Well Williams quotes one teacher who told a fellow educator" I had to give your kids or your students the answers because theyre dumb as hell."
But it seems the kids arent the only ones. Now we learn that some teachers in Tennessee Arkansas and Mississippi paid surrogates between $1500 and $3000 to take the Praxis exam for them the passing of which is necessary for teacher certification in 40 states. And how challenging is this test that some would fork over a few grand to a ringer sit-in? Williams describes a couple of representative questions writing:
Heres a practice Praxis I math question: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million 40000 250000 2500000 1/4000000 or 4/1000000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the following sentence: The club members agreed that each would contribute ten days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital. The test taker is supposed to point out that annually each year is redundant.
Forget about the fact that adults would find such questions challenging; its a sad statement about our society that wed set the bar for teacher certification so low in the first place. I had to think: how young was I when I didnt know the answers to the above two questions? Ten? Nine? Maybe even eight? Idiocracy has arrived.
Professor Williams also touches on a third rail of American social commentary mentioning that most of the teachers hiring the surrogates are likely black and that most of the surrogates may very well be white. Now before anyone thinks of Summerizing" Williams (not as I have. Rather this refers to application of the kind of politically correct social pressure that drove Larry Summers from Harvard) know that he is black himself. And his point in addressing race is that our leftist mis-educators tolerance of low-information black teachers puts the lie to their claim that they care about blacks. After all as he writes in his closing line If they the teachers manage to get through the mockery of teacher certification at what schools do you think they will teach?"
But never fear Dr. Williams. Im sure these molders of young minds are well versed in afro-centrism critical-race theory and the principles of white privilege.