By Selwyn Duke

When I’ve 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 there’s another problem: in some cases the teachers couldn’t teach
the right things even if they wanted to — they don’t 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 they’re dumb as hell."

But it seems the kids aren’t the only ones. Now we learn
that some teachers in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi paid surrogates
between $1,500 and $3,000 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:

Here's a practice Praxis I math
question: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million — 40,000,
250,000, 2,500,000, 1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? 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; it’s a sad statement about our society that we’d set the bar for
teacher certification so low in the first place. I had to think: how young was
I when I didn’t 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. I’m sure these molders of
young minds are well versed in afro-centrism, critical-race theory, and the
principles of white privilege.  

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