Why Johnny Can't Read

[Statikk HDM]

In Massachusetts, a man by the name of John Silber took the traditional teacher licensing test and took it up from the 10th to the 12th grade level and the results are shocking. A full 60 percent of the applicants, many of whom took 4 years of teacher training courses and passed with flying colors, flunked. Many teachers are retiring, and not too many come into teaching when they could be lawyers or doctors, etc.and make 4 to 5 times more money at least. So, no Rhodes sholars will be teaching in Massachusetts, or any other state. There is a two million teach shortage so we must scrape the barrelbottom. We take dimbulbs as teachers and wonder why south korea whips our ass on a geometry test.
2,100 more teachers took the test again, and 47 percent of them failed.
A mere seven percent of them passed on subsequent retakes, with as many as 30 percent having to take the test a whopping three times!
The "Gold Standard" for admittance tests is the Praxis, however. What follows are examples of the Mickey mouse material they are baffled by.

A customer thinks she is talking to TransGlobal Airlines about a flight from Tokyo to New York, but she really had the wrong number
Was she trying to reach the airline by
A: Letter
B: Radio
C:Telegram
D: Telephone

Next is a graph of Oil Esporting Countries from 1974 to 1975 and it asks which countries produced more oil in 1975 than 1974. Come on! That's a 4th grade question, not a question to be given to future educators of fourth graders!
In Mathematics, Praxis asked the probability of a coin landing heads up! What 7th or 8th grader doesn't know that?
The people who administer these tests do it to stop themselves from suffering the embarrassment of admitting that most teachers shouldn't have passed high school, much less teach 9th Grade. If pressed I would say these questions could and should be answered by the stock 14 year old. Stop the insanity NEA and get decent standards!