-By Warner Todd Huston
There would have been a day when a story saying that teachers were about to be excused from requirements that they be able to read just to avoid charges of racism would have been an entry in an issue of the National Lampoon or even on TheOnion.com. But today, in this day of truly insane liberalism, the idea that liberals don’t care if teachers can read just to avoid charges of racism in hiring is… well, sadly, it’s not even a little surprising.
New York’s Board of Regents is expected to adopt the new recommendation of an education standards task force espousing that the state dump a teacher candidate literacy exam known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, according to ABC News.
Sadly, that is where we are in the extreme, left-wing state of New York where state education officials are actually contemplating eliminating a reading test to determine if applicants applying for teaching positions can read at sufficient levels.
So, why would a state board of education want to hire teachers too ill-educated to be a teacher? Why would a state want to put teachers in the classroom who can’t read? Simple, it’s all to satisfy the left’s fanatical, self-destructive obsession of seeing racism in every single aspect of life.
According to ABC News, supporters of the recommendations say that eliminating the testing wouldn’t change the “high standards” required for teaching candidates.
“We want high standards, without a doubt. Not every given test is going to get us there,” said Leslie Soodak, a professor of education at Pace University who was part of the task force that looked at the tests.
Detractors of the test claim it is all about racism because fewer African American and Hispanic candidates pass the literacy tests compared to whites. According to the state, 46 percent of Hispanic candidates and only 41 percent of blacks pass the test. That compares to the 64 percent of white candidates who pass. Their conclusion is unsurprising: the test is racist.
It couldn’t be that our educational system is so bad that even people smart enough to qualify as a teacher can’t read. No, it HAS to be that the test is racist.
Even more absurd, New York administrators don’t want to hire those evil white people. “Having a white workforce really doesn’t match our student body anymore,” the racist Soodak admitted.
But, yeah, it’s all about the test.
Here is the stupidity as reported by ABC…
Kate Walsh, the president of National Council on Teacher Quality, which pushes for higher standards for teachers, said that blacks and Latinos don’t score as well as whites on the literacy test because of factors like poverty and the legacy of racism.
“There’s not a test in the country that doesn’t have disproportionate performance on the part of blacks and Latinos,” Walsh said.
She is telling you that reading is racist.
Let that sink in.
These liberals are seriously telling you that minorities shouldn’t be expected to be able to read because reading is for evil, racist white people.
So, because no minority should be expected to be able to read, these liberals are saying that they have no problem with teachers who also cannot read at sufficient levels.
ABC goes on to reveal one of the questions.
A practice test available for $20 on the New York State Education Department website features John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address as one of the reading passages and asks questions like this one: “In which excerpt from the passage do Kennedy’s word choices most clearly establish a tone of resolve?”
This test is meant to see if an applicant can read at a 12th-grade level — something a high schooler is supposed to be able to comprehend.
ABC’s story goes on to quote several more people denigrating the test, most of whom apparently could not pass it. The report also says that the literacy test does not cover things that aren’t covered in other tests, so it is unnecessary, they claim.
Sadly, this is all just another example of the liberal establishment dumbing down our educational system.
Before we go further, we have to recognize that everything of the American educational system of yore was not perfect and we can’t say that every last part of today’s education is a liberal bastardization of yesterday educational system. There were a lot of problems early in the 1900s in American education. It was often uneven for females and minorities, and standards for teachers weren’t exactly ideal from one state to the next.
Still, despite the failings of the education system of a country that was often thought of as a third world nation prior to World War Two — that would be America, folks — there is no doubt at all that students in “the good old days” were expected to know far, far more than students are today.
A perfect example of this fact turned up in 2013 at a county historical society in rural Kentucky. A local resident gave the organization a copy of a test given to eighth graders in 1912. Any look at this hundred-year-old test will reveal just how incredibly hard that test would be for today’s students, even if similar questions for today’s current events were used as the basis of some of the questions that appeared on the 1912 test.
Education has been failing since the 1960s when the far left finally finished invading and taking over America’s educational system from kindergarten to each school board, all the way to the Department of Education in Washington, and every grade school, high school, and college in between. This has all gotten worse as the power of the teachers union has grown.
Many on left insist that we don’t put enough money into education. This is total BS. America spends more per student than nearly every single nation on the planet but a few. The U.S. spends between $12,000 to $15,000 per student to get a child out to college. Countries including Norway and Switzerland spend a bit more, but 95 percent of the world’s nations spend far less.
So, what has this spending given us? Literacy rates at below the standards of the industrialized world. And falling.
Nice going, liberals. Nice going.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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