The New York Daily News reports that it doesn’t take much to hold on to a $59k teaching job in New York city:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday.

The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

… Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city’s worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job.

… Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.

… The two men met years ago at Brooklyn College where Leitner earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history in the late 1970s, and Brightly got a bachelor’s degree in 1992.

… About 19,000 teachers across the state take the certification exam each year and roughly 95% pass. Teachers are required to be certified - but the city has a temporary waiver from the state because the Education Department has not been able to find enough qualified instructors.

You can write your own jokes here. But the depressing thing is in the last paragraph: of what possible value is a test with a 95% pass rate?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2005 at 6:17 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us, Brilliant, but uncategorizable, (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.