Public School Teachers Pay Others to Take Their Employment Tests
What if your child were being taught by a teacher who could not pass a 12th-grade-level test in that teacher’s major field? What if that teacher, with a B.A. in education, paid someone else to take a mandatory teacher qualification exam?
It happens all the time.
The scandal of the hire-an-exam-taker broke a year ago. But it did not break far. The media covered it up. After all, the integrity of the public schools must not be called into question. Parents might lose faith in the tax-funded school system.
Economist Walter Williams reports:
Recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's blog carried a story titled “A new cheating scandal: Aspiring teachers hiring ringers.” According to the story, for at least 15 years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence Mumford, who’s now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher certification in 40 states. Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the University of Arkansas, said, “(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or scores.” She added, “The test is far too undemanding for a prospective teacher. … The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable teachers.”
As a taxpayer in both Arkansas and Mississippi, I am appalled. I still pay school taxes in Mississippi. I own a rental house there.
Williams continues: “CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the story hasn’t gotten much national press since then.” I am not surprised.
Other than pulling their children out of the schools, what can parents do to stop this? Nothing.
Online homeschooling is spreading. Parents with decent educations will soon be able to remove their children. They will let the Khan Academy or competing sites teach their children. The losers will be parents who had rotten educations. Their children will receive the same sort of education.
Continue reading on lewrockwell.com.
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Published on January 9, 2013. The original is here.
The ringleader pleaded guilty on February 1, 2013. The scam was exposed only because of a pink cap.
He charged his customers $1,000 to $6,000 for multiple tests, according to a presentation of the case Friday. He started arranging bogus tests in 1995, and wasn't sniffed out until 2010 when a phony test taker wore the same pink cap to two sessions in one day and caught the attention of a monitor.
So, it took investigators two years to follow up on this.
The cap gaffe wasn't the only one in the sometimes zany fraud. One proxy was obviously decades younger than her license plate (phony) match. Another proxy was male but the name on the ID was a woman's name. Some phony test takers flunked. Others scored so high compared to the real applicant that they aroused the suspicions of the testing company. One of Mumford's customers paid $6,000 and still didn't pass. The subject matter included physical education, guidance and counseling, biology, and elementary education. These were apparently earnest applicants who had no business whatsoever being teachers apart from their chicanery.
No other scam like this has been exposed since 2013, or so the media's silence indicates. Apparently, word got around about avoiding pink caps.