Here's a sad story about aspiring teachers failing elementary math tests.
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is releasing the results Tuesday. They say that only 27 percent of the more than 600 candidates who took the test passed. The test was administered in March of this year.The teacher’s licensing exam tested potential teachers on their knowledge of elementary school mathematics. This included geometry, statistics, and probability.
Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester was not surprised by the results. He told the Boston Globe that these results indicate that many students are not receiving an adequate math education.
That's obvious. What's especially frustrating, however, is the conclusion that the administrators drew from these test results.
Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents , says "The high failure rate puts a shining light on a deficiency in teacher-prep programs."
Why should special "teacher-prep" programs be needed to teach elementary-level math to aspiring teachers? This is the basic level of math these adults should have learned when they were in elementary school themselves. If they don't remember how to do 5th grade math, maybe they're just too dumb to be teachers. Anyone who squeaks through the test after taking remedial classes to bring them up to the level of an elementary school child probably still shouldn't be a teacher.
