Cheating Teachers in the US South

So—teachers are required to pass a test that is reportedly not difficult for a high school graduate. If they fail, they can keep trying. And yet some prospective teachers are actually cheating on the test by hiring stand-ins, at some obvious risk to their futures.

It isn’t fair to blame all teachers for the conduct of what may be a very small number of cheaters. However, surely it is significant that these test-sitters are all recent graduate of ed schools. It means that you can graduate from ed school while still knowing a lot less about your subject than the average student you are then employed to teach. What does that say about ed school?

But I suspect it’s worse than that. I suspect this kind of thing—cheating on your qualifications-- is actually encouraged by teachers’ college and the current professional regime.

The problem is that it is itself so obviously a fraud from the beginning. Everyone engaged in the exercise knows that you get passed in any education course no matter what; nobody fails, unless for political reasons. Everyone engaged in the exercise knows that the common practice of teacher evaluation by classroom evaluation is a fraud; it has nothing to do with whether you can teach, and everything to do with your personal relationship with the principal. Again, nobody fails, unless for political reasons. Probably some, if not most know that the typical form of "research" in education is a fraud, and has no scientific validity.

This sets a certain example—a culture of cheating. Anyone with a serious moral objection to teaching would feel morally obliged to leave ed school after a semester, if they were so naïve as to sign up without knowing all this in the first place. Accordingly, among other problems, the present system is systematically excluding from the trade those of high moral character.

This is especially troublesome, because the most valuable thing a teacher can do is to set an example to his or her students of good moral conduct. In the era immediately prior to the current “scientific” “profession” of teaching, and for millennia before, a good moral character was always considered the first consideration in hiring a teacher.

It seems like such a failure at the intergenerational transfer of morals (let alone knowledge) is a remarkably efficient way to destroy a nation, a culture, or a civilization.