That Test Is Whack

Oh, there’s big trouble amongst the Massachusetts Diversity-crats. The inimitable Boston Globe explains:

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

The minority failure rate has been demonstrably higher than among whites since the test's inception nearly a decade ago, according to state statistics, which show that 52 percent of Hispanic applicants and 54 percent of black applicants fail the writing portion of the exam. By comparison, 23 percent of whites fail. Black and Hispanic teachers also lag behind white teachers in major subject tests such as English, history, and math.

Well, gee: What are we going to offer our kids—competent teachers or an array of incompetent but differently-hued teachers? As you might well imagine, the Diversity-crats are hoping for the latter. After all, educating children well isn’t exactly important; it can certainly be sacrificed at the Altar of Diversity.

As The Boston Globe goes on to mention, the Diversity-crats are crying foul about the “cultural bias” of the teaching exams. They do so even though Asians perform almost as well as whites on the tests. Perhaps it’s that white male math that’s tripping up people. The Globe informs us:

Some minority teachers have criticized the test for containing culturally biased questions such as readings about investing in the stock market and ancient literature that white, middle-class applicants and those with liberal arts college backgrounds more readily identify with.

Ah, yes: If there’s anything that aspiring white teachers know, it’s the stock market. In our humble experience, pretty much all Caucasian elementary school instructors moonlight as venture capitalists.

And we’re delighted to learn that many minorities with college degrees believe that “ancient literature” is inherently white. Homer; Hesiod; Virgil; the Bhagvad Gita; the Bible—you know, that white-boy stuff. Boy, these complaining minorities already seem to be experts in the Diversity Racket.

In its unimpeachable wisdom, the Globe bestows its readers with an example of a potentially culturally biased question from the exam:

If sentence 4 contains an error in spelling, capitalization, or punctuation, select the type of error. If there is no error, select D, “sentence correct.”

For more conservative investors who want to minimize risk, companies listed on the dow jones industrial average may be of interest.

A. spelling error B. punctuation error C. capitalization error D. sentence correct

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” believe that we speak for all of you when we declare such queries abominably biased in favor of whites and Asians. In fact, if we controlled the Massachusetts state teaching exam, our questions would look like the following:

Yo, this is how we do it. If thiz next sentence got a problem, yo, tell us the motha-f****** problem, yo. Word.

Tyrone, Juan, Jiyoon, and Nigel just gone up to da’ club and sh**. Where dere’ women at?

A. Yo, that sentence is whack B. You forgot to mention Snoop C. Is they hos? D. Bitch, that sentence is fine.

Finally, a fair-minded question!

It is an insult to minorities, of course, to assert that “ancient literature” is inherently beyond their grasp—or that routine sentences on state exams must reflect their own cultural experience for them to pass. Obviously, our stupid—and largely inept—parody of street slang does little to prove our point. But children—including, of course, minority children—deserve the best educators we can find, and we should be very careful before we potentially sacrifice teacher quality to the fashionable and paternalistic Diversity-crats.

UPDATE: For another take on this matter, see the Colossus of Rhodey.