Minority Scores Lag on Teaching Test

This is the lamest thing I've read in quite some time:
>
> Education school deans in the last year began expressing concerns about the
> minority teachers' high failure rates to state officials and asked the state
> to evaluate the validity of the test and consider other ways of judging
> prospective teachers. They and others say the minority teachers' results
> raise questions about whether the design of the Massachusetts Tests for
> Educator Licensure is culturally biased and whether the quality of education
> that minority teaching applicants receive is good enough.
>
The education schools in Massachusetts are failing to prepare teachers, esp.
minority ones, to pass a basic skills test, so what do they do? BLAME THE
TEST FOR BEING "CULTURALLY BIASED"! GRRR!!! This underscores a more
general problem in education: when tests show that schools are failing to
educate their students, the people responsible for this failure blame the
tests!

In contrast, successful schools embrace tests as a valuable tool to measure
their own and their students' performance and make improvements. For
example, this is from KIPP's core set of operating principles known as The
Five Pillars -- here's Pillar #5:
>
> Focus on Results. KIPP Schools relentlessly focus on high student performance
> on standardized tests and other objective measures. Just as there are no
> shortcuts, there are no excuses. Students are expected to achieve a level of
> academic performance that will enable them to succeed at the nation's best
> high schools and colleges.
>
And this is lesson #6 of Achievement First's 12 Lesssons About School
Reform:
>
> An Unwavering Focus on Student Achievement. Before No Child Left Behind, the
> discussion about equity in schools most often focused on inputs: per pupil
> funding, class size, student to teacher ratios and others. The urban schools
> that have closed the achievement gap have all spent the same or less than
> their host districts and almost always have larger class sizes and less
> experienced teachers than the other schools in the city where they are
> located. However, by focusing exclusively on one output, student achievement,
> these schools have test scores that often double or triple the average scores
> of other students in the district. Our name, Achievement First, was
> consciously selected to constantly reinforce our unwavering focus on
> producing dramatic, life-changing student achievement, chiefly as measured by
> statewide, criterion-referenced tests. Furthermore, the entire focus of
> Achievement First teachers and leaders will be on outputs. Each school will
> create a "Yearly School Report Card" that highlights key output metrics,
> which will be mailed to all parents and posted on the Achievement First
> website.
>
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Minority scores lag on teaching test
Panel to study failure rate, bias complaints
By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | August 19, 2007

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/08/19/minority_score
s_lag_on_teaching_test/

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.