Excuses, Massachusetts style

I thought Massachusetts was filled with smart people. After all, it has some of the nation’s top universities — Harvard, Wellesley, Boston College, Tufts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to name a few.

So how come state legislature in this magnet for brainiacs wants to let aspiring teachers who have failed the state certification test three times … get licensed anyway?

Good grief! If this was happening in the Deep South, the moron jokes would be flying out of the snooty East Coast.

Yet here we have the chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education saying, “The test is one methodology …but it isn’t necessarily the best venue for everybody to demonstrate their competency.”

Incredibly, the state Senate approved the three-strikes-and-you’re-not-out bill by the whopping margin of 34-5.

This is pathetic. If a supposedly educated person — an educator, by the way — can’t pass a certification test, he shouldn’t be certified. That’s the way the world works — or should work.

If you don’t pass the certification test the first time for teacher, bartender or brain surgeon, you go back to the library or classroom, study a little harder and try again.

If you make it, congratulations. If you don’t, well, perhaps it might be time to consider an alternative career, like something in ditch-digging.

Chuck Zucco, owner of a Massachusetts company that helps teachers prepare for the test, says most of his customers who repeatedly fail the test — some more than a dozen times! — have learning disabilities or speak English as a second language.

Good grief again! I don’t know how to put this delicately, so I’ll just say it: If you have a severe learning disability or can’t speak English very well … you shouldn’t be a teacher!

A few folks in the Bay State realize how dumb this is.

“It demeans the whole profession,” said state Sen. Richard R. Tisei, a Republican and the Senate minority leader. “Teachers should be held to the same standards that we expect when we certify a lawyer, an accountant, a funeral director. … What type of message does that send to the kids?”

Well put, senator. And I’ll tell you what message it sends to the kids:

It tells them loud and clear that you don’t have to try very hard. That you can always make a lame excuse … and some sucker will fall for it. That you don’t have to strive for excellence but simply hold out your hand and demand your “entitlement.”

I’m not an educator or a futurist. But I predict that if a state lets unqualified teachers teach, it is going to end up with a bunch of stupid kids.

And you expected some other result?