As I was wheeling around the South Bay this afternoon after interviewing folks at LAX (for our story about the sudden shut-down of ATA Airlines), trying to decide where I should stop for lunch, I tuned into NPR for my afternoon news fix.
Almost as soon as I turned my radio on, a correspondent named Dan Collins launched into a report from Lima, Peru, where apparently all teachers are now required to take an annual "National Teachers Exam."
Of 180,000 educators who took the most recent test, Collins said, 95 percent failed. You heard that right. 95 percent. Failed. Ouch. Now that's gotta hurt.
The results have been characterized as "appalling." No duh.
However, as with all standardized tests everywhere, this one as well is controversial, with one camp calling it an inadequate measure of teacher competency and another saying, essentially, that it's the teachers who are inadequate, not the test.
One teacher interviewed on air by Collins decried the fact that the exam is given at all -- apparently it's a new thing in the country's effort to improve education there -- saying that Peru's powers that be aren't invested enough in educating educators and that teachers get "low pay and poor training."
Sound familiar?
A similar source went on to say: "More needs to be done to give Peruvian students the education they deserve."
Now, where have you heard that before?
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