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Thus far actual test scores of teacher applicants seem depressing. In Louisiana, for instance, only 53% passed in 1978, 63% last year. What about the ones who fail? Says Louisiana Certification Director Jacqueline Lewis: "Obviously they're moving out of state to teach in states where the tests are not required." The results of basic achievement tests taken by job applicants at Florida's Pinellas County school board (St. Petersburg, Clearwater) are not encouraging. Since 1976, the board has required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level. Though all had their B.A. in hand, about one-third of the applicants (25% of the whites, 79% of the blacks) flunked Pinellas' test the first time they took it in 1979.
In 1900, when only 6% of U.S. children graduated from high school, secondary school teachers were looked up to as scholars of considerable learning. Public school teachers were essential to what was regarded as the proud advance of U.S. education. By 1930, 30% of American 17-year-olds were graduating from high school, and by the mid-1960s, graduates totaled 70%. The American public school was hailed for teaching citizenship and common sense to rich and poor, immigrant and native-born children, and for giving them a common democratic experience. "The public school was the true melting pot," William O. Douglas once wrote, "and the public school teacher was the leading architect of the new America that was being fashioned."
The academic effectiveness of the system was challenged in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite. Almost overnight, it was perceived that American training was not competitive with that of the U.S.S.R. Public criticism and government funds began to converge on U.S. schools. By 1964, achievement scores in math and reading had risen to an alltime high. But in the '60s the number of students (and teachers too) was expanding tremendously as a result of the maturing crop of post-World War II babies. In the decade before 1969, the number of high school teachers almost doubled, from 575,000 to nearly 1 million. Writes Reading Expert Paul Copperman in The Literacy Hoax: "The stage was set for an academic tragedy of historic proportions as the nation's high school faculty, about half of whom were young and immature, prepared to meet the largest generation of high school students in American history." To compound the problem, many teachers had been radicalized by the 1960s. They suspected that competition was immoral, grades undemocratic, and promotion based on merit and measurable accomplishment a likely way to discriminate against minorities and the poor. Ever since the mid-1960s, the average achievement of high school graduates has gone steadily downhill.