Disclosure – I work part time in a High School, in the Math Department. I am an in-house tutor. I have my initial teacher’s license for both middle and high school math. When I took one of the exams, there was a person on line who had the look of a scared student about to take an SAT exam. I asked her if she was okay, and she told me that she had failed the middle school math exam. This is the data, although not the same year. Still relevant.

It starts for me with the fact that a teacher looking to add middle school math to their credential fails this exam 1/3 the time as a first time tester. If We subtract “First” from “All”, we find that 82 people took it their second (or more) time, and of those, 27 passed. Consider, the exam is graded on a scale of 100-300 (that, itself is strange to me), and 240 is passing. 70%. A student that passes their class with a 70% is not really ready to stay at that level the next year. You can see that 275 is a full standard deviation above the mean. 1 in 6 middle school math teachers has gotten an 88 or higher on their licensing exam. For me, this raises new and troubling questions.

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