School's In

Today is the first of school, and while millions of kids are rediscovering miserable boredom, most of Mexico's newspapers today are scandalized by the "76 percent of teachers" who failed to pass the exam they presented for the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) last week. Of course, this is a bit misleading, because most of them failed only insofar as they failed to win a tenured position. The problem with that is that there were positions available only for about 25 percent of those taking the test. In other words, even if all of the 100,000-plus aspirants had aced the test, 76 percent still would have failed.

Putting that aside and digging a little deeper, the results are still nonetheless worrying. Four percent of the test-takers answered less than 30 percent of the 80 questions correctly, while the national average was only 54 percent of the questions correctly answered. And all but the four percent are eligible for future positions as they become available. As the maitre d' says in Ferris Bueller (incidentally not a bad movie for the kids today), I weep for the future.