When the late Johnny Cash sang “I walk the line,” he probably had no idea what it would mean in a public school. “As a high school superintendant in New York City, I had to hire a new social studies teacher,” Jean-Claude Brizard remembered in remarks today at the Thomas Fordham Institute. “They sent me two candidates: One was drunk, one was sober.”

“One was drunk, one was incompetent. I said I had a third candidate. They said, ‘No, you have to choose between these two,’ so I picked the sober guy.” Brizard went on to run the schools in Rochester, then Chicago.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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