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.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
