This teacher apparently thinks a “role model” is a piece of bread they hold up to give them an idea of how to bake at Subway:
A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday.
The illegal stand-in – who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly – not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.
“I was pressured into it. He threatened me,” the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam.
“I gave him my all,” said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. “He gave me what he thought I was worth.”
So this teacher allegedly:
- paid the guy to take the test for him.
- paid him a WHOLE $2 to take the test for him.
- paid him what he said he thought he was worth — which was obviously a lie, since passing the test is worth more than that. But couldn’t even make the guy who allegedly helped him cheat feel good about himself and doing this unethical, dishonest activity.
But it gets better.
Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city’s worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job.
“I’m tired of taking this test and failing,” Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon’s probe. “I want you to help me.”
Here’s a teacher, then, who was never taught about something called…..STUDYING..And it gets even better:
Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.
“He said no one would ever know,” Leitner said outside the Brownsville, Brooklyn, building he has called home since briefly living on the streets.
And they didn’t. Which says something about the IQ and alertness of the test proctors.
Meanwhile, the newspaper decided that, in the very best journalistic traditions, they would send someone out to find Brightly so he could tell his side of the story:
When The News went to Brightly’s Mount Vernon home yesterday, a man who strongly resembled him insisted Leitner took the test on his own. The man, who appeared to be in his late 30s, denied being Brightly – saying he was the teacher’s son.
Well, it could be his son if Brightly had been a highly social and explorative student at 8.
Nah, it couldn’t be Brightly. He’d never lie about anything….
Can the district do a recall on students who had him in class?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.