Education: How to Be Perfect

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After hearing aroused members of Washington's Parent-Teacher Association reel off a series of gloomy facts and figures about the capital's elementary schoolteacher shortage, Mrs. Arthur Riordan produced some evidence of her own to show the House Appropriations Committee just how low today's teacher standards have fallen. On one first-grade exercise paper she produced, the sevens had been written backwards. On another, three plus six made eight and two plus three made six. On still another, truck had become truk and trains trims. What alarmed Mrs. Riordan was not the mistakes themselves: it was the fact that the teachers had marked all these papers "perfect."