An Alabama teacher has been suspended after outraged parents said their Grade 8 kids were given an offensive math test asking them about guns, sex, and drugs.
Joanne Bosler was put on administrative leave May 31, just a day before she was said to be retiring, after parents complained about the test, dubbed “The L.A. Math Proficiency Test.”
“Dwayne pimps 3 ho’s. If the price is $85 per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Dwayne’s $800 per day crack habit?”
Parents accuse the test of having racial overtones.
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“Tyrone knocked up four girls in the gang,” one question reads. “There are 20 girls in the gang. What is the exact percentage of girls that Tyrone knocked up?”
Other questions use stolen cars, murder-for-hire, drive-by shootings, and drug deals as examples.
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“I was shocked because she’s a strict teacher,” an eighth grader who took the test and didn’t want to be identified told WPMI. “She was telling all her classes it was a joke. She was laughing along with them.”
But parents like Jason Boyington, whose son took the test, said it wasn’t humourous.
“Very offensive. It blowed his mind,” said Boyington. “He had to read it twice for it to sink in – ‘are they really asking me these kind of things?’”
“It’s not stuff I really want my eighth grader having to learn and read about in school, whether it’s a joke or not,” said another parent whose daughter took the test, but did not want to be identified.
The school board apologized to parents after it was brought to their attention on Tuesday.
“We regret that this happened, especially so close to the end of the school year,” Rena Philips, a spokeswoman for Mobile County Public School System, told The Washington Post.
“We have 7,500 employees in Mobile County public schools, and the vast majority of them are doing phenomenal work in our classrooms,” said Philips.
A co-worker who did not want to be identified called Bosler “the epitome of a perfect teacher.”
According to the website Snopes, several teachers across North America have been disciplined for using the quiz.
The site reports that the test, also known as “The City of Los Angeles High School Math Proficiency Exam,” is an internet meme that has circulated since the early 1990s, and was even handed out by a teacher in Thompson, Manitoba in 2002.
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