Seldom is the question asked, “Is our children learning?” but for one school district, that’s just the kind of grammar you might expect in one of their district-wide spelling tests.  In Springfield, Massachusetts, school officials administered some 2,600 eleventh and twelfth-grade students a pair of spelling tests that, between them, had over 100 errors, including numerous typos, misspelled words, numbering errors, and even an erroneous “this is the end of the test” page with two pages of test material AFTER it!

Surprisingly, Superintendent Alan Ingram is willing to fall on the sword for this one.  While the tests were printed by an outside company, he says responsibility for the tests’ many failures falls to his own staff of proofreaders, who are all no doubt proud graduates of Springfield’s school district.  At least there were no freshly-ground black people involved this time!

So what’s worse?  Spelling books that can’t spell, or math books that fail at math?  As a word nerd, it’s always going to be spelling fail for me.

Tags: Springfield,  Massachusetts, Alan Ingram, spelling tests full of spelling errors, spelling tests full of typos, bad proofreading, school failures, school fail, spelling fail, fail, spelling tests full of mistakes administered to 2600 students

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