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Imagine an experiment in which "Victoria," a recent college graduate with a degree in English, takes over a 10th-grade class, the racial composition of which is 80 percent minority. A few miles down the street, in another 10th-grade classroom, is "Sherry," a teacher with three years of experience and a degree in education. Less than half of Sherry's students are minorities.

Educators schooled, trained and licensed by traditional means would have us believe that Victoria doesn't stand a chance; she is not a "credentialed professional. And worse, she is teaching a majority-minority class, which is particularly challenging.

If you subscribe to conventional wisdom, you would expect Sherry's students to outperform Victoria's. Very often, however, you would be wrong. The experiment we imagined has been carried out, and, based on the performance of their respective students, Victoria's skills are superior to the more experienced Sherry's.

How can this be? Victoria avoided the asinine offerings of the education department. She was recruited by Teach for America, an organization whose teachers are unconventional, highly effective and consequently, a threat to the education establishment. Victoria learned all of her teaching skills in TFA's five-week course.

A study conducted by the Urban Institute and the Calder Center on the effectiveness of Teach for America concludes that "TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers." The TFA effect, the authors conclude, "exceeds the impact of additional years of experience" obtained by the traditionally educated and trained teachers to whom TFA teachers were compared. The study was conducted at high schools in North Carolina.

In 1985, Annette and Russell Kirk observed that, "In no other occupation is mediocrity -- or positive incompetence -- so thoroughly entrenched as in the teaching profession today." (Annette Kirk was a member of the commission that wrote "A Nation at Risk," a withering critique of public education, in 1983.) The Kirks continue: "Surveys have shown that education majors rank lower in intelligence and aptitude tests than do majors in any other field." Among many necessary reforms "a giant stride" toward improvement "would be the elimination or the reform of college departments of education." Three months ago, Annette Kirk spoke at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where she echoed the same themes.

A 2006 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality randomly selected 72 U.S. schools of education to gauge their effectiveness at teaching reading instruction to prospective teachers. Under scrutiny were 223 required courses and 227 textbooks. Only 15 percent of the schools provide even "minimal exposure" to the science of reading, and "course syllabi reveal a tendency to dismiss the scientific research in reading." A panel of experts declared only four of the 227 texts "acceptable."

Millions of American children are illiterate as a direct result of education school incompetence. The Associated Press reported on July 25: "Only about one-third of U.S. students could read and do math at current grade levels on national tests in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available." Such catastrophic figures are met with a collective shrug. The Obama administration, to its credit, "will not award [discretionary funding] to states that bar student performance data from being linked to teacher evaluations."

A 2005 study by the Center for Education Reform (www.edreform.com) found "negative correlations between teacher certification and student achievement," and that "students of teachers who did not attend a college of education score just as well on tests."

This results from education schools spending too much time on left-wing political indoctrination, and too little on the most effective teaching methods. Notes George K. Cunningham, "The philosophy that dominates schools of education -- in North Carolina and across the nation -- stresses the importance of objectives other than academic achievement, such as building self-esteem and multicultural awareness."

Schools of education, teachers unions, school boards and district officials "agree with this position," writes Cunningham, a textbook author who has a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Arizona, "rejecting academic achievement as the most important purpose for schools." Charlotte Allen, a prolific writer with degrees from Stanford and Harvard, condemns education school activism in an essay, "Are Ed Schools Failing?"

Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia Teachers College, declared, after a study of education schools three years ago, "If we don't clean our own house, America's university-based teacher education programs will disappear" and be replaced by more effective alternatives. Continuing to fund the status quo, when two-thirds of American children can barely read and write, is state-sanctioned child abuse.

Charles Davenport Jr. (cdavenportjr@hotmail.com) is a freelance columnist who appears alternate Sundays in the News & Record.