But anyone who wonders what the Clark County School District’s “teacher shortage” is really all about need only read reporter Antonio Planas’ account of California classroom veteran Theresa Porter’s attempt to find work in our local Las Vegas schools, in the Aug. 25 Review-Journal.

Ms. Porter holds a master’s degree in English literature and has 14 years of experience teaching in Japan and California. She is licensed by the state of California to teach students whose primary language is not English -- an area where the Clark County district says it has “high needs.”

Not only that, Theresa Porter was named “teacher of the year” in the 2004-2005 school year, beating out 140 other faculty members at the high school where she taught in Stockton, Calif. Some might infer that means she knows how to teach, and does not need to go back to square one and start all over again.

(Unlike the Clark County School District, where enough students to field a softball team are often simultaneously and fraudulently named “student of the month” from the same school in an effort to raise false self-esteem and peddle more proud-parent bumperstickers, it appears Stockton is old-fashioned enough to name only ONE “teacher of the year.”)

But at her interview with the Clark County School District, Ms. Porter was turned down because, all those years ago when she was starting out as a teacher, she did her student teaching at the wrong place.

Ms. Porter fulfilled her California student-teaching requirement at San Joaquin Delta College and Fresno Pacific University. But Nevada does not recognize those programs.

This is like having Bill Gates or Steve Jobs show up offering to teach a course in entrepreneurship at the local business college, and telling them, “Sorry, we’ve checked your resume, and you never did complete all your required semesters of gym class and wood shop in high school, did you?” This is like refusing to give Audie Murphy his medals or allowing him to train other young recruits in how to conduct themselves in combat -- because you find out he lied about his age to get into the Army.

Nevada state law requires all incoming teachers to fulfill eight credits of student teaching before they can set foot in a classroom here, and that requirement is not unreasonable, responds Keith Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction and board member of San Francisco based WestEd, a pretend “independent” outfit which issues reports lobbying for more money for our dysfunctional government youth propaganda camps.

Before the district could hire Ms. Porter, she would have to obtain a provisional license, giving her three years to go back and do her required student teaching, Mr. Rheault explained.

But as it turns out, there’s no need. After briefly considering a position as a long-term substitute at Rancho High School -- making $110 per day without benefits -- Ms. Porter said Aug. 23 she has accepted a job in Bakersfield, Calif., teaching high school English to students whose primary language is not English ... for $60,300 a year, plus benefits.

“It’s a far different welcome on this side of the hill,” Ms. Porter says, further protesting, “I’m not just any teacher -- I’m excellent. The state is blocking a lot of qualified people from teaching.”

You want more? Las Vegas reader Lorraine Klenk writes in:

“In 1984, my husband and I were host parents to a young German exchange student. Anke lived with us for almost a year, graduating with high honors from Western High School. Returning to Germany, Anke had to complete a 13th year of high school. Before starting work at the University in Germany, Anke returned to spend another year with my husband and me. During that time, she took some classes at UNLV. She then returned to Germany” and took her teaching degree at the University in Goettingen, continuing to spend summers in Las Vegas. Needless to say, her English skills are flawless.”

“Anke started her teaching career in a big city -- Berlin, where she taught at the high school level. From there, she moved on to a smaller community where she has been teaching 5th through 10th grades. To encourage her students’ appetite to learn, Anke arranges three-week exchanges for her ninth and tenth graders to a small town in Kansas. ...“Now comes the amazing part of this saga,” Ms. Klenk continues. “On a visit a few years ago, Anke stopped at the Clark County School District offices to find out what she would have to do in order to teach in the district. She was told that her teaching degree and experience would not qualify her to teach here. She never received an interview.” Later asking if she could teach here during a one-year sabbatical, “Anke was told there was no chance for her to teach within the Clark County School District because she is a foreign national. ...

“Now, I understand our school district has hired several hundred teachers from the Philippines. I question the qualifications of many of these teachers. Are they all proficient in English? Has the district readjusted its requirements?”

Here will we end our extract from Ms. Klenk.

Because no one within the Clark County School District seems empowered to use any personal judgment in determining whether someone would make a good teacher (hint: principals are traditionally pretty good at this), what we are seeing here is an increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracy depending on an arcane system of “credentialism” which would rather import Filipina newcomers (you’re telling me Nevada accredits the student teaching facilities in dirt-floored huts in Mindanao? And how will they do explaining our Bill of Rights -- or don’t we teach that anymore?) than hire a California “teacher of the year,” or the truly bilingual Anke. (Or don’t we teach German, any more? Our high schools used to, you know.)

The last time I staffed a weekly paper, I hired a Singaporean who had worked for the Straits Times and an American who had written for an English-language daily in Korea and who later went on to become a college history professor. Aside from the occasional ongoing dispute about phrases like “in hospital,” do I need to say how thoroughly they ran rings around most of the “local talent” fresh out of Party State University in Tempe?

This Clark County youth camp bureaucracy would refuse to hire Albert Einstein to teach high school physics. It values the kinds of dull and obedient minds who are content to dutifully put in hundreds of make-work hours pretending our “education colleges” actually teach anything of value, over more active spirits who have traveled the world, actually excelling in real classrooms or in the subject areas they will be expected to teach.

Nor need we discuss the sundry “social adjustment” and quasi-therapeutic roles into which the modern kindergarten or first-grade teacher is now thrown. Neither Anke nor Ms. Porter sought to teach “how to find the little girls’ room.”

Designed in part to facilitate the annual cry that “We need more money!”, Clark County’s “teacher shortage” is a trumped-up artifact of a bureaucracy so de-humanized, so far removed from the real inspirational and instructional needs of students and parents, that it brings to mind one of those science fiction scenarios in which a robot civilization keeps trundling mindlessly along, oblivious to the fact that the mortal masters whose meals they keep fixing and whose beds they keep making went extinct some centuries ago.

Such behavior renders satire pointless. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.