Simply Uninvertible!

Unpacking the story about the school teacher who was caught cheating on his state certification exam won’t be easy, but we’ll give it try. There are so many interesting angles, it’s hard to decide where to go first:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday.

Two dollars? That right there says it all! Or does it? The inverted pyramid format can’t express the complexity of this story! We must read on:

The illegal stand-in – who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly – not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

Yet more intrigue to follow:

“I was pressured into it. He threatened me,” the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam.

“I gave him my all,” said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. “He gave me what he thought I was worth.”

Inverted pyramid, abort! Compelling Narrative must take over — there’s simply too much richness:

Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city’s worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job.

“I’m tired of taking this test and failing,” Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon’s probe. “I want you to help me.”

Now that the inverted pyramid has been abandoned, let’s let details fill themselves in:

Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.

“He said no one would ever know,” Leitner said outside the Brownsville, Brooklyn, building he has called home since briefly living on the streets.

The two men met years ago at Brooklyn College where Leitner earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history in the late 1970s, and Brightly got a bachelor’s degree in 1992. After meeting in the alumni office, Leitner began tutoring the teacher as he struggled to pass the state exam, officials said.

But the relationship took a bizarre turn just weeks before the test last July, authorities said.

“He got tired of flunking it,” said Leitner. “That was the thing that sparked this desperate act.”

The devastating conclusion:

Brightly allegedly helped Leitner obtain a counterfeit state identification card that showed Leitner’s photo with Brightly’s name. Using the bogus ID, the pair conned city educrats into issuing Leitner a school ID card to use on test day, authorities said.

On July 17, Brightly allegedly picked up Leitner at his home and drove him to Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, where the test was given. The teacher allegedly came back after the test was over and drove Leitner back home, officials said.

After the exam, the state began investigating Brightly’s passing score. He sent Leitner to meet with officials, and Leitner claimed to be Brightly – but the ruse failed, authorities said.

When The News went to Brightly’s Mount Vernon home yesterday, a man who strongly resembled him insisted Leitner took the test on his own. The man, who appeared to be in his late 30s, denied being Brightly – saying he was the teacher’s son.

Brightly has been charged with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes. He has been taken out of his Baychester classroom pending the outcome of the case.

About 19,000 teachers across the state take the certification exam each year and roughly 95% pass. Teachers are required to be certified – but the city has a temporary waiver from the state because the Education Department has not been able to find enough qualified instructors.

All of the hallmarks of a perfect NYC tabloid story are here: a bad educator in a failing school turns dumb criminal and overreaches both by recruiting — and, the injustice, underpaying — a guy who aroused suspicions not because he’s fatter and whiter but because he cheated too well. The mind reels!

I’m not sure the Post is even able to take it all in:

A ne’er-do-well Bronx teacher who twice failed the state teacher-certification exam has been charged with roping his mentally unstable tutor into taking the test for him, officials said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Times tries its best to tackle the narrative nut:

One was a 37-year-old middle school teacher who could not manage to pass the state teacher certification exam in social studies, his field. The other was a 58-year-old former homeless man with a master’s degree but no steady work, making ends meet through odd jobs – like tutoring the history teacher for the exam. One, the working teacher, was tall and black; the other was short and white.

No one can do it! This story is uninvertible!

The Final Days of the Fulton Fishmongers

The Times pokes around the Fulton Fish Market as it gets ready to close and move up to Hunts Point. The term “fishmonger” is bandied about liberally.

“Spring Hopes: Eternal”

We’ve noted the Post’s proclivity to print pat points about the weather. Now it’s time for the Times to wax poetic about that same topic: “The Calendar Says Spring and You Expect Sunshine and Flowers?”. Someone on West 43rd Street is satisfying his literary leanings. Relevant excerpts to follow.

Exhibit A) The Surreal Hook, taking the form of a man dressed in a carrot suit:

Of all the possible signs that spring had, in fact, arrived in New York yesterday, a 5-foot-2-inch carrot strolling down Broadway at midday was a pretty hopeful one.

But not even the carrot could convince itself that yesterday, the official first day of spring, even remotely resembled springtime.

“It’s not spring yet,” the carrot declared indignantly. The carrot was inhabited by Venancio Meza, 45, of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who was distributing fliers for a health food restaurant. A chilly drizzle fell, and the temperature hovered around 40 degrees.

Exhibit B) The Grand Observation on All of Human Existence:

Somewhere in the human body, there is a mechanism that runs on a blend of hope and self-delusion and makes people believe that on the morning of the vernal equinox, the world around them will suddenly bloom. Even if the forecasters predict rain and cold – as they did in advance of yesterday – that little mechanism continues to crank away.

In other words, spring hopes: eternal.

So yesterday, New York residents and tourists alike were once again reminded of the century-old observation by the clergyman and author Henry Van Dyke: “The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.”

And finally, Dashed Hopes in a Gritty Milieu:

At Coney Island, where Astroland reopened yesterday, the sky and water were a solid sheet of gray, and the Boardwalk was all but abandoned.

Those who showed up at the park were obviously driven by a deep commitment to the pursuit of thrills.

Britney McCollough, 18, and Kyle Huneycutt, 21, two college students from Orlando, Fla., were determined to wring whatever fun they could out of a soggy Astroland, and rode several of the rides, including the Cyclone roller coaster.

“On the Cyclone, we froze our faces off,” Ms. McCollough said in an enthusiastic way that suggested that freezing one’s face off is a good and exciting thing.

Bill Hoffmann, come home, all is forgiven!

“Gentrified by the Homeless”

The Village Voice notes the irony in the possibility that CBGB will be forced out by a homeless-services organization:

Word that the legendary club CBGB is in danger of getting priced out of its Bowery hole-in-the-wall by a possible $20,000-per-month rent hike roiled the rock world last month.

But the irony is that the greedy landlord poised to uproot CB’s is not some condo-crazed speculator but the Bowery Residents’ Committee—a 34-year-old homeless-services agency.

Gentrified by the homeless? Now there’s a twist.

“The ‘Sack’ King”

I’m interested in Michael Strahan’s marital troubles like not at all, but it should be noted that the Post really came through this morning with the headline “The ‘Sack’ King” after they pored through the salacious details from the defensive end’s divorce proceedings and reported on his “repeated trysts” with other women.