While kids generally need to beg to retake a flubbed test, apparently teachers get a much sweeter deal. All states allow wannabe teachers to keep taking their licensing tests if they fail, and apparently there's no limit to state largesse. More troubling, it's not clear if states do much to keep these individuals out of the classroom until they do pass the test, since most states regs spell out anywhere from a one-to four-year grace period.

In an unusually meaty piece of investigative reporting for TV news, Fox News in Dallas shows us the depth of state patience with teachers who fail these tests repeatedly. One aspiring teacher took the state certification test 55 times until she finally passed, 14 years later. Her excuse: "I just needed one-on-one tutoring." Another teacher, who failed the test 49 times in 11 years, blamed the process as "political" and said that the tests don't "relate to teaching kids."

While the licensing exams may not be perfect measures of a teacher's academic and professional knowledge, there should be a limit to how many times a teacher can take them, especially since they are generally believed to assess the reading, writing and 'rithmetic skills of a middle schooler.

Although the Texas Education Agency told Fox News that most teachers in the state pass the certification exams on the first try, reporters analyzed data for some of the state's largest districts and found high rates of teachers retaking these tests. In Dallas, for example, 41 percent of teachers failed the test at least once. Of these teachers, nearly 13 percent continued to fail it at least four more times, and almost two percent failed it a minimum of 10 times.

This era of coddling kids seems to have spilled right on over to the adults. Dallas Independent School District certification honcho Cassandra Black told Fox, "You keep trying because that is the way to be successful...as an educator I am not going to slam someone that keeps trying because then the point of education would be mute."