Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones did a brave thing at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America annual conference in Pittsburgh over the weekend. The platinum-selling rapper -- who goes by the instantly recognizable moniker Nas -- told an audience of 900 students to be smarter than he was when he was their age. He told them to stay in school.

The author of "Illmatic," one of the most influential and revered hip-hop albums of the last 25 years, dropped out of middle school, though you would hardly know it from the hyper-literary quality of his lyrics. Nas has never stopped learning and questioning things much of the world takes for granted.

No less an academic superstar than Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University has obsessed over Nas' lyrics for years. He even co-authored a book about the influence of "Illmatic" on urban discourse in 2008. During what was ostensibly a lecture in honor of the Martin Luther King Day holiday at Carnegie Mellon University several years ago, Dr. Dyson seamlessly dropped sections from "Illmatic" into the speech, thrilling those who had ears to hear it.

"The reality of it is, you need to keep educating yourself, and I wish I had stayed in school," Nas told his audience, 99.9 percent of whom have every intention of doing so, which is why they're in the Boys & Girls Clubs in the first place.

Nas, who's 36, assured his audience that he planned to get his diploma, earning the applause and respect of his hundreds of admirers. But as gifted and brilliant a rapper he's proven himself to be over the years, none of his hundreds of fans who turned out to see him at the Hilton Downtown last weekend would say he was qualified to be president of their local school board, no matter how many professors quote him in Martin Luther King Day speeches.

I bring this up because I've been thinking about the case of Detroit school board President Otis Mathis. Earlier this month, Detroit News columnist Laura Berman published excerpts from e-mails that Mr. Mathis, 56, sent to board members. We all make grammatical errors when quickly composing e-mail -- but this is another matter.

The grammar, punctuation and spelling in the e-mail is so bad that Mr. Mathis had no choice but to cop to being "a horrible writer" when Ms. Berman contacted him. Whenever a school board president's next answer to a columnist's query is: "Yes, I can read. I'm capable of reading a lot of information and regurgitation," that official has already lost the confidence of those who take academic accountability seriously.

No one questions Mr. Mathis' intelligence. According to his defenders, he's a math whiz who breezed through advanced calculus and trigonometry in college, but has struggled with writing because of a learning disability similar to dyslexia. He insists he can read, but has to reread official documents several times to understand and memorize them. That's where the "regurgitation" comes in.

Complicating the situation is the fact that Mr. Mathis is a popular board president who was elevated to that position by his colleagues by a 10-to-1 vote over a far more qualified University of Michigan academic. They've been willing to overlook his inability to write coherently because he's the kind of leader who knows how to build consensus. They haven't considered his inability to write a deal-breaker so far, though that may change once the late-night comedians get a hold of the controversy.

The Detroit Public Schools has an obscenely low graduation rate of 25 percent, making a parent's decision to send a kid through that system either unshakeable faith in that child's immunity to systemic failure or parental neglect at its worst.

With a dropout rate of 75 percent, no aspect of public school education in Detroit escapes scrutiny these days, including the abilities and credentials of the city's embattled school board.

While Mr. Mathis' talent as a consensus-builder is admirable, there's no escaping the fact that being functionally unable to write is unacceptable with the education of 90,000 mostly black students at stake. Otis Mathis should be working as a math coach, not leading a failing school board responsible for shaping general education policy in the nation's worst school district.

With 44 percent of Detroit's adults reading at or below a sixth-grade level and more than 60 percent of those graduating from high school requiring remedial course work in college if they make it that far, the school district doesn't have the luxury of carrying a leader who can't write, regardless of his other credentials.

Nas doesn't have a high school diploma, but unlike Otis Mathis, he's an amazing writer. Still, he's humble enough to want to inspire kids to stay in school. Mr. Mathis needs a similar reality check.

Tony Norman's weekly video, the Last Word, is featured exclusively in the Insight section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.