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Well-disposed
Yesterday the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) announced that it would drop the language of social justice from its description of how prospective teachers' "dispositions" should be evaluated. The decision was a long time in coming -- but as ACTA president Anne Neal notes, it is not enough.
The National Association of Scholars, ACTA, and FIRE have all argued that NCATE violates students' First Amendment rights when it attempts to hold them to a standard that amounts to a political litmus test. KC Johnson has explained in elegant detail exactly how the language of social justice has assimilated and attempted to normalize a series of highly tendentious ideological assumptions. The chilling effect this creates has shown itself in stark relief in cases at Le Moyne College, Brooklyn College, and Washington State, where dispositions requirements have been used both to silence criticism and to persecute prospective teachers whose beliefs were not in line with those the institution expected to be able to impose.
When Arthur Wise, NCATE's president, appeared yesterday before the Education Department's National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, he attempted to defuse criticisms of dispositions theory by pre-emptively announcing that NCATE would no longer use the language of social justice because "the term is susceptible to a variety of definitions." "I categorically deny the assertion that NCATE has a mandatory 'social justice' standard," Wise said. "We don't endorse political and social ideologies. We endorse academic freedom, and we base our standards on knowledge, skills and professional disposition." The Committee then voted to extend NCATE's recognition for another five years and also agreed to expand its accreditory powers to include distance education programs.
FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, who was in Washington yesterday to testify about NCATE's unconstitutional imposition of a political hurdle on new teachers, praised Wise's unexpected remarks: "I applaud what NCATE has done today; it's a step in the right direction." Lukianoff is right -- but ACTA president Anne Neal qualified NCATE's announcement in important ways when she noted that NCATE shouldn't be dealing in disposition assessment at all. Neal told InsideHigherEd that dropping the term "social justice" "will make absolutely no difference" in how NCATE and its affiliates act. "Removing social justice doesn't eliminate the issue of imposing disposition on teacher candidates." Neal is right to warn that NCATE's cosmetic revision of its language does not address the larger problem of dispositions assessment, and that it may in fact simply drive it underground.
Margaret Soltan agrees.
Posted by acta online on June 06, 2006 at June 6, 2006 12:03 PM
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