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NCATE, the national accrediting agency for teacher-training programs, continues to be on the defensive for its new"dispositions" criteria, which has been used at several institutions to screen out potential teachers solely on the basis of their beliefs on social or political issues. Today an op-ed in the Washington Postsummarizes many of the key cases, the first of which went public at Brooklyn College around nine months ago.
The piece contains the following howler from NCATE president Arthur Wise: the organization didn't"expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies." The organization, Wise continues, expected only"that candidates exhibit two professional dispositions: fairness and the belief that all students can learn." Hmm. I wonder how, exactly, the organization expected the following disposition-related mandate, conveniently not mentioned by Wise but adopted by NCATE in 2002, to be implemented?
For example, if the unit has described its vision for teacher preparation as ‘Teachers as agents of change’ and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice.
As someone who has lived inside of two different ed schools for nearly 20 years, my take on this is slightly different. For me, it is not a philosophical issue as much as a choking cloud that stifles open discussion, as students conform to overt and perceived pressures to act “socially just.” The meanings of social justice should be brought into the open, debated, shaped, and studied. But in practice, the term is a thinly veiled attempt to engage in partisan politics, all in the name of "democratic" education. It’s scandalous.
By way of disclaimer, I happen to embrace many of the beliefs that are attached to ed. schools' definition of social justice. What concerns me, however, is when these beliefs become loyalty oaths and creeds, used to deem one morally upright and another morally reprobate. The university becomes one more venue for the ‘herd of independent minds,’ to invoke the memory of Vance Packard. It’s NCATE’s vision of America, not Socrates’s, sucking the lifeblood out of public discourse and cheapening the educational experience for all.
Timothy James Burke -
2/6/2006
Just a side note, but are you serious, KC, when you suggest that historical knowledge does not produce (at least potentially) insight or understanding which has a bearing on "fundamentally political matters"? If not, what kind of insight does it produce? If none, why on earth should legislators or anyone else put money into Departments of History at universities? Why are "fundamentally political matters" different than ethical, social, cultural or other insights which historical knowledge might reasonably be expected to produce?
I'm perfectly ok with arguing that crude, polemical, instrumental presentations of "political matters" in any class, even a class ostensibly devoted to politics, are a bad idea. Or that the enforcement of ideological litmus tests as part of the assessment of a student's work are professioral malpractice. But in some ways, you're trying to push that (relatively simple) conception of profesionalism beyond that in order to sustain the peculiar alignment and force of your critique.
If I'm teaching about the history of slavery and the Atlantic system, and the discussion leads into contemporary alignments of race, labor, freedom, laws, the relations between elites and ordinary people and much else besides, doesn't that trespass onto "fundamentally political matters", in some way? I'm not going to get up and preach (I don't think I have a set position which to preach even if I wanted to) but neither am I going to shush the class up because we have strayed to "fundamentally political matters". I assume that if you're talking with students about the institutional history of the U.S. Senate and they want to apply that to the recent charged debate about the nature and utility of the filibuster as a political practice, you don't dismiss class on grounds that "fundamentally political matters" have come up. I'd even assume that you wouldn't--and certainly shouldn't--shy away from expressing your own opinion of how the history of the Senate as an institutional body has a relevance for reading and even having a position on the debate over the filibuster as a practice.
Sherman Jay Dorn -
2/6/2006
Either HNN's server is in a different time zone, or you need to be getting to bed earlier -- up answering HNN comments at 1 am?
Your answer suggests that it's the requirements of students, not the institutional mission (or lack thereof), that's the problem. That's a useful clarification.
[The public-private distinction is the natural response, and in the obvious sense of first amendment rights I agree. But I'm not entirely satisfied with that explanation, because different public institutions do have different missions (thus my mention of West Point). If they're developed thoughtfully, consistently, and openly, there's nothing inherently wrong with a specific mission for a College of Education of, say, "We're producing graduates who encourage debates in school classrooms."]
Robert KC Johnson -
2/6/2006
On the Haverford/Bryn Mawr issue: there is, I think, a basic difference between public and private schools. It's no coincidence that the highest-profile dispositions cases have involved public schools (Brooklyn, Wash. State, Alabama, Alaska-Fairbanks)--institutions that are prohibited by the First Amendment from punishing students for their political beliefs.
But apart from the legal angle, I'd still argue against dispositions as the 2002 NCATE guidelines outlined. Take the H/Bryn Mawr case, or BYU from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. Absolutely, students know what they're getting when they enroll. But the 2002 guidelines say that each student must be individually assessed on their commitment to promote social justice--which, if interpreted literally, holds that Ed students don't have the right to disagree with or challenge what they're taught, since, by disagreeing with their instructor's or department's conception of "social justice," they could be deemed lacking a disposition to promote social justice.
The NCATE argument circa 2004 was that this could never happen, because Ed faculty would have a broad view of what constituted 'social justice.' And then we saw the abuses--which, given what is obtained from use of the dispositions criteria (which, as far as I can tell, is nothing that wasn't done before) should be reason enough for setting it aside.
Agree with you on IRB issue.
Robert KC Johnson -
2/6/2006
Oscar,
In the abstract, I agree with much, though not all, of what you say, but I think there are some problems once these ideas get translated into practice:
1.) The dispositions criteria deals not with the content of what's taught in the classroom--but in how Ed students are evaluated. This, in turn, runs into First Amendment problems, at least for public schools. Students can't be punished for (as in the Wash. State example) for saying that they oppose affirmative action. Yet the NCATE guidelines requiring each student to be assessed individually on their disposition to promote social justice, coupled with the ideological imbalance in most Ed Departments, open up the likelihood for this occurring. (This is not strictly an ideological issue--there's just as much potential for abuse, though there's no 1 Am. issue, at the few right-wing schools accredited by NCATE, such as BYU and Oral Roberts.)
2.) There's a significant academic freedom issue here. At least one foundation for academic freedom is the belief that our training as academics gives us a degree of knowledge about our subject matter that should shield us from politicians telling us what to teach. But on fundamentally political matters (i.e., the Ed class at BC that showed Fahrenheit 9/11 the class before Election Day), we have no reason to be more knowledgeable than the average citizen. So if we're going to introduce openly political elements into the curriculum, we can't expect politicians (at least Republicans) to not strike back at academic freedom.
3.) NCATE's dismissal is a bit disingenuous, since embedded within the definition of "dispositions" itself in other NCATE documents is a question of defining social justice.
And one broader point, to follow up on what Ralph said. With Education and teacher-training, there's a significant degree of public policy/legislative input into curriculum, by the nature of the subject: the legislature has the right (and the obligation) to set overall academic goals for the public schools. It might be--as you say--that "a teacher and a school is always going to be subversive of something in that transformation is almost inevitably subversive at some level." Yet what's striking about the dispositions debate is that NCATE and the Ed schools are not making that argument to state legislatures. My guess is if they did, state legislatures would find it unacceptable.
Sherman Jay Dorn -
2/5/2006
The more egregious cases we've seen (e.g., at LeMoyne College) affecting a limited number of teacher-ed students would be egregious regardless of the institutional mission, and I want to push two points to get some elaboration:
1) What about institutional missions? I attended Haverford College. One friend attended West Point. Both have very unique institutional missions that are recognized broadly by others, and the fact that one is public and the other private doesn't interfere with that uniqueness. From the description of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr education program's philosophy is the following:
"Education students find that what they learn both inside and outside the classroom gives them a useful perspective on their own intellectual development and that teaching, as a profession and as an important component of many professions and human activities, is a meaningful way to interact with others and challenge SOCIAL INJUSTICE" (http://www.brynmawr.edu/education/philosophy.shtml; emphasis added).
Not only is that perfectly compatible with Haverford's and Bryn Mawr's origins as Quaker-affiliated colleges, but I couldn't really imagine an education program associated with Haverford that didn't have that social-activism flavor. Students who attend Haverford know that going in.
2) What about research ethics policy at every university in the land? The third principle of the Belmont Report is "Justice" (http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html#gob3), and it officially is supposed to help guide every Institutional Review Board in the U.S. It's been that way for years, and I don't see any evidence that having institutionalized that term in research ethics has harmed universities in any way, nor do I think you can make the argument that having those policies institutionalized biases the IRB process in any ideological sense. (I can think of a bunch of bureaucratic processes related to IRB that can be harmful, but that's different.)
I think it's important to note that there are multiple explanations for why social-justice platitudes don't belong in the conceptual framework of a public college of education, or why dispositions are frequently-misunderstood things, and that we need to apply the normal academic standards to the analysis of our own institutions, ruling out alternative explanations and thinking clearly.
Oscar Chamberlain -
2/5/2006
First off, I left out a word in the opening sentence. The last phrase should have been "that go beyond your interpretation.
Second, to your point Ralph. Subversion need not be of society. Pressure to conform can result in subversion of the individual. The point I was trying to make in that paragraph--and I was indeed clumsy in making it--is the distinction between transformation and subversion depends to a considerable degree upon one's perspective, or ideology.
Third, the link contains a fairly wide range of statements that can be summed up in this phrase: "improving the human condition." Some are pretty doctrinaire in describing such improvement, some leave it pretty wide open.
To return to my first post, let me clarify the point I was trying to make (and which I had not thought of before I read those definitions).
*Is it right for a university to have as its goal the encouragement of human progress?
*If it is, does the university have a right--or even a duty--to say what it means by progress?
*And is such a statment, no matter how general or specific, inherently ideological?
I'm not trying to bait anyone here. In point of fact, I've come up with no answer of my own yet that did not make me at least a bit uncomfortable
Ralph E. Luker -
2/5/2006
Oscar, Would you read over your "In short, ..." sentence in paragraph #6 -- because it isn't. So, exactly what you mean isn't either. I don't think that you would want to be hauled out in public and forced to explain why any of Uncle Sam's tax-payers are obliged to pay for the subversion of society as it is.
Oscar Chamberlain -
2/5/2006
KC
Thank you for the link. Both the quote you chose and the material on the link raises questions that go your interpretation.
On its face, the quote simply says this, "if a commitment to social justice is part of the school's criteria for teachers, then evidence of that commitment can be examined."
That's pretty logical--if one accepts the right of the school to use such an ideological commitment as a criteria for teachers. I assume that is your primary objection.
However, the material at the link suggests a broader consideration of the question, what is the role of the teacher--and therefore of the school--in relation to its students and to the larger society?
It cannot be neutral, at least not in a nation as diverse as ours. And education is inevitably transformative, even if that transformation is intended to create conformity.
In short, a teacher and a school is always going to be subversive of something in that transformation is almost inevitably subversive at some level. That's true for public schools, military schools, Jesuit schools, etc.
KC. My impression is that you believe one can state the role of the teacher and the school without some reference to an ideology that relates teaching with society.
