Free Republic

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice “from local to global level.” This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn’t long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight “oppression,” and sees American society as pervaded by the “global interconnections of oppression.” Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

NEA overwhelmingly passed a resolution (B 10) endorsing gay marriages and adoptions in states where they're legal. Click here and read the first three paragraphs. NEA recommended that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues be required content for teacher credentialing. (Teachers would be forced to undergo sensitivity training concerning homosexuality before they could be certified to teach.) Here is the wording of the resolution: "That NEA advocate for the inclusion of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender issues in the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) teacher education program review process." NEA has already contacted NCATE about this....

Personality Test: The dispositional dispute in teacher preparation today, and what to do about it by William Damon 09/08/2005 The standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Excellence (NCATE) are of critical import for America's future teaching corps and for K-12 education in general and will wield disproportionate influence for decades to come. Over the past fifteen years, 25 states have outsourced the approval of teacher preparation programs to NCATE by adopting or adapting its standards as their own; the other 25 have various "partnerships" with the organization. Which makes it all the more disturbing that central to...

Schools of Reeducation? By Frederick M. Hess Washington Post 02/05/06 For those who have been troubled by the tendency of universities to adopt campus speech codes, a worrisome new fad is rearing its head in the nation's schools of education. Stirred by professional opinion and accreditation pressures, teachers colleges have begun to regulate the dispositions and beliefs of those who would teach in our nation's classrooms. At the University of Alabama, the College of Education explains that it is "committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia,...

10/24/05 By John Leo Class(room) Warriors The cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions." What are "dispositions"? NCATE's prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said...

Jan. 16, 2006 issue - The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education. Consider The Chronicle of Higher Education's recent report concerning the schools that certify America's teachers. Many education schools discourage, even disqualify, prospective teachers who lack the correct "disposition," meaning those who do not embrace today's "progressive" political catechism. Karen Siegfried had a 3.75 grade-point average at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but after voicing conservative views, she was told by her education professors that she lacked the "professional disposition" teachers need. She...

he cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions."

Why Nevada education is not about to improve Steven Miller July 11, 2005 Here in Nevada the political class endlessly professes its dedication to getting our public schools out of their seemingly interminable rut. It�s clear, of course, why elected politicians are so eager to appear responsive on this issue. When parents see evidence that a fifth-rate government school monopoly is depriving their kids of first-rate futures, parents understandably get quite anxious. And anxious parents in large numbers can quickly translate into thoroughly dead political careers. Consequently, everyone in the Nevada Legislature today endlessly proclaims his or her eagerness to...

Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views. The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance. Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said,...

In some public schools math teachers do more than teach algebra and geometry — they give their students lessons intended to purge what they consider racism. The "anti-racist education" program in place at Newton Public Schools in Newton, Mass., a wealthy, liberal niche of the Bay State, has angered some parents who believe the school district is more concerned about political correctness than teaching math skills.

Advocates of multicultural education from schools and colleges across the country gathered in Kansas City the week before the 2004 presidential election to rededicate themselves to transforming teaching and school systems into instruments of social justice as they define it. Many of the more than 200 presentations at the 14th annual conference of the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) focused on teacher preparation as the best hope for making multicultural diversity the engine of educational progress. At one session, presenters from Central Missouri State University and local school districts expressed the view that teachers should be trained to rewrite...

Most American parents would be outraged if they knew how the education world's multiculturalists are trying to shape new teachers before they go to work in public schools.     Surveys by the nonpartisan organization Public Agenda have shown that parents still believe in America as an overwhelmingly good country, and they want their children to believe that as well. [snip] The multiculturalists, by stark contrast, do not see the United States at all as a good country with common values worth transmitting. They grossly divide Americans into "oppressors" (all whites of European descent) and the "oppressed" (all persons of color...

"A monocultural faculty cannot do the job very well. We cannot teach about diversity in the absence of diversity. We need to reconstruct identities, values, beliefs, and lifestyles." New Teachers Face NCATE Litmus Test on Diversity Educators must exhibit Written By: Robert Holland Published In: School Reform News Publication Date: January 1, 2002 Publisher: The Heartland Institute LAS VEGAS--The tight link between political advocacy of multicultural diversity and accreditation of the higher education institutions that train the nation's K-12 teachers was on display during the recent annual convention of the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), held at the...

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education: Whose Standards? Abstract The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is the largest accreditor of teacher training programs in the U.S. Its standards are fast becoming the national norm. Little understood outside the education community, NCATE's review process is as much or more concerned with a program's philosophical perspective than with the qualifications of its faculty and the knowledge of its graduates. Instead of emphasizing teaching's role in producing student achievement, NCATE's Standards are congenial to the learner-centered pedagogy that is popular with education professors and in disagreement with...