This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Justice is Done

The president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, Arthur E. Wise, has wisely agreed to drop "social justice" from its organization's list of things they're scanning teachers' "dispositions" for. It happened at a U.S. Education Department panel, on which sat a group of people ready to state the obvious -- that the notoriously vague phrase "social justice" can operate as a political litmus test.

But Wise knew who was behind him, both in physical proximity and in order of speech — a small group of third-party witnesses ready to pick apart NCATE’s practices.

So Wise preempted his detractors. “I categorically deny the assertion that NCATE has a mandatory ’social justice’ standard,” Wise testified. “We don’t endorse political and social ideologies. We endorse academic freedom, and we base our standards on knowledge, skills and professional disposition.”

And then, Wise threw the witnesses a bone, announcing that NCATE had decided to eliminate references to “social justice” from its current glossary because “the term is susceptible to a variety of definitions.”



Anne D. Neal, of ACTA, is right, however: “Removing social justice doesn’t eliminate the issue of imposing disposition on teacher candidates.” IMHO, dropping the whole "dispositions" thing is the way to go. A person's social views are none of NCATE's business.