In January 2010, “planners” at the flagship campus of the
We know about this thanks to a heads-up article in the (
The Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, which is apparently too sensitive to call itself a task force, calls for a form of teacher education that tries to make would-be teachers into exemplars of alienation from American cultural norms. They would like to ensure that every student on track to become a teacher in
The task group’s recommendations, strange as they sound, sound familiar to us. Several years ago, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the nation’s leading accreditor of schools of education, cobbled together new standards that included rules for future teachers to have the right “disposition” to teach. Among the dispositions NCATE thought desirable was “social justice.” In 2006, NAS challenged the use of “social justice” as a disposition, arguing that it was tantamount to mandating an ideological viewpoint. Art Wise, then NCATE’s president, backed down and removed the rule. Under its new president, however, NCATE appears to have reverted to an approach that puts ideological indoctrination at the center of teacher education. Glenn Ricketts wrote about this in January.
We hope that the citizens of force group is convened to bring agitprop to your state.