Radical Dispositions In Education

I strongly encourage you to read this entire article at The New York Sun.

Our education system is in peril. It is being attacked from within and without. We must protect the minority of conservatives in it and drive the liberal extremes out of it. This article is a frightening reminder that subversion is alive and well.

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, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions.

Brooklyn College's School of Education, which is the only academic unit at the college with the status of school, is among dozens of education schools across the country that incorporate the notion of "social justice" in their guiding principles. At Brooklyn, "social justice" is one of the four main principles in its conceptual framework. The school's conceptual framework states that it develops in its students "a deeper understanding of the quest for social justice." In its explanation of that mission, the school states: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism."

n an e-mail to the Sun, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute in Virginia, Robert Holland, said: "The tight link between the accreditors and the multiculturalists indicates that social justice is being defined by those who despise the very ideal of an American common culture - considering it irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, etc."