Dark Times Indeed: NCATE, Social Justice, and the Marginalization of Multicultural Foundations
Dan W. Butin
Cambridge College

This article first traces the political context of NCATE’s decision to drop the term “social justice” from its examples of potential dispositions. This is done in order to highlight this event as an exemplary moment where multicultural foundation’s marginalization was made starkly visible by its actual absence from the policy table. This article then provides three distinct empirical data sets at three ever-more finely grained units of analysis—a national-level analysis of influence, a state-level analysis of coursework requirements, and a classroom-level analysis of syllabus construction—that demonstrate such marginalization. None of the data sets are in and of themselves definitive; when viewed in combination, though, the overarching picture offers a strong prima facie argument to support the claim of marginalization.  

The first data set provides a national perspective of the number and relevance of multicultural foundations scholars and voices within teacher education and the education policy debates surrounding it. The second data set provides a comprehensive perspective of the coursework requirements (focusing specifically on multicultural education courses) in every single teacher education program within a single state. The third data set examines a large set of multicultural foundations syllabi to determine the format, scope, and specific practices of classroom instruction for future teachers.  

The results, in brief, are that the level of influence in national educational policy debates and actual policymaking is miniscule; that the requirements for multicultural foundations coursework rarely exceed a single introductory course; and that most such introductory coursework seldom forces prospective teachers to leave the safety of the textbook or the four walls of the college classroom. This article thus concludes that multicultural foundations has abdicated its responsibility to future teachers, schools of education, and the public at large by removing itself (and being removed) from the paramount discussions and debates of the role of schools in a democratic and pluralistic society committed to equity and equality for all students. The clear-cut example is in regards to NCATE’s decision to remove social justice as a possible disposition. But the real examples are littered across the K-16 educational landscape, beginning in the deafening silence of voices at the national level and percolating down to the college classroom level of actual practices and policies. These are dark times indeed for multicultural foundations.

KNOWING WHO IS BEHIND US: CONTEXTUALIZING NCATE’S DECISION

In the summer of 2006, NCATE came up for re-accreditation in front of the Education Department’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality. At stake was NCATE’s ability to continue accrediting education schools as well as its desire to expand accreditation reviews to nontraditional institutions (such as online universities). For close to a year NCATE had been fighting charges of facilitating the ideological indoctrination of students due to the inclusion of “social justice” as an example within its set of possible dispositions. The National Association of Scholars (NAS), for example, had filed a formal inquiry with the US Department of Education because, it argued, social justice “is a term necessarily fraught with contested ideological significance” and, by listing it, NCATE was “clearly encouraging and legitimating the adoption by teacher preparation programs of what appears to be a political viewpoint test” (NAS, 2005, pp. 1-2; see also Hess, 2006; Johnson, 2005; Will, 2006). 

Arthur E. Wise, NCATE’s president, denied such a charge to the committee: “I categorically deny the assertion that NCATE has a mandatory ‘social justice’ standard . . . We don’t endorse political or social ideologies. We endorse academic freedom, and we base our standards on knowledge, skills and professional disposition” (quoted in Powers, 2006). Yet as Powers (2006) noted, “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.” Wise thus announced that NCATE would eliminate all references to social justice because “the term is susceptible to a variety of definitions.” The third-party witnesses had nothing to attack; and NCATE received a five year renewal of its license to accredit. 

One cannot really blame NCATE for its decision. Sitting behind Wise were the presidents of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), NAS, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). These three organizations, in conjunction with David Horowitz’s “academic bill of rights” campaign (Horowitz, n.d.), have been the leading organizations in high profile and highly effective attacks on the so-called “liberal bias” in higher education. FIRE has championed students’ contestation of teacher education dispositions at, among other institutions, Brooklyn College and Washington State University; ACTA has built upon the Ward Churchill scandal (University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006) to argue that “the extremist rhetoric and tendentious opinion for which Churchill is infamous can be found on campuses across America…In course after course, department after department, and institution after institution, indoctrination is replacing education” (ACTA, 2006, foreword; p. 3). 

NCATE’s decision can thus be seen, from an organizational perspective, as prudent. NCATE must be seen as but one in a host of institutions under attack from neo-conservative organizations and think tanks funded by a small group of well-financed right-wing foundations (deMarrais, 2006). As Michael Berube (2006) has pointed out, this is a conscious move by the conservative movement to go beyond attacking the content of academic discourse—what he terms substantive liberalism—and instead focus also on the context and process of academic discourse itself, which Berube terms procedural liberalism. By consciously redefining “social justice” as non-inclusive and one-sided (i.e., liberal), such organizations were thus also able to redefine NCATE as seemingly against academic pluralism (see Fish, 2004, for an explication of this strategy).  

Moreover, and more pragmatically, there was literally no one sitting behind Arthur Wise willing and able to defend the other side to the committee; namely, there was no one who could speak to the ancient origins of, societal consensus around, and empirical evidence for social justice as a cause for all individuals (and especially for future teachers) in a democratic and pluralistic society.  

And it is this fact of visible absence that raises the glaring questions for the multicultural foundations field. For multicultural foundations scholars are precisely the individuals who have developed extremely nuanced and powerful methodologies and theories for unearthing, examining, and explicating social inequities in our schools. If anyone in teacher education should have been sitting behind Arthur Wise, either in person at the meeting or metaphorically through other means in other public and visible venues, it should have been multicultural foundation scholars. So, simply put, where were multicultural foundations scholars when the question of dispositions was put on the table? The answer, simply stated, was that they were too marginalized to be heard.

THE MARGINALIZATION OF FOUNDATIONS

This section empirically examines the marginalization of the multicultural foundations field at three distinct levels of analysis. It does so in order to document the actual structures, policies, and practices that, in all of their seemingly mundane minutia, formally and systematically exclude multicultural foundations from the table of educational policymaking such as occurred with NCATE’s decision.  

Before proceeding, though, it is useful to point out that this marginalization, at this particular historical moment in contemporary educational debates, is deeply ironic. It is ironic exactly because so much of educational practice and policymaking has become centered on issues at the heart of multicultural foundations—e.g., urban education, cultural competence, structural inequities, and the performative and organizational limits of testing and accountability (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Oakes, 2004; Rogers & Oakes, 2005). In fact, the very dispositions indexed by the term of social justice—issues of cultural competence and “fairness” (the term NCATE now uses in place of social justice)—are of utmost relevance for teachers, administrators, and the general public at large. Only 32% of teachers feel very well prepared to address the needs of students from diverse cultural backgrounds (NCES, 2000, p.35), while at the same time an overwhelming majority of teachers (almost 80%) believe that it is “absolutely essential” that effective teachers have an ability to work well with students whose backgrounds are very different from their own (Public Agenda, 2000, p. 39). Given the overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001) in the pool of teacher candidates—close to 90% of teacher candidates are white, female, and come from educated, middle-class, English-speaking families (Snyder, Tan, & Hoffman, 2004, tables 255 & 265)—multicultural foundations coursework is a crucial component for developing such dispositions.  

Multicultural foundations should thus seemingly be a central component of teacher education (deMarrais, 2005), especially since the teaching of complex and contested topics oftentimes encounters massive covert and overt student resistance (Butin, 2005a). As Villegas and Lucas (2002) suggest: 

Because many teachers-to-be enter education believing that schools are impartial institutions, that cultural diversity is problematic, that knowledge is objective and neutral, that learning consists of passively absorbing new information and repeating it by rote, and that teaching entails dispensing information, preparing them to be culturally responsive requires a complete resocialization. (p. xix) 

Resocialization, though, is not so simple. The research on teacher change is clear here; as Virginia Richardson and Peggy Placier (2001) note in a review of the research, “What we see expressed in these current studies of teacher education is the difficulty in changing the type of tacit beliefs and understandings that lie buried in a person’s being” (p. 915). The teaching of social justice should thus (seemingly) be centrally important and centrally located in teacher education. But this is far from the case.

National-Level Analysis of Influence

The first step for determining the relative influence of the multicultural foundations field is assessing the national presence and impact it might have in influencing educational policy. A review of the literature finds that the multicultural foundations field has minimal presence. 

In previous research, I detailed (Butin, 2005b), for example, that between 2001 and 2004, only a single major education policy report out of ten dealing with “fixing” teacher education explicitly referenced the multicultural foundations. This included policy reports from the political left, right, and center, and boasted prominent members (such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Mary Hatwood Futrell, and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann) who are aware of and active in fields aligned with the multicultural foundations. A detailed content analysis of three of the major reports found that out of a combined total of 224 pages, the multicultural foundations garnered just four sentences. One of my conclusions was that  

“What this portends is the near total ascendancy of an instrumentalist conceptualization of teaching and learning in educational policymaking...the most contextual and contested educational issue—‘culture’— has become acontextual and neutral...The ‘problem’ of at-risk schools has been circumscribed in the language of efficiency and accountability. Culture (of students, teachers, schools, communities) has been erased” (Butin, 2005b, pp. 293-294).  

Such (willful) disregard for a central theme within the multicultural foundations signals a fundamental lack of ability to be heard.  

This inability to be heard at the national level may be due, in part, to the fact that the multicultural foundations field no longer has a formal and official presence in the policy-making bodies that determine and debate what actually should be taught in education schools. Dottin, et al. (2005) document the recent withdrawal of the Council for the Social Foundations of Education (CSFE) from NCATE. CSFE is the national umbrella organization for the social foundations field, having member organizations such as the John Dewey Society, the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), and the History of Education Society. CSFE officers and individuals have, over the past two decades, served in various capacities in NCATE, from serving on accrediting committees, advising and writing standards, and leading specific task forces (Dottin, et al., 2005). The relationship with NCATE ended in 2004; “While money was the apparent reason for the recent break up between CSFE and NCATE [due to the membership fee of $15,000], there continues to be an undercurrent of other concerns. Many within the social foundations of education community do not look with favor on national accreditation as a structure, or on NCATE as an adequate example of such a system” (Dottin, et al., 2005, p. 251). With no similar relationship to Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) either, no formal relationship exists today by which the multicultural foundations field can put forward its perspective surrounding issues of the review and accreditation of the majority of education schools. 

Finally, such lack of presence is mirrored in the general positioning of multicultural foundations within teacher education. An analysis of data drawn from the federally-funded Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED; Thurgood, et al., 2006) clearly demonstrates this. The SED asks all doctoral students to, among other things, self-identify their specific doctoral subspecialty. There are 40 distinct categories within education (e.g., music education, psychology, social science education), with only a single one (“social/philosophical foundations of education”) that indexes multicultural foundations. Assuming that the methodology is more or less sound (e.g., self-identification issues, completion rates), the data show a precipitous decline in those that identify themselves as foundations scholars. Table 1 provides a summation of the data.

Table 1. Number of Doctoral Degrees Awarded in the Social/Philosophical Foundations of Education

Thus from the time that Greene (1976) noted the plight of the foundations until today, the actual number of foundations scholars has declined by more than 50%; from a high of 1,430 doctorates awarded in foundations during the five-year period of 1970-1974 to the total of 647 in the most recent five-year period of 1995-1999. This objective decline is mirrored by the foundations’ relative position to other doctorates within education. Whereas, in the period of 1965-1969, doctorates in foundations accounted for 6.6% of all educational doctorates, in the most current five-year period they account for but 2% of all educational doctorates. Even if one were to exclude all doctorates awarded in fields focusing on practitioners (e.g., educational leadership, educational administration, and curriculum and instruction [which are the three largest categories of doctorates awarded]), the number of doctorates within the social/philosophical foundations still constitute just barely over 3% of all doctorates in the most current five-year period. 

There is therefore a decidedly obvious trend at the national level. The multicultural foundations field is too small, too disconnected, and too easily overlooked to be heard within the current educational policy debates. While it is uncertain whether any single one of these conditions is the primary “problem,” it is clear that the confluence and interlinked aspects of these issues exacerbates the overall national level of influence that the multicultural foundations field may hope to achieve.

State-Level Analysis of Coursework Requirements

The marginalization of multicultural foundations may be viewed as well at the level of coursework. Specifically, if the dispositions of cultural competence, social justice, and “fairness” do indeed require a complete “resocialization,” it would seem to be important to offer as many opportunities as possible to engage such issues in the college classroom. Yet that is not the empirical case on the ground.  

An analysis was conducted of every approved elementary teacher certification program in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Specifically, the analysis examined whether prospective elementary teachers were required to take a multicultural education course. The analysis focused on traditional university-based teacher education programs because, even with the national emphasis on alternative certification pathways, such traditional routes continue to produce the vast majority of our new teachers. This is especially the case in Pennsylvania, as it is a “net exporter” of teachers (certifying more teachers each year than it hires) and thus has limited alternative certification pathways. The analysis focused on elementary education because more than half of all new teachers gain such certification, and this pathway has the most required educational coursework, and, thus, the opportunity to take a multicultural education course. This analysis is therefore a best-case scenario, with all other types of certifications almost surely requiring less coursework from prospective teachers. Finally, the analysis looked only at multicultural education courses (as opposed to foundations, introduction to education, or educational psychology), given the presumption that teacher resocialization takes time. One cannot confront issues of, for example, gender bias in the classroom in just two 50-minute class sessions and consider prospective teachers’ dispositions altered. 

Minimal research exists concerning required educational coursework in multicultural education. Fuller (1992) found that out of 19 institutions, 18 had a multicultural education course, but only half of these required it. Bennett and Jordan (1997) found that of 139 elementary education programs, only 20 (14%) required coursework in multicultural education. And a US Department of Education (Adelman, 2004) analysis of actual undergraduate coursework taken by future teachers found that multicultural education was not among the top thirty courses taken; for post-baccalaureate coursework, multicultural education was taken by just 17% of teachers. 

There were eighty-six elementary education programs approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (see Appendix A). Relevant information of exact coursework requirements (through Internet searches of each university’s website) were found for eighty-three of them. While multicultural education courses had varying titles – e.g. “multicultural education,” “education in a diverse society” – course descriptions were very uniform. Alvernia College’s description of their required “Diversity in the Classroom” course, ED 301, is typical in that it, “Explores the ways learning is influenced by culture, language, race, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status . . . .” 

Table 2 provides a summary of the results. Twenty-three percent of all elementary education programs required a multicultural education course. For comparison sake, secondary education programs with citizenship/social studies certification were also included. Nine of the teacher education programs with elementary education programs did not have a Citizenship certification; of the remaining 74 that did, 16% required a multicultural education course. The implication is that, in the best-case scenario of elementary education, fewer than one in four future teachers has the opportunity to take a multicultural education course in college. Once secondary education programs are considered, fewer than one in five teachers is required to gain exposure to and involvement in the complex and contested issues of K-12 education.

Table 2. Status of required coursework in multicultural education 

It is of particular, if tangential, interest that a coursework requirement in multicultural education did not correlate to any obvious factor, including NCATE accreditation. Coursework requirements in multicultural education at the elementary and secondary (citizenship education) level were examined in relation to NCATE accreditation (see Appendix A), and the total enrollment and in-state tuition of the institution. (These data were taken from the 2004-05 US News & World Report rankings). Table 3 presents the Pearson correlations.  

Table 3. Pearson correlations of select variables