The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog
October 24, 2007:
Teacher-Education Accreditor Formally Drops Social-Justice Language
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3308/teacher-education-accreditor-formally-drops-social-justice-language?at
Teacher-Education Accreditor Formally Drops Social-Justice Language
The board of the nation’s largest organization accrediting
teacher-education programs has formally voted to
drop controversial language about social
justice from its standards for evaluating
teacher-education programs.
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education had been
criticized by some students — and by conservative activists — for
suggesting that teacher-preparation programs evaluate students’
professional “dispositions” by considering students’ “beliefs and
attitudes such as caring, fairness, honesty and responsibility, and
social justice.”
The concept of social justice, opponents said, had been used by
institutions to weed out would-be teachers based on their social and
political beliefs. Several teacher candidates had complained about
education professors who seemed more interested in students’ political
views than in their classroom performance (The
Chronicle, December 16, 2005).
The accreditor first announced in the summer of 2006 that it would
eliminate social justice from its recommendation for how
teacher-education programs could evaluate students (The
Chronicle, June 16, 2006). Now its board has formally
voted to do so, said Jane Liebrand, a spokeswoman for the organization.
Under a new definition in the glossary of its standards, the
accreditor says it expects institutions to assess students’
“professional dispositions” by considering students’ sense of “fairness
and the belief that all students can learn.” —Robin Wilson
