THE WOULD-BE COMMISSARS OF YOUR LOCAL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
How comfortable would you feel if you knew that in the future, the teacher in your child’s classroom had been pre-selected on the basis of adherence to an extremist ideology or that to graduate college they had to parrot these beliefs whether they agreed or not ? Or that the accreditation of your child’s public school or university was going to ride on the school’s administration, teachers or professors demonstrating loyalty to this agenda in their classrooms to the satisfaction of unknown, unelected, unaccountable but zealously committed bureaucrats ?
Well, brace yourself because it’s already here. The new teachers fully ” educated” in this vein should be hitting the job market in most, though not all, states by 2007 or 2008 at the latest.
Accreditation agencies operate mostly out of the public or legislative spotlight and hand out what amounts to good housekeeping seals of approval on various university programs to indicate that a Law or Medical School does indeed dispense knowledge that will allow graduates to function as lawyers and doctors. High Schools have their own accreditation agencies and a similar program of certification. Essentially the process is supposed to be a review to ensure that fraudulent diploma mills do not operate on par with Harvard or legitimate state universities or schools.
Unfortunately, it seems that the American hard Left, envious of the neo-Stalinist conformity of some foreign Teacher’s Unions like those in South Korea and dismayed at the success of civil libertarians in attacking campus P.C. speech codes and overt indoctrination tactics, have spent the last few years infiltrating accreditation agencies to impose their values through the accreditation process. It is a strategic initiative of breathtaking scope and one quite likely to succeed.
Universities are now going to have to certify prospective teaching candidate’s commitment to ” social justice” in order to win accreditation for their Colleges of Education. For teachers that means providing evidence in their lesson plans to their university program supervisors of following the multicultural left’s Afrocentric-Radical crit interpretation of American society as a bastion of oppression. Candidates who hold other views will not be allowed to graduate and become teachers:
“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.”
Critics of the dispositions standard contend that the idea of “social justice,” a term frequently employed in left-wing circles, is open to politicization.
“It’s political correctness that has insinuated into the criteria for accreditation of teacher education institutions,” a noted education theorist in New York, Diane Ravitch, said. “Once that becomes the criteria for institutions as a whole, it gives free rein to those who want to impose it in their classrooms,” she said. Ms. Ravitch is the author of “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.”
A case in point, as Mr. Johnson of Brooklyn College has pointed out, is the way in which the term was incorporated into Ms. Parmar’s course, called Language Literacy in Secondary Education, which students said is required of all Brooklyn College education candidates who aspire to become secondary-school teachers. In the fall semester, Ms. Parmar was the only instructor who taught the course, according to students.
The course, which instructs students on how to develop lesson plans that teach literacy, is built around themes of “social justice,” according to the syllabus, which was obtained by The New York Sun. One such theme is the idea that standard English is the language of oppressors while Ebonics, a term educators use to denote a dialect used by African-Americans, is the language of the oppressed.
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