Public Education Spirals Further Down the Toilet

via Instapundit
It seems that the correct "disposition" is a growing requirement to become a teacher. The article deals mostly with CUNY Brookly School of Education. Though the idea of evaluating prospective teachers' disposition is from a national education consortium; "Driving the new policies at the college and similar ones at other education schools is a mandate set forth by the largest accrediting agency of teacher education programs in America, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. That 51-year-old agency, composed of 33 professional associations, says it accredits 600 colleges of education - about half the country's total. Thirty-nine states have adopted or adapted the council's standards as their own, according to the agency."
In 2000 the council introduced new standards for accrediting education schools. Those standards incorporated the concept of dispositions, which the agency maintains ought to be measured, to sort out teachers who are likeliest to be successful. In a glossary, the council says dispositions "are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice."
Some choice quotes:
"All of these buzz words don't seem to mean anything until you look and see how they're being implemented," a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David Johnson, said. "Dispositions is an empty vessel that could be filled with any agenda you want," he said.
Critics such as Mr. Johnson say the dangers of the assessment policy became immediately apparent in the fall semester when several students filed complaints against an instructor who they said discriminated against them because of their political beliefs and "denounced white people as the oppressors."
The report to the council stated that teacher candidates will "self-evaluate and faculty will evaluate the candidates on 8 dispositions at mid-semester and at the end of the semester." Those who perform poorly in the assessment are given "counseling."
"Candidates who do not meet academic standards and candidates who do not demonstrate acceptable performance after such counseling will be counseled out of programs," the report stated.
A professor emerita at California State University Monterey Bay, Christine Sleeter, suggested in a March 2001 essay in the Journal of Teacher Education titled "Preparing Teachers for Culturally Diverse Schools: Research and the Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness" that education schools could "alter the mix of who becomes teachers" by recruiting and selecting "only those who bring experiences, knowledge, and dispositions that will enable them to teach well in culturally diverse urban schools."