Readin’, ‘Ritin, ‘Rithmetic, and Commitment to Social Justice
‘Disposition’ Emerges as Issue at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College’s School of Education, part of the City of New York college system, is looking beyond the basics when evaluating a student’s abilities. The new criteria include a prospective teacher’s commitment to social justice and other elements of their ‘disposition’.
It should be noted that the School of Education at Brooklyn college is a state school. Additionally, it is the only accredited education school in the system.
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.
“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.
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is driving this change to non-academic assessment. This agency is comprised of 33 professional associations and accredits 600 colleges of education, half of the education colleges in the country.
To drive home the notion that education schools ought to evaluate teacher candidates on such parameters as attitude toward social justice, the council issued a revision of its accrediting policies in 2002 in a Board of Examiners Update. It encouraged schools to tailor their assessments of dispositions to the schools’ guiding principles, which are known in the field as “conceptual frameworks.” The council’s policies say that if an education school “has described its vision for teacher preparation as ‘Teachers as agents of change’ and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice.”
In essence then, a student’s political beliefs become a criteria for whether they will be permitted to become a teacher. An excellent example is assistant professor Priya Parmar. As the sole teacher of a required class, Language Literacy in Secondary Education, she controls a critical path to an education degree.
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.
Students complained that Ms. Parmar retaliated against students who defended the ability to speak correct English.
Speaking of Ms. Parmar, one student, Evan Goldwyn, wrote: “She repeatedly referred to English as a language of oppressors and in particular denounced white people as the oppressors. When offended students raised their hands to challenge Professor Parmar’s assertion, they were ignored. Those students that disagreed with her were altogether denied the opportunity to speak.”
Students also complained that Ms. Parmar dedicated a class period to the screening of an anti-Bush documentary by Michael Moore, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a week before last November’s presidential election, and required students to attend the class even if they had already seen the film. Students said Ms. Parmar described “Fahrenheit 9/11″ as an important film to see before they voted in the election.
“Most troubling of all,” Mr. Goldwyn wrote, “she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers.”
Four targeted students have dropped Parmar’s class.
“Basically, she’s a socialist, she’s racist against white people,” Mr. Madden said. “If you want to pass that class you better keep your mouth shut.”
In an interview with the Sun, Ms. Harned said she dropped out of the School of Education and switched her major to political science because of her experience in Ms. Parmar’s course.
“I’m blacklisted,” she said. “How am I supposed to move forward in a department I’m not comfortable in?”
And that’s exactly the point of judging student dispositions. If the student is not politically aligned with the teacher then they are steered out of education. For this particular class you must be a racist socialist (or at least be able to shut up and fake it really well). Otherwise you are not fit to become a teacher.
(Tip credit to Bumper)
Good Lord — they would have bounced my @$$ out of that program so fast there would have been a sonic boom. After all, I was one of the three best known conservative students on my campus, was the Campus Political Director (AKA Minister of Propaganda in the campus paper) for the College Republicans, and co-founded the campus pro-life group.
As it was, two of my education professors tried to get me tossed from the program — one because I advocated for school vouchers in an assignment and the other because I told him that his multi-cultural education class was the single most useless course I had taken in the College of Education.
No, I would have never survived at Brooklyn College.
Just read the whole article. Gack! Rhymes, You may have been tossed out. They would never have let me into the building one day 1.
It is a longish article and was difficult to excerpt. It examines many more aspects than I incorporated in this post. I definitely recommend that it be read in its entirety.
The language of oppressors! Maybe she should teach the class in Esperanto?
Maybe she forgets that knowledge is power, and one method of power open to anyone is the communication of ideas. Without a common framework for discussion, we would live in chaos. I am not saying that English must be static and unchanging; every year new words are invented and integrated into the tongue.
Oppression is not borne out of what language is spoken, but by how people treat one another. Spanish, Latin, and Bantu (spoken by Hutus, as well as Tutsis in Rwanda) could be just as easily be considered the language of the oppressors (for their moments in history).
Language is power, and Ms. Parmar should be teaching people to command that power. Do not say ”I am oppressed”, but say ”I will be free”.
In short…. she is an idiot who pretends to be a liberator and voice for the oppressed, who merely lives to oppress people herself.
Scott makes a great point, but what is sad is that so many people actually view Parmar as a liberator.
Even worse, Brooklyn College isn’t the only place for such intolerance; it’s running rampant at institutions all across the country, and the professors in question are hiding their hate behind a mask of education.
While I was in college, I was subjected to similar intolerance. Being a political science major, I read, watched, and listened to opinions from the entire ideological spectrum. When my English professor discovered that one of the outlets to which I listened was Rush Limbaugh, I suddenly became “the enemy” and saw my grades drop. He never asked if I agreed with Limbaugh, but determined that since I so much as listened to the program that I was to be punished.
I realized then that “higher learning” was a subjective term.
A student was expelled from a graduate education program at a private college in Syracuse for the same issues. He denounced multi-culturalism and advocated corporal punishment in a term paper. He is suing with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, because the school gets federal money. This is a state school - a far better civil case. Students shouldn’t surrender, they should sue.
I’ve gathered from the general tone of this site that many of its regulars are conservative. Therefore let me introduce myself: I am a liberal.
I am not, however, politically correct, and I can clearly see this woman is a moron. While I agree with the basic idea of teachers evaluating would-be educators to ensure that they have the disposition for teaching, political views have nothing to do with such a disposition. The woman is a fool, and an embarrassment to her institution and to those who share her end of the political spectrum. PC terms, buzzwords, and Michael Moore change nothing, they only alleviate the frustrated rage of those too stupid, too lazy, or too cowardly to get out there and truly live up to their beliefs.
This woman represents all that I hate, because she is one of the forces on both ends of the spectrum who are tearing this country apart by polarizing our politics. At a time like this, when we’re engaged in a protracted hydra of a struggle in the Third World country, disapproved of by most of the world, possibly facing charges of war crimes for the actions in Abu Gahrib and Guatanamo Bay, our economy failing, our children’s education sacrificed every day to fools who couldn’t find their own backsides with two hands and flashlight - we don’t need people like her. We need people who will foster bipartisanship and the ability to relate to the “other side,” whoever that might be, as individual people with their own reasons for believing whatever it is they believe.
We may be a representative republic rather then a true democracy, but we were founded with democratic ideals in mind and the heart of democracy is, now and always, tolerance, equality of views, and for the love of god and little green apples, COMPROMISE.
*looks around sheepishly, gets off soapbox*
Um, yeah. My point being, radicalism is bad.
Ayezur, I think I can add you to the list of about 5 liberals I can respect
Have you heard about this: Moonbat School Principal Kicks Marine Off-Campus, Then Lies About It
Matthew Lund and Zach Richardson were college roommates. After college Richard joined the Marines and Lund started teaching. Richardson went to Iraq, Lund to Carson Middle School, there to teach a 6th grade language arts class.
As a class assignment Lund gave his students the opportunity to write a letter to Sgt. Richardson in Iraq. Richardson wrote back and gave the class the names of five other Marines who would like to receive letters. Soon other middle school classes were also sending letters to the Marines in Iraq.
When Sgt. Richardson returned to the United States he told Matthew Lund that he wanted to come to the Carson Middle School to personally thank the students for their support and letters. Lund filled out and submitted a “Resource Visitor or Guest Speaker Form” and submitted it to Principal Corbett. Lund says he never got the form back from Corbett. He says he asked the Principal about the form, and was told that she was not going to look at it.
Lund says that he realized his request to have Sgt. Richardson visit the school was going to be ignored by Ulrica Corbett. He made the decision to proceed with the plans for the visit, a visit that took place, or was to take place on May 23rd, one week before Memorial Day.
When Sgt. Richardson showed up at the Carson Middle School Lund took him to the school’s media center to prepare to meet the students. At that point, according to Lund, Principal Corbett called him into the hall and told him that the Marine was not approved to be at the school. Lund told Corbett that the proper form had been submitted and had been ignored. Corbett’s response was “that’s your problem, not mine.” Lund’s version of the discussion with Corbett in the hallway suggests that Corbett harbored a great deal of hostility toward Sgt. Richardson and Matthew Lund. She told Lund that the students had not earned the visit from the Marine, and closed the discussion with Lund with the phrase “what part of what we just discussed do you not understand?” She then ordered Matthew Lund to escort Sgt. Richardson off the school campus.
Getting lost in the outrage over the abuses by a clearly over the top teacher is that this “dispositions” crap is now the law of the land, declared so by people who have no authority to make laws and are creating mandates to be carried out by those who salaries are paid for with our tax dollars. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts there aren’t very many elected officals in this county that are aware of it any more than any of us who visit this site-until Ms. Parmar. For my part I’m sending copies of the article and the pdf files from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s web site to every elected offical I know and then some. Maybe some out for a little lime light congressman will convene a hearing.
Dan - I hope that was tongue in cheek b/c I don’t know even 5 conservatives that I can respect (sounds almost as ridiculous as your comment but then again I am truly joking).
Moonbat — hmmmmmm more liberal bashing. You might have just used the term “idiot” since not all liberals would have kicked a Marine off campus. But if you want to talk about moonbats, we can chat about Bob Jones University for a while or those crazed folks in Kansas that want to turn the clock back to the 15th century in Biology classes across the state.
Law of the land? how so? And my tax dollars are going to fund, among other useless things, those bridges to nowhere in Alaska - where is your complaint about those wasted millions? Also, unless you are speaking of President Bush’s NCLB programs (or some other federal program that the Republican Congress and White House have enacted or left in place), it’s not “our” tax dollars.
Unless I am mistaken, and plenty of the comments I read imply that I am, this is a site that exposes the supidity of Zero Tolerance polices and not a place where the right gets a free pass to bash the left. Look at where many of these Zero Tolerance policies are coming from - smack dab in the middle of those bastions of conservatism, Red States. It is not a right and left thing, it is an issue of stupidity.
Ayezur - unfortunately it is more than a tone, it appears to be a fact. Usually one sees the blame the Liberals comment somewhere in the thread - unless it is replaced with a blame the lawyers post. Unfortunately this blame game distracts the reader from the true source of the problem - the local school board polices that condone ZT in the first place.
Back on target here - What a load of Cr@p! Who is running that nuthouse Brooklyn?
Zero Tolerance is not a liberal/conservative issue. It is a stupidity issue. Zero tolerance was birthed under Clinton with the Gun Free Schools Act(s). As observer pointed out the Bush administration has done nothing to remove it. ZT transcends anything left or right - politicians and administrations on every side are guilty of enacting and enforcing these policies.
*points at Jim* What he said. I just felt a decry the woman for calling herself a liberal.