Dispositions Victory
I’m hoping that the NCATE move will bring to an end my involvement with “dispositions,” a term I first encountered on November 29, 2004, when the head of the Social Studies Ed program at Brooklyn e-mailed me. The e-mail asked me to supply negative information about one of my students, Evan Goldwyn, since:
We have some serious concerns about his disruptive and bullying behavior in the SOE classroom as well as aggressive and bullying behavior towards his professor outside the class . . . The School of Ed is trying to be more systematic in looking at what educators call"dispositions," that is behaviors necessary for being a successful teacher in the public schools. Being able to do excellent academic work, does not always translate into being a thoughtful, self reflective and effective teacher for youngsters.
Evan was a wonderful student—very smart, very hard-working, about whom my only real problem was that he occasionally didn’t speak up enough in class. I e-mailed back to say this, after which point my feedback was no longer desired. (Politically, Evan struck me as centrist or perhaps center-right, but hardly a strong conservative.) I also asked a colleague, Margaret King, to do some background investigation into the concept of “dispositions,” since I had an article deadline at the time.
Margaret worked her way through Ed literature to note the link between the idea of “dispositions” and using Ed programs to promote “social justice.” At that point, I had still never heard of NCATE, and assumed that “dispositions” was another tool brought in by Brooklyn College provost Roberta Matthews, who since her installation in 2001 has zealously redefined college personnel and curricular policies to implement her written mantra that “teaching is a political act.”
Meanwhile, I heard back from Evan and two other students of mine, Christina Harned and Simon Tong, that the Education course’s instructor demanded that they recognize “white English” as the “oppressors’ language,” and, without explanation, had the class spend its session before Election Day 2004 screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The alleged “bullying” behavior came when several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicized content, prompting her to inform them that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice. The three students, as well as a fourth, Scott Madden, who had a similar experience with the same instructor the previous semester, communicated this information to the dean of the Brooklyn Ed School. Five other students would subsequently file statements.
The students’ coming forward had negative consequences. One month later, Evan and Christina were accused of violating the college’s “academic integrity” policy on their course final projects, the development of five “diversity” lesson plans for a social studies class. The assignment explicitly gave students permission to cut and paste state guidelines from the internet, and stated they were only to list sources they would distribute to their hypothetical class. Evan was faulted for not providing sufficient footnotes, in an assignment that required no footnotes, Christina for copying two items from the internet (one of which was the definition of Jim Crow, which most people would consider coming under the concept of common knowledge) in one of her lesson plans. By this definition of plagiarism, just about every student at the college and most professors would be guilty at some point in their careers.
Brooklyn has a clear four-step procedure on plagiarism, which culminates in an appeal to the undergraduate dean. But for Evan and Christina, this process was abandoned. Instead, their initial meeting occurred with the instructor and the undergraduate dean, who refused them permission (on tape) to bring a witness, a tape recorder, or an attorney to the meeting and then pronounced them guilty. As I’ve noted in other contexts recently, if my Brooklyn experience has taught me nothing else, it’s that the blatant corruption of normal procedures rarely conceals benign intent.
Blocked at the college level, the students went public, giving interviews to Jacob Gershman, then the higher education reporter for the New York Sun. Gershman spent several months working on his article, mastered the dispositions literature, and did his best to speak to those on the other side of the issue. (Both the instructor and her supervisor declined comment to the Sun; the Ed dean gave a brief nasty comment about the students but little else.) The resulting story was a model of how the press can bring sunlight to the academy and explain some of its less appealing aspects to the public at large.
Gershman’s article stimulated a firestorm. Fox News’ David Miller brought the issue to a national television audience. At Brooklyn, the local branch of CUNY’s indefatigable faculty union, the PSC, scheduled a special “academic freedom” meeting—operating under the premise that “academic freedom” gives professors authority to punish students for challenging their in-class viewpoints on controversial contemporary issues. PSC president Barbara Bowen demanded that CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein issue a public statement condemning the Gershman article—assuming that “academic freedom” is irreconcilable with freedom of the press. Goldstein, of course, demurred, and it quickly emerged that no other Ed program at CUNY was following Brooklyn’s peculiar conception of “social justice” education.
Gershman’s story helped trigger a more national examination of the issue, bringing to light cases even more grotesque than Brooklyn’s. Washington State’s Education program developed its own “dispositions” form, which it applied in Owellian fashion to a conservative student named Ed Swan. Education professors contended that anyone who opposed affirmative action lacked a “disposition” to promote “social justice,” and therefore shouldn’t be a public school teacher—even though Washington voters, in 2000, had approved a referendum outlawing the use of race-based policies in education. In effect, Washington State sought to exclude a majority of the state’s voters from becoming schoolteachers, solely on the grounds of their political beliefs.
Swan went to FIRE, which, as only FIRE can do, initiated a highly effective public relations campaign on his behalf. On campus, two professors from political science took up the cause, correctly noting the irrelevance between a student’s political views and his or her ability to teach. Under mounting local pressure, Washington State backed down.
By this point, NCATE was on the defensive for trying to hide an enormous change in teacher education policy through a little-noticed modification in its 2002 “dispositions” guidelines. NCATE president Arthur Wise tried to blame the individual programs, commenting that Brooklyn’s behavior was “aberrant”; Brooklyn, in turn, claimed that it had no choice but to screen students ideologically in order to maintain accreditation. The system was perfect: both NCATE and the individual school could (unconstitutionally, in the case of public colleges and universities) purge students of unacceptable political beliefs, but retain plausible deniability for being responsible for the action.
This bureaucratic sleigh-of-hand failed to survive the next press inquiry into dispositions, a major article by Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Wilson detailed some of the outlandish “social justice” rhetoric through which NCATE was now requiring Education programs to screen prospective public school teachers. As a result of the article, NCATE ordered education schools to assess students’ dispositions based solely on"observable behavior in the classroom,” and added that it did"not expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies.”
This statement appeared to end the matter, but then Wise started to backtrack, suggesting that “social justice” still represented a litmus test for teachers. So FIRE, ACTA, and NAS mobilized. Each developed impressive statements urging the Department of Education to strip NCATE of its powers. And NCATE, realizing that its attempt to use dispositions theory to create an ideologically homogenous generation of public school teachers could badly backfire, retreated.
The entire affair demonstrates two important points. First, there’s nothing necessarily harmful in outside commentary on academic affairs—even if, as is often the case, that outside interest also has political or ideological motivations. The Gershman article was a great piece of journalism. Absent the outside pressure from FIRE, NASA, or ACTA, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that Education departments would have modified their dispositions policies. If outside criticism is flawed, or makes unsustainable arguments, of course it should be condemned—just as if criticism from inside the academy suffers from the same shortcomings. But the press or activists have a right to comment about higher education, and in today’s ideologically one-sided academy, often can provide a necessary balance.
Second, individual students can make a difference. Lots of advocacy groups, professors, and individual activists contributed to NCATE’s retreat. But, in the end, this victory belongs to Evan Goldwyn, Christina Harned, Scott Madden, and Simon Tong. Their willingness to make their opinions known, and their courage in sticking to their guns despite highly inappropriate actions by the college administration, set the stage for the issue going national. In this respect, the actions of four students at Brooklyn College will improve the experiences of thousands of Education students nationally in the years to come.