Garbled Expectations

The announcement that NCATE has decided to remove a “disposition” for “social justice” as a condition for teacher accreditation comes as welcome news to anyone who understands the importance of protecting teachers from vaguely defined political litmus tests. Apparently, however, NCATE President Dr. Arthur Wise remains bereft of any such understanding.
 
After finally deciding to remove the “social justice” criterion from his organization’s accreditation guidelines, Dr. Wise remarked that he was nonetheless “hard-pressed to understand” how FIRE thought NCATE’s guidelines constituted a “code” in the first place. Moreover, Dr. Wise remarked, NCATE standards “do not expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies.”
 
Dr. Wise’s organization might retain more credibility, both with its members and with the public, if it refrained from propagating guidelines that are not only dangerously vague, but that the president does not expect to enforce.