George Will on Education Schools

Posted on | January 9, 2006

Conservatives attacking public education and teachers is one sure-fire way to get me really pissed off. As the son of a teacher with over thirty-five years of experience, I have watched my mother struggle with students who do not want to learn, parents who do no want to get involved, and politicians targeting her and her colleagues for no reason other than posturing. I also have first hand experience working in the classroom as I was sometimes recruited to help with things when extra adults were needed. So you can imagine my reaction to an article from Newsweek via MSNBC entitled “Ed Schools vs. Education” by George F. Will.

The article is an indictment of universities who enforce the “professional disposition” requirement set forth by the National Council for Accreditation in addition to passing their course work. Of course to Will “professional disposition” reads “liberal” because the NCA defines a professional disposition as being “guided by beliefs and attitudes related to values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social justice”. He cites the case of Karen Seigfried, a student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Seigfried was an education major with a 3.75 GPA who was told she lacked the professional disposition after voicing conservative viewpoints. But Will never tells us exactly what those viewpoints were. They could have been as innocuous as stating her beliefs on the war in Iraq, in which case I would side with her, or they could have been a potential liability to a school district she might have worked for in the future such as stating a negative opinion on homosexuality or why the poor should be blasted into space.

When I read the term “professional disposition”, I think of potential liability to the school which Miss Seigfried might have been if the conservative views she voiced . There have been a lot of lawsuits in recent years over treatment towards students by teachers and school administration. One of the more common ones are lawsuits against schools that fail to deal with anti-gay bullying. Some of the verdicts have been pretty hefty and in the era of school budget problems, a lawsuit does not help. But in terms of teachers specifically, the need for a “professional disposition” requirement is exemplified in the case of Thomas McLaughlin in 2003.

Thomas was a fourteen year-old student at Jacksonville Junior High School in Jacksonville, Arkansas, when he realized his homosexuality. He came out to some of his closer friends at school but did not feel comfortable with coming out to his parents at that point. The school administration got wind of it and called a meeting with Thomas’ mother and informed her that her son was gay. Anyone with common sense knows that this is a horribly cruel thing to do to a person. In 1997, a Pennsylvania teenager committed suicide after a local police officer threatened to tell his parents he was gay. The resulting lawsuit ended up in a $100,000 judgment against Minersville.

But the administration was not alone as the teachers got in on it too. Thomas was made to read from the bible, a clear violation of the first amendment’s establishment clause, and had to listen to teachers tell him he was “unnatural” and “abnormal”. When he told other students he had been forced to read from the bible, he was suspended for two days. the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the school district an won a settlement which included a formal apology to Thomas, $25,000 in damages, and a series of policy changes.

When it comes to certain professions I am a firm believer that certain things like religion and politics are to be left at the door. In a previous entry, entitled “The Battle for the Pharmacy”, I stated that pharmacists are one such profession. Teaching is another one. A teacher is there to teach, not to espouse political views, proselytize a particular religion, or anything else. Curriculum is developed on both local and state levels with some mandates from the federal government and it is a teacher’s job to teach that curriculum. Any teacher who does the kind of bullshit like what happened to Thomas should be fired immediately and their teaching license revoked.

Will mentions that this whole thing leads to teachers with professional disposition but lack quality in terms of ability. He cites a statistic that says “Fewer than half of U.S. eighth graders have math teachers who majored in math as undergraduates or graduate students or studied math for teacher certification.” Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought George W. Bush fixed stuff like that with the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law that was passed in 2002? In fact, here is what The White House says on the highly qualified teacher requirement:

“districts are required to demonstrate annual progress in ensuring that all teachers teaching in core academic subjects within the State are highly qualified.”

I got the sense that in his column, Will was implying that once these “low-quality” teachers with good professional disposition were hard to get rid of once they got tenured. It is actually a misconception that a tenured teacher is hard to remove unless they do something really bad like molest a student. I once asked a teacher who worked for the Michigan Education Association and was told that teachers can be removed for poor teaching quality, psychological reasons, or on a “morals charge” (Note: A “morals charge” are things like looking at porn on school computers, inappropriate touching, etc.). And, unless the teacher is genuinely being wronged, usually the threat of going before the tenure board will get a resignation.

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