Education schools want to make sure prospective teachers are politically correct

Robin Wilson:

Partway through her teacher-training program, Karen K. Siegfried started pulling her red compact car to the far end of the campus parking lot. She didn't want her professors at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to see her bumper stickers: One proclaims her opposition to abortion, and the other is emblazoned with the name of one of Alaska's Republican senators.

"It worried me what they could do based on my politics," says Ms. Siegfried, who had already clashed with education professors over her views on affirmative action and gun control. When Ms. Siegfried disagreed with one professor's contention that video games make children violent, she says, the professor told her: "We don't need that kind of attitude."

Although she earned a 3.75 grade-point average in the one-year program, Ms. Siegfried says her professors told her last spring that she lacked the "professional disposition" necessary to be a good teacher. She was inflexible, they said, and wasn't open to new ideas or responsive to other cultures. Ms. Siegfried left the teacher-training program, she says, before her professors could show her the door.

She is one of several students — backed by national conservative organizations — who have complained in the last year about education professors who are more interested in students' political views than in their classroom performance. In addition to evaluating whether students are responsible and have good communication skills, for example, some education schools have begun questioning whether students value social justice, acknowledge white privilege, and agree to be change agents in battling sexism, racism, and homophobia.

Some conservative groups have written to members of Congress and the U.S. Education Department, complaining that the questions amount to a political litmus test that violates students' rights to free speech. "It is not the job of a state university," says David A. French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, "to implement an orthodox ideology." Professors, he says, have no business assessing students' dispositions "after a classroom session where they are encouraging students to voice their opinions, and then extrapolating from those that these people cannot teach."

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