RESCUING SOCIAL JUSTICE IN EDUCATION: A CRITIQUE OF THE NCATE CONTROVERSY

Abstract

1Initially, many educators were disappointed by what seemed like an abrupt removal of this educational value. But in the years since, little has been said or done to understand what, exactly, happened behind the scenes to prompt NCATE to abandon its commitment to the value of social justice. In this paper, my aim is to both reconstruct the story of how this apparently controversial principal was quietly taken out of NCATE‘s glossary, and to examine the motives behind the decision to remove social justice from educational discourse. Why did these two words become a threat to so many policy makers? What do these words mean to those who acted to remove them? In the process of investigating this obscure bureaucratic action, I discovered, among other things, that the claim of NCATE‘s political neutrality—a status it conveniently designates for itself—needs to be exposed as a demonstrable falsehood.