In response to my posting, NCATE Eats Crow, George asks astutely, “[B]ut will the crow be digested”? And of course it is all too true that educratic organizations such as NCATE, in whose interest it is not to roil the waters, are eminently capable of stating one thing and implementing quite the opposite.

But whether NCATE can be trusted to keep its promise and actually end its advocacy of politically correct, “dipositional” litmus tests for evaluating prospective teachers may be something of a canard. The organization has presided in many other ways, and systematically, over the degradation of our public schools. It’s hard to see that this overall decline could be reversed, as long as NCATE remains the gatekeeper–even if it did drop its scandalous endorsement of “dispositions” indoctrination. Which leads one to conclude: The U.S. Department of Education should not be re-authorizing NCATE as an accrediting body. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings should refuse to sign such a reauthorization.