The nation’s largest organization accrediting teacher-education programs, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, is doing away with language about social justice from its standards for evaluating teacher-education programs.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education had been criticized for holding that these programs should evaluate students’ professional “dispositions” by considering students’ “beliefs and attitudes such as caring, fairness, honesty and responsibility, and social justice.” Critics said that institutions were using such standards to eliminate prospective teachers on the basis of their social and political beliefs.

The accreditor’s new standard consists in advocating that institutions assess students’ “professional dispositions” by considering students’ sense of “fairness and the belief that all students can learn.”

It remains to be seen whether the many ideologues in teacher preparation schools will twist the “fairness” standard so as to continue to impose their sociopolitical views on would-be teachers.