ABSTRACT
At some point in the spring of 2003, the semester before I became an assistant dean in the School of Education at Brooklyn College, I realized something had radically changed in how my colleagues were talking about teaching, education, and their life in schools. Having been subjected the previous two years to New York State’s new regulations governing teacher certification, having spent hours in meetings frantically plotting how to meet these mandates, and now having to face the daunting task of preparing for a visit in 2005 from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), professors increasingly filled their conversations with talk of outcomes, performance data, alignment of standards, rubrics, grids, and how to “tweak” or “jury-rig” or simply fabricate course syllabi or bulletin descriptions to meet some new standard. Program and general faculty meetings consisted more and more of discussions about how to comply with directives from the state or outside agencies and associations. In hallway corners and behind closed doors, faculty whispered threats of leaving and despairing words about the surveillance to which they were being subjected. Less and less audible were conversations about race-after five years the Committee on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity had fallen by the wayside-or about aesthetic education-collaborative efforts with Lincoln Center Institute had declined-or about faculty research interests-monthly discussion groups at which colleagues presented their scholarly work had faded away. Replacing these were discussions about how to meet the NCATE standard for diversity, how to ensure standardization across courses, how to tabulate and collect faculty
publications, and how to formalize a conceptual framework. More and more faculty talked about how Kafkaesque their life had become. This was in the spring of 2003, two years before the actual visit from NCATE.
