Multiculturalism’s Teacher Education Dictatorship

By Nicholas Stix
Circa August, 2005
Middle American News

Who teaches the teachers? Recent incidents in which teacher education professors and administrators persecuted students, exemplify a racist, totalitarian movement, in which the people entrusted with training teachers seek to turn all of America’s public school teachers into political apparatchiks, brainwashing them, and through them, America’s children, in order to bring about an anti-white, Marxist revolution. Teacher education programs combine repression, revolutionary politics, counterproductive pedagogy and pseudo-scholarship.

At the Brooklyn College campus of the City University of New York, students in the required course “Language Literacy in Secondary Education” who disagreed with instructor Priya Parmar’s advocacy for “ebonics” were persecuted and given low grades. As reported by Jacob Gershman in the June 3 New York Sun, students said that Parmar, the only instructor who teaches the course, “denounced white people as the oppressors.” Meanwhile, Scott McConnell was expelled by Jesuit LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, for declaring in the personal philosophy of teaching he was assigned to write, that he opposes multiculturalism and believes in corporal punishment.

When Brooklyn College students disagreed with Priya Parmar’s advocacy for so-called ebonics, and supported the teaching of Standard English, she shut them out of class discussions. Students then complained to the Brooklyn College administration. As the Sun reported, “‘Most troubling of all,’ [student Evan] Goldwyn wrote, ‘she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 911 should not become teachers.’”

Parmar allegedly retaliated, by claiming that Goldwyn and another student who disagreed with her were guilty of “plagiarism,” and lowered their grades. She also reportedly got a colleague, Barbara Winslow, to attempt to organize a campaign against Goldwyn. Winslow wrote to Goldwyn’s other professors, claiming that the School of Education had “serious concerns about his disruptive behavior in the SOE classroom as well as aggressive and bullying behavior toward his professor outside the class.”

The charge of plagiarism related to quotations in teacher “lesson plans” that Goldwyn and the other student had prepared. But one cannot be guilty of plagiarism based on an unattributed quotation in a lesson plan. Thus was the “plagiarism” charge dishonest and a form of political retaliation.

At LeMoyne College, as Scott McConnell told me, he had never claimed that he would engage in corporal punishment, just that “based on personal experience and research,” he understood it to have been shown to have beneficial results. “Not once did I mention that I would enforce it.” However, his professor, Mark J. Trabucco, passed along McConnell’s paper to Cathy Leogrande, the director of the Graduate Education Program, who expelled him. Leogrande wrote to McConnell on January 13, 2005, “I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the LeMoyne College program goals.”

The relevant passage of McConnell’s paper reads thusly:

“I do not feel that multicultural education has a philosophical place or standing in an American classroom, especially one that I will teach. I also feel that corporal punishment has a place in the classroom and should be implemented when needed.”

McConnell had maintained a 3.78 average, and got glowing evaluations for 64-hours spent as a student teacher.

McConnell told me that he still hopes to continue his training and become a teacher.

McConnell filed suit against LeMoyne College on May 4. He seeks immediate reinstatement as a student at LeMoyne College, protection from retaliation by the various defendants, and a total of $40 million for the violation of his First Amendment rights, the infliction of emotional distress, and punitive damages. He is represented by local attorney Sam Abady, and by Michael E. Rosman of the Center for Individual Rights, and supported by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org).

McConnell’s attorneys have been able to use statements LeMoyne Provost John Smarelli Jr. made on March 15 to CNN host Aaron Brown, where Smarelli claimed that McConnell’s beliefs were in violation of New York State law, to argue that LeMoyne officials were acting “under color of law.”

There are no laws against having certain beliefs in America; Smarelli not only invented laws, but expounded on them on national TV.

In their filing, McConnell’s attorneys argued that LeMoyne College officials violated his rights under the federal and New York State constitutions, New York education law, and as set out in their own college handbook. The attorneys showed as well that, contradicting LeMoyne officials, large bodies of scholarship challenge both multiculturalism and the bias against all corporal punishment.

In the case of Brooklyn College, the School of Education was enforcing the similar notion of “dispositions.”

College teacher education programs have a stranglehold on the credentialing of public school teachers. The nation’s largest organization accrediting college teacher education programs, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), has decreed that teacher education students be graded based on their “dispositions.” And the required “disposition” is “multiculturalism,” a mixture of revolutionary Marxism and anti-white racism. Thus can failing an illegal political litmus test cause the education of an academically superior student and excellent classroom teacher to be wasted, and his career to be destroyed before it has even begun. NCATE dominates teaching accreditation in 46 states.

Priya Parmar and the other multiculturalists who dominate teacher education call one of their central ideas “language rights.” According to “language rights” dogma, there is no common language in America, but countless “minority languages” and a “majority language” that no “minority language” speaker is obligated to learn. Blacks may speak “ebonics,” and Hispanics may speak Spanish or the unintelligible mishmash of “Spanglish.” Then why spend billions of taxpayer dollars on English and remedial education classes? For multiculturalists, such classes function in order to retard students’ (particularly minority students’) educational progress, to hire minority teachers—many of whom are themselves functionally illiterate—and as political indoctrination programs.

Multiculturalists claim that black and Hispanic children learn Standard English better through pedagogy using black slang (“Ebonics”) and Spanish (“bilingualism”), respectively, than through pedagogy using Standard English. However, the opposite is true. “Bilingual” and “Ebonics” education are proven failures.

John Russell Rickford, a Stanford University professor of linguistics and education, and one of the leading advocates of teaching black children Standard English via readers written in black dialect (aka African-American Vernacular English aka Ebonics), claims in the book he co-wrote with his son, Russell John Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, that research has shown that black children make great gains using dialect readers written in “Ebonics.” However, the research carried out on poor black children in East Palo Alto, CA by the elder Rickford and his wife, Angela, who is also a professor of education and linguistics at Stanford, failed miserably, a fact the book does not mention. Afrocentric allies of the Rickfords, such as Keith Gilyard, an English professor at Penn State University, have for years spread the falsehood that the Rickfords’ experiment was a success.

In John and Angela Rickford’s research, as laid out in their 1995 paper, “Dialect Readers Revisited,” they showed that black children taught with Standard English readers did almost twice as well as those taught with black dialect (“Ebonics”) readers. The students taught in black dialect scored only 46.3% correct on a reading comprehension test, as opposed to the students who were taught and tested on Standard English readers, who scored 90% correct. And it’s no wonder, when one considers the sort of slangy, baby talk dialect the Rickfords seek to inflict on seventh-graders (12 and 13-year-olds).

“This here little Sister name Mae was most definitely untogether. I mean, like she didn’t act together. She didn’t look together. She was just an untogether Sister.

“Her teacher was always sounding on her ‘bout day dreaming in class. I mean, like, just ‘bout every day the teacher would be getting on her case. “But it didn’t seem to bother her none. She just kept on keeping on. Like, I guess daydreaming was her groove. And you know what they say: “don’t knock your Sister’s groove. But a whole lotta people did knock it. But like I say, she just kept on keeping on.”

The incidents at LeMoyne and Brooklyn colleges were not flukes. Similar situations will continue to occur, until promising candidates can become teachers without teacher education degrees, and teacher education professors and accreditation organizations lose their power.

Candace de Russy, a trustee of the State University of New York and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, who has for years fought multiculturalism told this reporter,

“‘Dispositions’ is teaching these students not how to think critically, but rather a manipulative and coercive type of pedagogy basically dictating left-leaning political views these future teachers must have. It is indoctrination and not education.

“Not requiring poor and minority students to write and speak Standard English is a grave injustice to them. They need this command of Standard English to survive and to prosper and to fulfill their obligations as citizens….

“These young Americans—teachers and students—are being consciously taught to reject our common language and first principles, and underlying that is the notion that America is singularly oppressive and evil and that is dangerous to this country.”

Multiculturalists seek to isolate most blacks and Hispanics into cultural islands of poverty, ignorance, and hatred, the better eventually to use them as revolutionary storm troopers, and turn an educational dictatorship into a political dictatorship.

Postscript, January 10, 2023:

In January, 2006, the Appellate Division of the New York state Supreme Court ruled that LeMoyne had to permit Scott McConnell to enroll in classes for the spring semester.

“LeMoyne College will appeal a court decision ordering the school to accept a student into its graduate teaching program who was rejected because he wrote a paper advocating corporal punishment, administrators said Thursday.

“In the meantime, the Jesuit school said it would abide by the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday and allow Scott McConnell to enroll in classes for the spring semester.”

“LeMoyne Has No Shame,” by Charles Mitchell, The Fire, January 20, 2006.

I’m trying to find out what the ultimate disposition of McConnell’s case was.

In Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, the Rickfords discussed this writer’s most famous exposé of “Ebonics” at great length.

“More often than not, though, anti-Ebonics crusaders left the authors of the [Oakland Ebonics] resolution alone after one or two jabs. Unfortunately, it was the black community at large that that sometimes took the roundhouse punch.

“This was the case with ‘Ebonics: Bridge to Illiteracy,’ a long, searing five-page essay penned by Nicholas Stix and published in a libertarian magazine. Like many other columnists, Stix believed Ebonics to be a dangerously subversive scheme. And like several other columnists, he wound up revealing some of his own deep-seated stereotypes and animosities while slamming the proposal.

“Arguing that a federal government with a jones for ‘counter-institutions’ was coaxing Afrocentrists out of the cracks, Stix declared that

‘The movement for Ebonics is just one division of the movement for bilingual education in which we see the partnership of the welfare state and racism in making the world safe for illiteracy.’

“Stix certainly had a right to protest the possibility that national funds would be spent on an Ebonics program he considered backward and sure to fail. But not only is the notion that illiteracy is a necessary consequence of Ebonics ignorant and insulting, it requires us to look at peculiarities of culture as if they were determinants of ability, an exercise that leads irrevocably to racism. And yet this antagonism toward Ebonics, bilingual education, and other perceived tabernacles of ‘liberalism’ was merely symptomatic of the fever for ‘pure’ English and for a homogenous America that we were suffering from during the time of the Ebonics affair—and that we will likely continue to suffer from well into the twenty-first century. In such a climate of intolerance, it’s only natural to blame the victim.

“Stix was not alone in crying racism while propping up distinctly racist attitudes….”

John R. and Russell J. Rickford. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English‎ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).