NCATE, the powerful body headed by Art Wise that accredits about half of the country's teacher education programs, recently decided to drop a controversial standard that it had been using to evaluate ed schools.

The standard called for programs to evaluate whether or not future teachers were committed to "social justice" as part of the larger task of making sure they have the "dispositions necessary to help all students learn." Conservatives attacked the "social justice" standard as being both vague and politically loaded--sort of an ideological litmus test for future teachers.

Wise was smart to drop the language: the politics of ed schools are unlikely to change as a result of something so small, anyway.