WHY AM I HERE? Friday saw the first regular meeting of the expanded all-university committee I've been conscripted onto. Should I be offended by the under-representation, both relative to the general population and relative to the faculty, of middle-aged white guys on the committee? (On the other hand, it is a committee structured to provide equal votes for Education and for Liberal Arts, as well as representation by Allied Health and Arts. The pink collar ghettoes of the university?) The fashion statements of a majority of the committee run the usual range of dowdy to frumpy to butch. It's too soon to identify who the scholars are, the true believers, the hacks, suck-ups, and time-servers, and the cynics.

So what did we do? A lot of "the current business is no new business." A statement (complete with our imitation of a biohazard warning label) generalizing the "conceptual framework" to apply to school administrators, as well as to teachers. Some other committee took a look at this statement and recommended some changes. Herewith a sampling.

The tenets of knowledge, practice, and reflection are central to the Teacher Education Educator Preparation Program. Each of these areas is outlined below in relation to candidate knowledge, practice and reflection. The faculty believes that future professional educators need to demonstrate competencies identified by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) for the initial certification programs and by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) appropriate state and national professional associations for the advanced certification/endorsement programs. These competencies, as well as those established by the national organizations in each of the disciplines, are integral to the core tenets of knowledge, practice, and reflection that define the exemplary educator. As such, they are also a part of our University Assessment Plan for Certification in Education.

I don't know how many people labored over this at the other committee, but we had 40 people occupied with ratifying this for about 15 minutes. We also had to be informed of a foul-up affecting our students' ability to obtain background checks. Illinois now requires a state background check, with fingerprints, for aspiring teachers. This is not a Federal background check. A number of local police departments and school boards have not yet gotten the word. Whether the Illinois rules allow, for example, a convicted pedophile from New Jersey with a clean record in Illinois to become a teacher I don't know. But the absence of cooperation between school boards and local police on the background checks is yet another symptom of governance-in-a-vacuum. Perhaps the authorities in New Orleans had no idea where the school buses were, because the school board never told the police.