Grad Schools Are Training Activists, Not Teachers

(Daily Signal)—Who is teaching the teachers? Critical theorists, DEI peddlers, and all manner of indoctrinators who have weaponized the American education system to further their ideological and cultural goals.

That’s my conclusion after reading a study released Wednesday by the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Buck.

Buck reviewed the syllabi of many of America’s top graduate schools of education and found that they were not only ideologically uniform, but that they were mostly “advancing dogmas grounded in progressive and critical theory frameworks rather than exposing prospective teachers to intellectually diverse ideas and training them in pragmatic instruction and classroom management methods.”

Most Americans have caught on to the reality that our nation’s top schools are overwhelmingly bastions of the Left. But many still don’t realize just how much the ideological bent of these schools affects nearly every major institution across the Western world.

What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. Instead, the political and cultural milieu that’s fostered there is spread everywhere else, by design. And nowhere is that impact more pernicious than in K-12 classrooms.

Buck stressed that among the institutions he was able to review there was a heavy emphasis on “immutable characteristics and activism” rather than “preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom.”

For instance, teachers are being taught to “queer education” rather than teach math. Future teachers are being told that special needs education requires an “anti-capitalist politic” and “collective liberation.”

“That these critical texts appear so frequently, often without any degree of traditional or practical balance, presents to the outsider a concerning picture about the state of these institutions,” Buck wrote.

Graduate schools of education are explicitly putting ideology above rigorous pedagogy of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Buck offered some specific examples.

The UCLA program instructs future teachers to “embody a social justice agenda”; “attend to the moral, cultural, and political dimensions of teaching”; and “mirror the diverse, caring, anti-racist, socially responsible learning communities.”

The focus is primarily on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Buck provided a list of some of the articles provided for CSUN’s “reflective teaching course.”

• “Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis into Teacher Education”
• “Queer of Color Literacies as Subversive Reading Practice: How Queer Students of Color Subvert Power in the Classroom”
• “Queering Elementary Education: A Queer Curriculum for 4th Grade”
• “Striving for Critical Reflection in Multicultural and Social Justice Teacher Education: Introducing a Typology of Reflection Approaches”

At the University of Texas at Austin, Buck found numerous readings that relied on critical theory, like “Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible?,” “Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective,” and “Writing, Rioting, and Righting Como Negra: A Testimonio of Black Latinx Erasure in Bilingual Education.”

The syllabus for one of the courses at UT Austin began with a land acknowledgement and warned against “an onslaught of political attacks around issues of race, gender and sexuality” that have been “particularly intense in our state.”

This was just a smattering of what Buck found.

These institutions not only teach the teachers, but they also largely control who can become a teacher to begin with. They are training the indoctrinated to go forth and convert America’s children. They provide administrative and teaching staff for schools all over the country.

The bias is systemic. Our education system has been turned into a vast machine of ideological replication.

As Buck noted in his report, “many state and district policies encourage or even require teachers to pursue master’s degrees.”

While it can be possible to become a teacher without pursuing one of these advanced degrees, the path to success is often narrow, limited, and capped.

He wrote that many states “mandate automatic salary increases for teachers with such degrees, and two states actually require teachers to earn a master’s to become fully licensed. Even if states don’t explicitly mandate such pay bumps, 90 percent of the nation’s largest school districts pay teachers with advanced degrees more.”

This despite evidence that advanced degrees provide no guarantee of quality teachers. In fact, according to one study Buck cited, there is some evidence that graduate degrees make teachers worse at their jobs, assuming that their job is educating America’s schoolchildren. Clearly, it isn’t.

It’s easy to see why K-12 education, even in deep-red states typically skews far to the left.

Schools are being fed a steady diet of teachers who have been taught to put activism first. Other teaching skills, in Buck’s assessment, are often shunted to the side, treated as merely ancillary to the primary role of the teacher as an activist.

So, what needs to be done?

It’s highly unlikely that these graduate schools of education will suddenly reform themselves.

As I’ve written time and again, DEI, critical theory, and the constellation of ideas that we often call “wokeness” is essentially their religion.

What must be done is first to break their grip on the gatekeeping function they’ve created for themselves.

Drop certification requirements that demand new teachers must have graduate teaching degrees. Allow schools to have greater flexibility in how they hire and from where.

Break the chain that tethers the ideological conformity of higher ed to America’s K-12 system. That will both open the pool of hiring to those who haven’t gone through the ideological wringer and will additionally pressure graduate schools of education to reform or see their pool of students dry up.

Maybe then the schools that decide to get back to basics, that place emphasis on a traditional education will be rewarded by making their graduates more desirable to K-12 schools, and especially to fed up parents.

Just as importantly, we need to start defunding these schools. Stop giving away federal loans to essentially fund programs that rely on critical theory and all manner of toxic nonsense.

The end of the West is being funded by American taxpayers. That needs to stop.

Nothing will change until the power these graduate schools have within the whole system is shattered.