Education Schools Have Long Been Mediocre. Now They’re Woke Too

At the time, I figured my experience was unique. Surely, I thought, other teacher-prep programs focused on human cognition, behavioral management, child psychology and other educational practicalities. Alas, my program was mild compared with what current graduates must suffer.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has reviewed the required coursework for 14 programs for teachers-to-be in the Badger State. These programs produce about 80% of all teaching graduates in the state each year. What they found was shocking. Worldview building and ideological manipulation take precedence over teacher preparation.

On the syllabi, noticeably lacking are academic literature or manuals of classroom instruction. Instead, Hollywood movies like “Freedom Writers,” popular books like

Jonathan Kozol’s

“Letters to a Young Teacher,” and propaganda like “Anti-Racist Baby” abound. In place of academic essays, graduate students write personal poems or collect photographs. These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.

The University of Wisconsin-River Falls defines education as a “social justice and change agent.” The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point commits to “anti-racism.” Each program exhibits a philosophy of education called critical pedagogy, made popular by Brazilian Marxist

Paulo Freire,

that envisions schools as places not of academic instruction but of societal change.

Freire, one of the authors assigned most often in schools of education, mapped the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy onto the teacher-student relationship and advocated for what he believed was a liberatory education. He cited the Maoist and Leninist Revolutions as ideals of his thought in action. Where Freire shifts from Marxist ramblings to practical advice, he encourages teachers to spur their students toward discontent with the world around them.

If there’s practical training involved, it’s likely to be about how to discuss LGBTQ+ issues with 3-year-olds. The same philosophy encourages “action civics.” Rather than teaching a straightforward history curriculum, educators are expected to encourage their students to advocate social change.

Wisconsin is no outlier. Progressive activism is flooding American classrooms because teacher-prep programs are steeped in it. In 2019 the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal reviewed the education-school syllabi at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The results are unequivocal,” wrote

Jay Schalin,

the study’s author. “The most influential thinkers in our education schools are radicals who adhere to a collectivist, utopian vision.”

What teachers-to-be aren’t being taught is perhaps even more concerning. The National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed how many schools of education taught prospective elementary-school teachers the “science of reading”—decades-old research that confirms the necessity of phonics, spelling and vocabulary instruction. Only 15% of schools emphasized these elements in 2006, which increased to 22% according to a survey from 2019.

The implications of these syllabi are chilling. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty paper reports almost 2,000 students graduate yearly from Wisconsin’s teacher-training programs. The Teachers College at Columbia University has more than 90,000 alumni. These institutions are producing a teaching workforce imbued with a radical ideology but lacking instructional skills. Their influence over thought, policy, instructional practice and curricula is far-reaching.

Students are the obvious losers. But teachers suffer, too. It’s almost a rite of passage that every teacher must go through hell his first year. Partly this is a function of getting used to the job, but it’s also a reflection of how ill-prepared they are by their training to stand in front of a classroom full of students.

Training and credentialing programs have been dumping mediocrity into American schools for decades. The system is so entrenched, perhaps the answer isn’t reforming the education schools but getting rid of them. Many successful charter schools employ a mentorship model. They hire enterprising young men and women and then provide rigorous on-the-job training, coaching and support. There are also alternative licensing programs, some of them through universities, that focus on the practicalities of classroom instruction for anyone looking to change careers.

For now, legislators should ease teacher licensing requirements and support any reforms that stop the flow of ideology from schools of education to America’s classrooms. One day a better-trained, ideologically diverse corps of teachers might emerge that is more interested in helping students learn actual content than in filling their heads with progressive politics.

Mr. Buck is the editor of Chalkboard Review, a senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute, and an eighth-grade English teacher at Hope Christian School in Milwaukee.