Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers.
By: Emily Hanford
Published: Oct 26, 2018
Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.
It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.
How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.
What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.
But talk to teachers and many will tell you they learned something different about how children learn to read in their teacher preparation programs. Jennifer Rigney-Carroll, who completed a master’s degree in special education in 2016, told me she was taught that children “read naturally if they have access to books.” Jessica Root, an intervention specialist in Ohio, said she learned “you want to get” children “excited about what they’re reading, find books that they’re interested in, and just read, read, read.” Kathy Bast, an elementary school principal in Pennsylvania, learned the same thing. “It was just: Put literature in front of the kids, teach the story, and the children will learn how to read through exposure,” she said.
These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”
These ideas had been debunked by the early 2000s. It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words. Many whole-language proponents added some phonics to their approach and rebranded it “balanced literacy.”
But they did not give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when parents and teachers expose children to good books. So, while you’re likely to find some phonics lessons in a balanced-literacy classroom, you’re also likely to find a lot of other practices rooted in the idea that children learn to read by reading rather than by direct instruction in the relationship between sounds and letters. For example, teachers will give young children books that contain words with letter patterns the children haven’t yet been taught. You’ll see alphabetical “word walls” that rest on the idea that learning to read is a visual memory process rather than a process of understanding how letters represent sounds. You’ll hear teachers telling kids to guess at words they don’t know based on context and pictures rather than systematically teaching children how to decode.
Many teachers learn these approaches in their teacher preparation programs. Publishers perpetuate these ideas, and school districts buy in. But colleges of education — which should be at the forefront of pushing the best research — have largely ignored the scientific evidence on reading.
The National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed the syllabuses of teacher preparation programs nationwide and found that fewer than four in 10 taught the components of effective reading instruction identified by research. A study of early-literacy instruction in teacher preparation programs across the University of North Carolina system found that instructional strategies based on research were mentioned “in a cursory way, if at all, on most syllabuses.” (Some instructors required students to write their “personal philosophies” about how to teach reading.) Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute in Mississippi interviewed more than 100 deans and faculty members of schools of education as part of a study of teacher preparation programs in the state and found that most of them could not explain basic scientific principles about how children learn to read.
It’s not just ignorance. There’s active resistance to the science, too. I interviewed a professor of literacy in Mississippi who told me she was “philosophically opposed” to phonics instruction. One of her colleagues told me she didn’t agree with the findings of reading scientists because “it’s their science.”
There is no excuse for this. Colleges of education have to start requiring that their faculties teach the science of reading. Children’s futures depend on it.
Emily Hanford (@ehanford) is a senior education correspondent for APM Reports and the producer of the audio documentary “Hard Words: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?” This article is based on her reporting for that project.
[ Via: https://archive.ph/MIgPZ ]
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[ “Three-cueing” is the “whole word”/”whole language” method. ]
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults, with Dr. Lyell Asher. Includes:
Introduction: Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 1) 1965-75: The Decisive Decade
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 2): College Administrators
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 3): Administrator Training
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 4): University of Delaware Re-Education
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 5): Mainstreaming Microaggressions
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 6): Yale's Halloween Hustle
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 7): Why Authoritarians Love "Intention vs. Impact"
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 8): Ed Schools: Weak Academics & Woke Politics
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 9): From Justice to Social Justice
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 10): Social Justice Illiteracy
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 11): The Knowledge Gap
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 12): The Reading Debacle
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 13): How Ed Schools Won
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 14): Things You Can Do: Higher Ed
Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 15): Things You Can Do: K-12 Schools
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Introductory article: Dr. Lyell Asher: Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults
The series doesn’t of course tell the whole story of higher education’s descent into Woke orthodoxy—it couldn’t. But it does connect a few of the most important phases in that descent to a 100-year history of so-called “progressive”—but in effect, regressive—pedagogical theory in the nation’s k-12 teacher training schools. Despite the great work of writers and researchers like James Koerner, Diane Ravitch, Rita Kramer, John Taylor Gatto, and E.D. Hirsch, to name just a few, that history is largely unknown—not only to the public at large, but to college faculty as well.
At least where faculty are concerned, it’s unlikely that knowing that history and its disastrous consequences for minority and low-income students especially, would dampen their willingness to allow, and often encourage, the abandonment of the fundamental academic values on which their own disciplines have been built. However much the professoriate may identify with the principled freedom of Galileo and Darwin, it does so only in retrospect, after the dust has settled and the victors have been announced. In the moment, it always follows the example of the Church.
But that’s an old story. As I believe Christopher Hitchens once said (I’ve been unable to verify my memory), “There is no more cowardly creature on god’s green earth than a professor with tenure.”
==
This is a rather stunning expose of the current dysfunction in US higher education. It explains that the problem and corruption goes back longer than you think, and isn't with academics like you might suspect.
Dr. Lyell Asher traces the current assault on free speech and academic freedom and integrity back from its origins over 100 years ago, through K-12 education today, and its source in the low standards and ideological pseudoscience of the diploma mills known as America's Schools of Education.
A domain so corrupt that it refuses to even teach kids how to read correctly on purely ideological grounds. The same domain that insists that it alone holds the solutions to the gaps in educational equity... gaps that it created in the first place.
What becomes clear is that the US has everything it needs to fix its educational woes - the studies, the science, the statistics, the reports, the effective, tested pedagogies, everything.
It can fix its problems, but for quasi-theological reasons, it just won't.
All up, it's over an hour in length, but very compelling.
The University of Southern Maine graduate students say professor Christy Hammer's remarks were inaccurate and transphobic.
By: Troy R. Bennett
Published: Sep 29, 2022
UPDATE: Officials at the University of Southern Maine announced Monday they they would not replace a professor who allegedly told her class there were only two biological sexes. Read the story here.
PORTLAND, Maine — Nearly two dozen graduate students at the University of Southern Maine are demanding their education professor be replaced after the professor allegedly said only two biological sexes exist.
The students said professor Christy Hammer’s remarks were inaccurate and transphobic.
After all but one student walked out of Hammer’s class on Sept. 14 in protest, they demanded a facilitated restorative justice meeting between the 22 students and their professor.
They got it, but, according to students, Hammer maintained her position saying non-binary biological sex designations are merely variations on male and female. Now they want Hammer gone.
Biologists believe there is a larger spectrum to sex than just the male-female binary.
University officials have yet to make a decision on the request, but students say they don’t want to return to class until they get a new instructor.
“We don’t want to go back to the classroom with Christy Hammer,” said student Michael Lombardi.
Calls and emails to Hammer were not immediately returned, and the university offered a one-sentence response to multiple questions from the Bangor Daily News.
“We are aware of this situation and are taking steps to provide students with the support needed,” said interim Provost Adam Tuchinsky.
Tuchinsky did not indicate if USM was considering replacing Hammer for the class.
“I want her to do some diversity training at least — or just retire,” said student Elizabeth Leibiger, who plans to become a high school English teacher.
According to several students, the situation began Sept. 7 while Hammer was teaching a graduate course in the Extended Teacher Education Program titled “Creating a Positive Learning Environment.”
The class is required to complete the graduate program and become a certified teacher in Maine.
During the session at Bailey Hall on the Gorham campus, a free-for-all discussion erupted over both social gender and biological sex identifications, with one student and Hammer saying they believed only male and female biological sexes exist.
The rest of the class maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.
The heated discussion was not resolved before the end of the class period.
Leibiger, who is non-binary, was absent from class that week but learned about the incident from classmates. When Leibiger arrived for the next class, on Sept. 14, they immediately brought up the discussion again.
“I asked [Hammer] how many sexes there were,” Leibiger said. “She said, ‘Two.’ I felt under personal attack.”
Leibiger then gathered their things and walked out of class because they no longer felt respected.
“I let her know I didn’t think she was qualified to teach a class about positive learning environments,” Leibiger said. “It’s the ultimate irony.”
After leaving class, Leibiger stopped in Bailey Hall’s lobby where all but one of their classmates joined them after the group also walked out of Hammer’s class.
The students then drafted a letter to the school of Education and Human Development, asking for a facilitated restorative justice meeting with their professor and the single student who agreed with her.
“We thought she was just speaking from a place of ignorance, not hate,” Leibiger said.
The meeting took place Wednesday, and the sole student who had disagreed reportedly apologized to classmates. But Hammer maintained her position on the binary nature of sex.
“I went in very optimistic, but at the end of the three hour session it felt like we weren’t listened to,” said Lombardi, who plans to teach high school science.
Lombardi said he wasn’t sure if he and his classmates would show up to the next scheduled class on Oct. 5 if university administrators didn’t agree to replace Hammer. But he’s hoping it will happen.
“Knowing in my heart, as a teacher, that I always want to have my ears open to what my students are saying, and then not have that reciprocated — it was very frustrating,” Lombardi said.
PORTLAND, Maine — University of Southern Maine officials announced Monday that they would not replace a professor who allegedly told her class there were only two biological sexes.
The alleged incident upset much of professor Christy Hammer’s graduate-level education class, instigating a mass walk out and triggering a facilitated restorative justice meeting last month where many students demanded Hammer be replaced.
Instead, USM will make an alternative, identical class available.
“We have developed an alternative plan for this class and will be opening a new section of this course for those students who would like to move,” university spokesperson Gina Marie Guadagnino said. “The original section taught by professor Hammer will continue for any student who wishes to remain in that class.”
University officials didn’t specify how many students will be moving to the new section, nor did they comment on Hammer’s alleged statements. Hammer did not respond to phone and email messages.
Biologists believe there is a larger spectrum to sex than just the male-female binary.
Student Elizabeth Leibiger, who instigated the walkout, is planning to take the alternative class.
“I think that the next step USM needs to take is being clear what accountability will look like for Christy Hammer,” Leibiger said.
According to several students, the situation began Sept. 7 while Hammer was teaching a graduate course in the Extended Teacher Education Program titled “Creating a Positive Learning Environment.”
The class is required to complete the graduate-level Extended Teacher Education Program and become a certified teacher in Maine.
During the session at Bailey Hall on the Gorham campus, a free-for-all discussion erupted over both social gender and biological sex identifications, with one student and Hammer saying they believed only male and female biological sexes exist.
The rest of the class maintained both biological sexes and social genders are on a spectrum.
The heated discussion spilled over into the next scheduled class on Sept. 14.
A majority of the class then drafted a letter to the Department of Education and Human Development asking for a restorative justice meeting with Hammer.
The meeting took place Wednesday, and the sole student who had disagreed reportedly apologized to classmates. But Hammer maintained her position on the binary nature of sex.
Leibiger hopes the incident will be instructive for the class of future teachers.
“It’s our job as educators to grow and change, address our biases, and above all else, protect every one of our students,” Leibiger said.
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This is creationism.
graduate-level education class
Take careful note. They’re not biologists, they’re teachers. They’re going to go out into the world and teach children this fundamentalist creationism. Schools of Education are politically captured and ideologically compromised, and how this ideology got into the mainstream in the first place.
See: Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults (Part 8): Ed Schools: Weak Academics & Woke Politics
Biologists believe there is a larger spectrum to sex than just the male-female binary.
False. As the author of the linked article states.
Leibiger, who is non-binary
Because of course she is.
“I asked [Hammer] how many sexes there were,” Leibiger said. “She said, ‘Two.’ I felt under personal attack.”
Translation: “Describing objective reality attacks me, because I don’t live in reality.”
the sole student who had disagreed reportedly apologized to classmates.
Translation: “They put this student through a Maoist struggle session.”
USM will make an alternative, identical class available.
Translation: “Those who don’t believe in evolution can take a class in Intelligent Design and pretend they’re equivalent.” Instead of simply failing students who refuse to take legitimate science units, they’re offering “alternative facts” to placate those who are upset by hearing the real ones.
The Jordan Hill article is a great example of what I am currently learning, just as an update I did end up changing majors. I am currently majoring in early childhood education, and the majority of our course work is focused on gender identity and how the teachers emphasis on certain subjects creates bias. Last week we spoke about how more logical subjects make girls feel less competent. Only to be told this week that maybe if teachers focused more on educating and praising girls when they complete a math problem we can help reduce gender and sex bias in the classroom. On today’s topic we will be learning about the gingerbread man/woman to display the complexities of sex and gender identification. I am don’t know if you have heard of the so called gingerbread person, but I just had to say something after reading the hill article.
Yikes.
Yes, I’ve posted about that before. It should go without saying that it’s completely unscientific and requires one to believe that humans did not evolve alongside other species that are sexually dimorphic and exhibit gendered behaviors.
Social constructivism is inherently a form of “intelligent design.” Where Xians believe that an all-powerful god created life, social constructivists believe that an all-powerful oppressor class invented the "lie” of sex and gender and socially engineered everyone into accepting this as “truth” and perpetuate it in the preservation of that power.
Except the most rudimentary study of pretty much any other species, and certainly any mammal, will demonstrate this is obviously false. Which, of course, is why science must be “decolonized” to let non-science be treated like actual science.
And worse, it’s all based on stereotypes. What I have is a slightly different version, but let’s zoom in on some of the detail:
That is, build your identity around tired stereotypes of what “woman-ness” and “man-ness” means, what “feminine” and “masculine” mean.
You can’t be a femme boy, or a tomboy girl. You have to identify along lines of not being a boy or a girl at all.
And of course, the messaging itself will influence children who are still learning to navigate the world and figure out how it works. That, of course, is the point of indoctrination. Pretending that well-understood concepts and language are actually complex allows shallow, juvenile takes to masquerade as intellectual profundities.
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By all means, let’s work on the gender bias in the classroom.
In recent years, a yawning gender gap has opened up in American higher education. Men now account for just 43 percent of enrollment in our nation's colleges and earn only 43% of bachelor's degrees. Not surprisingly, women also account for 60 percent of the nations graduate students.
-- Taken from the report-Gender Equity in Higher Education: 2010-issued by the American Council on Education. The report also found that among undergraduate students over 25, women outnumber men by a two-to-one margin. The largest gender gap was found among African Americans, where 63 percent of all undergraduates were women.
But I don’t think they don’t want to do that, when they’re busy creating the bias. It’s not even a new bias; Christina Hoff Sommers was talking about this 20 years ago.
This, along with being 75% of all homeless, 75% of all suicides, 92% of all workplace deaths, two thirds of all victims of violent crime, 75% of all murder victims and dying 5 years earlier, falls under the broad spectrum suite of “systemic” benefits they experience called “male privilege.”
Certainly, in many countries, girls getting access to a quality education is a very big challenge. However, when we’re talking about luxury beliefs such as the “Genderbread Person,” we’re not talking about Afghanistan or Somalia or Chad. And the activists sure aren’t talking about them.
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You may find Dr. Lyell Asher’s examination of education schools to be enlightening.
https://quillette.com/author/lyell-asher/
He points out that the corruption in ed schools is far older than the current Woke plague that is beleaguering us and threatening the future of all kids, their employability and the competitiveness of the countries where it takes hold.
‘The widest street in the world’ is one witty description of the street that separates the campus of Teachers College from the rest of Columbia University. The current sentiment at research universities that professors of education are ‘lesser breeds without the law’ is one that has been expressed since the beginning of the century. In 1916, Abraham Flexner wrote that education schools had ‘lost their heads’ when they called for the removal of important knowledge as well as trivia from the school curriculum. He complained of their unwarranted devotion to technique, as well as the ‘absurdities and trivialities’ of their course offerings and dissertation topics. In 1929, Irving Babbit of Harvard observed that professors of pedagogy ‘are held in almost universal suspicion in academic circles, and are not infrequently looked upon by their colleagues as downright charlatans.’ Not long thereafter, in 1933, the retiring president of Harvard, Lawrence Lowell, told the Board of Overseers that Harvard’s school of education was a ‘kitten that ought to be drowned.’ During the downsizing of more recent decades, education schools continue to be among the first place universities look for belt-tightening, and in some places, notably Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Duke, such schools have disappeared'
Even those running the schools recognized the problem.
“Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence. [..] Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.”
-- Theodore Sizer (Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education) and Walter Powell (Associate Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education), “Changing Conceptions of the Professor of Education” (1969)
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“... elite education schools are doing an adequate job of conveying fundamental, broad-based knowledge and skills to prospective teachers. The foundations and methods courses we reviewed suggest that faculty at most of these schools are often trying to teach a particular ideology-that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature-without directing their students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view.”
-- David Steiner, Susan Rozen, “A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom” (2004)
By 2004, we can see the threads of what we now know as “other ways of knowing,” social constructivism and the abandonment of educational content in preference to activism.
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I don’t mean to try to put you off from your ambition. More to affirm what you’ve already noticed: that the challenge here is larger than advertised. It’s not merely making it through tertiary education, meeting all the demands and the work that such education entails. But also navigating an authoritarian ideology that has become extremely confident in itself - supremely so, one might even say - and brooks no dissent.
I tip my imaginary hat to you for the challenge that you’re taking on.
As with any young non-believer growing up around fundamentalist religionist parents, you will likely find you have to lie in order to get by. But if you can discreetly find others whose ethics are more liberal and less postmodern Marxian, you may find you’re not as alone here as it might seem.
And hopefully there’ll be more teachers like Jordan Hill and fewer like this.
That is, “gaslight infants and toddlers for their own good.”
As a high school teacher approaching my third year, I look back in despair when I think about how little of what I learned in graduate school was actually connected to the craft of teaching or to what goes on in real classrooms. My experience in the Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) program at Ithaca College is a mirror to a larger trend: that today’s programs seem to focus more on indoctrinating prospective educators into the “social justice” faith, thereby creating more ideological homogeneity throughout the field. I post my story at Heterodox Academy in order to expand the discussion around the impact of intellectual orthodoxy in teacher-training degree and certificate programs.
At Ithaca College, the education department makes no bones about the fact that they expect prospective educators to be, first and foremost, activists and social justice champions–more so than teachers, scholars, and critical thinkers. Visit the department’s homepage, and after two social justice quotes you will see the following disclaimer: “We believe that true excellence in education requires a commitment to equity and social justice.” In fact, to even be considered for the M.A.T. program I had to take a prerequisite course for which the primary text was a book called Teaching to Change the World. This move towards “teaching as activism” is a trend I am seeing proliferate in the field of education, in addition to the humanities and social sciences.
Each course in the M.A.T. program started by criticizing No Child Left Behind, behaviorism, and other theories not currently “in vogue.” At the end of the program we were required to put together an “e-portfolio” explaining, defending, and essentially swearing an oath on the core values of the Ithaca College education department, with special emphasis throughout the program placed on the standards related to diversity and creating a safe learning space. When I asked questions about details or the efficacy of certain methods or philosophies, I was assured firmly and repeatedly that it was “best practice.” When I asked what “best practice” meant, I was told that it is what most scholars in the field believe is the right way of doing things.
I entered the M.A.T program at Ithaca College in 2013 because I expected to be trained in the art of teaching. That is to say, I expected to learn practical pedagogical strategies that would enable me to become an effective educator. Instead, what I got was a militant crash course in ed-psych theories like constructivism and sociocultural theory, and a series of pontifications on issues of race, gender, literacy, and second language acquisition. I also expected that since I was receiving an M.A.T. with an English concentration there would be some kind of rigorous immersion in American and British literature, or even young-adult or children’s literature. Not so. Instead we were required to take “Multicultural Literature” and “Global Literature.”
Throughout the 13-month program, we were constantly put through what felt to me like social justice litmus tests. My first presentation had to do with ensuring comfort and safety for gay, transgender, and other marginalized students. Another module involved a unit on understanding African American English–with the goal of convincing us that African American English has its own internal system of logic that often improves upon that of standard written English. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the amount of time we spent on these types of issues is difficult to justify. Teaching is a high-stakes, high-pressure profession. We are expected to teach five or more classes a day, advise clubs, contact parents, plan lessons, grade assignments, and, most importantly, equip students with the knowledge and skills they will need to survive and thrive in a complex world. A curriculum that focuses narrowly on diversity, cultural literacy, and identity politics does little to prepare prospective educators for the day-to-day realities of the job.
Such narrow-mindedness is not just bad for viewpoint diversity and intellectual curiosity, but by pushing teachers out in the world who are generally unprepared to deliver high-quality instruction, the result ends up being even worse for students. When teacher-preparation programs work like corporate “diversity training” sessions; when theories of inclusion and problems like institutional racism are the main focus; when teacher-preparation is disproportionately geared towards urban students, English language learners, and special education students–teachers enter the workplace bewildered by classroom realities and, as a result, tend to be intellectually unfit to help any students reach developmentally appropriate learning objectives. Teachers need to develop specific pedagogical skills in graduate school, including strategies for classroom management, principles of fair grading, awareness of common student mistakes, and procedures for text-selection, as well as deep levels of content-knowledge. These things were only briefly and tangentially covered at Ithaca College.
During student teaching, whenever my lessons were observed or critiqued, the criticisms leveled were not focused on my command of the material, my presence, or my ability to convey information, nor were they questions about my ability to engage students or plan lessons. The criticisms I received were almost always about some “implicit bias” or slip of the tongue, some unconscious stereotype or microaggression. One example will suffice: While teaching S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders to 8th graders, I introduced the class to the actor Paul Newman, a 1960s heart-throb and celebrity fixation for characters in the book. I then briefly mentioned his charity work with Newman’s Own. After the lesson, my professor told me that my comment may have referenced “privilege” and “alienated some of the students who were poor and likely could not afford to buy Newman’s Own products.” The irony is that the rural town in which I taught this lesson only has a few restaurants, the cheapest being McDonald’s–which exclusively serves Newman’s Own coffee and salad dressing. This punctilious language-policing was a daily regularity in our program, and our constant awareness of it produced a frustrated hesitancy in our teaching, as well as an Orwellian dullness in our verbal expression.
Now lest I sound like a disenfranchised conservative, I should add that I consider myself both a pluralist and a liberal democrat who is passionate about free speech and expression. I teach both 10th and 12th grade English, in addition to a college philosophy course for juniors and seniors. I am just as comfortable teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X as I am Macbeth. In my philosophy course, we discuss a weekly current event article, and we have studied and debated some of the most controversial topics imaginable, such as third wave feminism, tattoos, race, marijuana, income inequality, affirmative action, and even Haidt and Lukianoff’s pivotal piece in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” My students were shocked by this article. They could not believe that “adult” college students wanted safe spaces, free speech zones, trigger warnings, and administrative protection from words and ideas that might oppose their worldview or make them uncomfortable.
As a class, moreover, I suspect that the spirit we created together throughout the year–fostered by an atmosphere of critical thinking and maturity–has empowered and emboldened my students. They have seen first-hand what active discourse and a free and open marketplace of ideas can do for their own learning of difficult theories and concepts, and it has given them a sense of confidence and self-sufficiency. Most students do not want to be seen as victims; they want to learn. They want to examine ideas thoroughly and consider them from multiple and varied perspectives. Increasing viewpoint diversity among faculties at schools of education will be a big step forward in toning down the current ideological indoctrination and will help prepare teachers to truly master their noble, chosen craft.
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This is what the homepage for the school’s Department of Education looks like in 2022:
The math curriculum is cobbled together from different sources: an off-the-shelf curriculum called TERC; Contexts for Learning, a “conceptual math” approach pioneered by Catherine Fosnot, an education professor at City College of New York; and “a variety of things we found on the Internet,” according to Stacey Gershkovich, who oversees math at Success. EdReports.org, an independent nonprofit that reviews curricula, has rated TERC poorly, reporting that it “does not meet expectations” for alignment to Common Core standards or for classroom usability. Gershkovich is unconcerned. “We kind of scrap it for its parts,” she explained to me.
[...]
An unintended and largely unrecognized consequence of the lack of an established curriculum in this country is the profound effect it has on how teachers spend their time. American classroom teachers spend a prodigious amount of time cobbling together lessons from scratch. A 2016 study by the RAND Corporation revealed that virtually every ELA teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws on “materials they created or selected themselves.”
Among elementary school teachers, 94 percent report turning to Google to find ELA lesson plans and instructional materials; 87 percent search Pinterest. The numbers are virtually the same for math. The default curriculum in American education, at least in elementary and middle school, is simply stuff teachers find on the Internet.”
Critical race theory took over in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly
By: Robert Pondiscio
Published: Jul/Aug 2021
We have been inundated of late with alarming stories about the radical transformation of schooling in the wake of George Floyd’s death last summer and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. To mention just a few: We hear of third-graders in Cupertino, California (home of Apple) forced to discuss their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” We read about a New York City principal asking parents to determine which of eight “white identities” best describes them—from “white supremacist” to “white abolitionist”—and seeking their commitment to “dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” And we’ve seen reports of an Arizona state education department’s “equity toolkit” titled “They’re not too young to talk about race!” which recommends that white parents “can and should begin addressing issues of race and racism early, even before their children can speak.”
The daily drumbeat suggests there has been a violent leftward lurch in public education in the past year, but is it really something new? Critical race theory and “anti-racism” came to dominate K–12 education in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
From the nation’s founding through the mid-19th century, education theorists from Benjamin Rush to Horace Mann hewed to the notion that a republic cannot long remain ignorant and free—hence the need for free and universal public education. From these founding ideals of citizen-making, Americans drifted over time to see education as serving chiefly private purposes, even if it also advances the commonweal. We expect schools to help our children get along with others and prepare academically for college and career, and to otherwise shepherd them toward a fruitful adult life. But as a profession, education has a long history of seeing schools as agencies to promote whatever was on the mind of “progressive” reformers of the era—from abolition, temperance, and turning immigrants into assimilated English-speaking citizens over a century ago, to promoting bilingualism and raising awareness of climate change more recently. As the education-reform veteran Chester E. Finn Jr. observes, “schools have long seemed like a swell place for adult causes to try to enlist kids.”
Education’s present focus is identifying and correcting racial inequity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the current racialized view of American K–12 education and its outcomes is the exclusive project of classroom radicals and doctrinaire race and gender-studies theorists. A generation of teachers, administrators, and policymakers has been trained, encouraged, and even required by law to view their work through the lens of racial disparity. The “woke” revolution roiling our schools, with its Manichean view of oppressors vs. oppressed, is an overnight development that has been decades in the making. “Wokeness” on college campuses seeped into teacher training decades ago, while university schools of education have long seen themselves as an instrument for remaking society along lines more congenial to social justice activists.
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Let’s start with California. Over the past two decades, its test scores, which once led the nation, have flagged. Its long-standing dominion over textbook content, which came about because of the sheer size of the state’s student population, has faded thanks to technology-driven changes in the publishing market. But now it has once again become a K–12 bellwether owing to the adoption by the state’s board of education in March of a controversial ethnic-studies curriculum. For now, that curriculum is voluntary, but not for long. A law that would have required every student in the state to take and pass a one-semester ethnic-studies course in order to graduate was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, but it has been reintroduced and is widely expected to pass. Many districts are moving forward anyway. Ethnic studies will be a graduation requirement in Los Angeles schools starting with the 2023–24 school year. Fresno, the state’s third-largest district, will require two semesters of ethnic studies starting this fall.
California’s “model curriculum” was met with intense debate and criticism when the initial draft was released in 2019. The state’s department of education received over 21,000 comments on the document, most criticizing it as one-sided or prejudiced. Jewish groups insisted the curriculum didn’t accurately reflect the American Jewish experience, and contained anti-Semitic lessons and ideas, including references to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Since then, activists, advocates, and angry Twitter mobs have waged war over subsequent drafts, arguing over which groups and people deserved greater representation, and which offensive or misleading portrayals should be massaged or removed.
But these battles, however earnestly fought, betray a fundamental misunderstanding about what gets taught, and how difficult it is to keep inaccurate and even pernicious ideas out of American classrooms. Curricula are not handed down to teachers on stone tablets. Indeed, they are seldom, perhaps never, taught as written. What gets in front of students in most American classrooms is largely up to teacher discretion, making it nearly impossible to control—or even monitor—the content of children’s education or the ideals and values being valorized by their teachers. If the many factions battling over California’s model curriculum did so believing the fight would determine the shape that ethnic studies will take in classrooms, they were almost certainly mistaken.
Nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary-school teachers—draws upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts, according to a RAND Corporation study. Google and Pinterest are the two most common sources of curricular materials cited by teachers. Nearly three out of four social-studies teachers in a separate RAND report agreed with the statement “Textbooks are becoming less and less important in my classroom.” Materials that teachers “found, modified, or created from scratch” make up the majority of what gets taught. Only one in four secondary-school social-studies teachers cited resources “provided by my school or district” as composing the majority of what they use in class on a given day.
Moreover, all this curriculum curation, creation, customization, and tinkering is not regarded as a flaw, but a feature of classroom practice. Teachers are trained to “differentiate instruction,” adapting or supplementing the curriculum to make it more engaging, accessible, or challenging based on the needs of individual students. Academic standards like Common Core mostly dictate the “skills” students are expected to demonstrate; they are largely silent on the specific content kids should learn. These practices and habits weigh heavily on the use of controversial curricula, whether officially “adopted” or not. Outsiders assume far more top-down control over classroom content than actually exists.
A good example of the “choose your own adventure” nature of curricula and instruction is the New York Times’ hotly debated 1619 Project, a conscious bid to “reframe” the conception of America from a democratic republic founded in 1776 to a “slavocracy” that began with the arrival of the first Africans in 1619. It put forth several widely discredited ideas as fact, including that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery, and the claim of provocateur Nikole Hannah-Jones that “for the most part…black Americans fought back alone” against racism. The Wall Street Journal quoted Civil War historian James McPherson, who criticized the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
Given these charged assertions, intense and acrimonious debate, and the 1619 Project’s dour view of American history, one might expect school boards, districts, and schools to exercise care and caution before formally adopting it for classroom use. And this appears to be so. A vanishingly small number of school districts has expressly authorized it for use in their schools, including Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the website for the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to produce a free and downloadable 1619 Project curriculum for K–12 classrooms, says it’s in use in all 50 states. There is no reason to suspect that the Pulitzer Center is exaggerating its claim to have “connected 4,500 classrooms…with the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators.” It’s a telltale glimpse of how controversial materials find their way into American classrooms. Teachers are doing what teachers do: searching, sampling, looking for lessons and readings on a given day to engage students, differentiate instruction, or launch a classroom discussion. It is impossible to know with any confidence the conditions under which selections from the 1619 Project are being introduced or discussed, what other readings are also assigned, or if any opposing points of view are offered. The classroom is a black box. Teachers, either individually or in grade-level or subject-matter “teams,” decide for themselves what gets read, discussed, and put in front of children—with little if any oversight.
Compare California’s ethic-studies “model curriculum” with a more familiar example: the Advanced Placement, or AP, program. It is commonly assumed that the course content of an AP class is the same, regardless of where it is taught or by whom. However, the College Board (which administers the AP test) issues only curriculum “frameworks.” There are no mandatory sequences of lessons, texts, and assignments. The standardized end-of-course AP exam creates an incentive to follow the framework so that students can earn college credit with a passing score. No such normalizing pressure would exist in California. There is no reason to expect any two ethnic-studies classes offered anywhere in the state—or any state—to be the same or even similar. Without the restraining effect of a single final exam, it will fall entirely to the attitudes, beliefs, and discernment of individual teachers—and in some cases their whims and prejudices—to fulfill ethnic-studies requirements, with no clear and reliable visibility for parents, taxpayers, and other “stakeholders.”
California’s effort is the most far-reaching ethnic-studies initiative, but it’s not unique. When he was Connecticut’s education commissioner, Miguel Cardona—now Joe Biden’s secretary of education—oversaw the creation of America’s first state-mandated ethnic-studies course, which Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute derided as “an intellectually shoddy exercise in ideological indoctrination.” Cardona’s Department of Education cannot impose an ethnic-studies mandate on the states, but Eden speculates that Cardona “could advocate for it from the bully pulpit of his Cabinet-level position and use other levers at his disposal, most notably the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, to advance critical race ideology in K–12 schools.” In many instances, he would be preaching to the choir: At least eight other states, including Texas, Virginia, Vermont, and Oregon already require schools to offer some form of ethnic studies as an elective, with more on the way.
The immense variability of the quality and content of schooling between and within states, districts, and schools, even across the hall in the same school, is an unintended consequence of how America organizes and runs public education—and one that contributes to the challenge of influencing (or even knowing) what gets taught. Other nations’ school systems tend to be more pluralistic than those in the U.S., with all manner of schools, even private and parochial schools, eligible for government support. But unlike many other countries, the U.S. lacks a national curriculum. The words “school” and “education” do not even appear in the U.S. Constitution. The result is 13,000 American school districts, each under state and local control.
But the crazy-quilt variability of public education is in one significant way still quite surprising. The tradition of “academic freedom” that protects classroom speech and course content in higher education generally doesn’t apply to K–12 public-school teachers. Courts have repeatedly affirmed that local school boards wield nearly complete power to set curricula. In the eyes of the law, public-school teachers are considered “hired speech.” In 2007, for example, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a former Indiana teacher who claimed to have lost her job because she criticized the impending Iraq war in ways that upset students and parents. “The First Amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system,” a three-judge federal appeals panel said unanimously. Such decisions should, at least in theory, inhibit teachers from introducing controversial material without proper vetting or from being overtly opinionated on sensitive subjects.
It is no defense for teachers to claim, as they often do, that they are expressing their personal views in solidarity with students. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, a California math teacher earned tens of thousands of Twitter “likes” and retweets when he asked with anguish what he was supposed to say to his students if Kavanaugh was confirmed. Some wondered why a math teacher would feel compelled to raise the subject at all. Joshua Dunn, a political-science professor at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, describes such displays as an unacceptable form of “moral grandstanding” by teachers. But the well-established limits on teacher speech and conduct have not inhibited a significant number of educators who are inclined to view moral grandstanding as not a problem in teaching, but rather the point.
Heather Levine, an English teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts, ignited a social-media firestorm last year when she tweeted that she was “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” She is part of a movement called #DisruptTexts, which describes itself as “a crowdsourced, grassroots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon” and to “aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices.” When a writer with the Wall Street Journal contacted her about it, Levine huffed that she found her inquiry “invasive.” When the piece criticizing #DisruptTexts appeared, she took to Twitter again to complain that she had been named and her tweet had been quoted “without my knowledge or consent”—suggesting the degree to which she assumed complete control with no public scrutiny, even of words she wrote online for all the world to see. The decision to drop Homer, she explained, was simply a choice made by her school’s ninth grade team. “It was not a blanket school or district-wide decision and any teacher, including myself, would still be more than welcome to teach from the text,” Levine wrote.
It would obviously be impractical for school boards to weigh in on every instructional decision made in the schools they oversee. But given the weight of court decisions and divisive debates over curricula, simple prudence would seem to suggest a minimal level of professional awareness that potentially controversial instructional decisions might require some level of approval or authorization from a school administrator or district supervisor. Levine’s what’s-the-big-deal explanation was intended to reassure. But it raises more questions than it answers. Where do teachers get the idea that they have the right—even the duty—to “disrupt texts,” challenge the canon, or engage in vocal “allyship” with their students?
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We should not assume that all, or even most, of America’s nearly 4 million classroom teachers are closet activists or social-justice warriors determined to indoctrinate impressionable children in the woke catechism of the radical left. They are merely doing what they have been trained, encouraged, and habituated to do at every stage of their careers, starting in ed school.
University schools of education enjoy a near-monopoly on teacher training and credentialing in the U.S. By the time the American Educational Research Association issued its comprehensive review of teacher education in 2005, it reported that “over the last decade or so conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements. Advocates of a social justice agenda want teachers to be professional educators as well as activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” Remember: That report came out 16 years ago. So if critical race theory is new to you, it means you haven’t set foot in a college of education in the past 30 years. When I received my own master’s degree in elementary education 20 years ago, my portfolio was judged in part on how well my work demonstrated a “commitment to social justice” as a disposition expected of teachers who can become “agents of change.” In the early 20th century, George S. Counts, the intellectual forefather of critical pedagogy and among the most prominent education thinkers of his time, was proposing that teachers and schools “dare to build a new social order.”
This social reordering and change agentry is not the exclusive hobby horse of the progressive left. The activist conception of the teaching profession actually dovetailed with the agenda of the education-reform movement, beloved by many conservatives, which was at the peak of its power, prestige, and moral authority in the first decade of this century. Union-free charter schools staffed by earnest and hard-charging Teach For America corps members who were determined to attack and reverse the “soft bigotry of low expectations” made media darlings of high-performing charter schools like KIPP and Success Academy. Movies such as Waiting for Superman helped build bipartisan support for the reform agenda of charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher accountability. The 2002 federal No Child Left Behind Act explicitly made “closing the achievement gap…especially the achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students” a matter of national urgency.
Writing in National Review in 2015, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess described the bipartisan détente that allowed the reform agenda to set the tone for public education for most of this century: “Conservatives embraced education as the foundation of an opportunity society and a path to eventually shrinking the welfare state. Liberals approached schooling as a way to address poverty.” To forge this consensus, “conservative reformers made several key concessions,” Hess wrote. “They accepted a massive increase in federal authority, an expansion of race-conscious accountability systems, and a prohibition on talk of parental responsibility and the virtues of the traditional family.” Liberal reformers gave up less ground. “They mostly toned down their demands for new public programs and took care not to accuse their conservative allies of bigotry,” Hess observed.
In sum, professional education emphasizing social-justice imperatives and more than two decades of public policy aimed at gap-closing had racialized K–12 education long before “critical race theory” became a buzz phrase and a political football. If you are under age 40 and work in an American school—public, private, or charter—you likely have no professional memory of a time when ending racial inequity was not the primary focus of your field. The anodyne language of “anti-racism” (who isn’t opposed to racism?) merely lands as the latest effort in a decades-long effort to improve education outcomes for students of color, among the least likely to have received a rich and rigorous education, or to have been launched from their K–12 public school on a path to equal opportunity, upward mobility, and fair and equal treatment in civil society. Teachers cannot have failed to learn that among their profession’s most solemn obligations is to close the achievement gap. Until recently, that has meant some combination of higher standards, testing, improved teacher quality, rich and rigorous curricula, or enhanced school choice for low-income families, among other favored programs and policies.
Ibram X. Kendi, the leading figure in the “anti-racism” movement, is not interested in closing the achievement gap. Neither is he concerned with raising achievement among black and brown students—at least by any measure known to social science. “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies,” insists the author of How to Be an Antiracist. Neither is it merely the tests that are racist; no, it’s the achievement gap itself. “To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea,” Kendi writes. “The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing.”
Even by the standards of testing critics, who are legion, this is a remarkable assertion. Forget our long obsession with gap-closing and teaching for social justice. The mere belief in the existence of an achievement gap is transmuted into racism. “Our faith in standardized tests causes us to believe that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black test takers–and not the tests,” Kendi writes. But this is poor scholarship at best, and at worst a deliberate falsehood. The vast weight of education policy, practice, and reform efforts has rested on precisely the opposite assumption: that there is nothing wrong with black test takers. The presence of measurable disparities in student achievement has been broadly viewed by generations of education reformers as evidence of systematic failure: of teachers, schools, and districts. These are adult failures all. The children are blameless.
Denying the existence of such gaps or casting even the discussion of them as racist has proved to be too much even for some progressives. Writing in the Washington Post, Matthew Yglesias noted: “The fact remains that if African American children continue to be less likely to learn to read and write and do math than White children, and less likely to graduate from high school, then this will contribute to other unequal outcomes down the road,” including the ability to organize politically and effectively navigate the world beyond school. “Stigmatizing the use of test scores and grades to measure learning undermines policymakers’ ability to make the case for reforms to promote equity,” Yglesias concluded, including “combating racially biased low expectations among teachers.”
Alas, high expectations for black and brown children are now an object of suspicion. In 2019, New York City Department of Education leaders attended a workshop where they were told that values such as hard work, individualism, objectivity, and “worship of the written word” were hallmarks of “white supremacy culture.” Under Cindy Marten, Biden’s pick for deputy education secretary, San Diego’s effort to become “an antiracist school district” prohibits teachers from factoring into students’ grades their classroom behavior and whether or not they turned in assignments. The pernicious effects of this line of thought were unintentionally revealed by a white high-school student who told a local TV station that inequities are so strong that it’s “not fair of us to put forth policies that only cater to the students that are able to meet these requirements.”
If veteran educators have responded with dismay, even horror, at the tortured logic of “whiteness” as the theory that explains all ills in education, it’s because it threatens to erase, at a stroke, decades of efforts on behalf of minority children. The most improbable triumph of the anti-racist orthodoxy promoted by Kendi and his acolytes has been in schools that until now have been proof points of its emptiness. If any institutions in American education have earned the right in the past 30 years to claim the title as genuinely “anti-racist,” it’s the networks of high-performing urban charter-school networks such as KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and others. KIPP, which runs nearly 250 schools in 20 states, has had unparalleled success in ushering low-income black and brown students to and through college, but last summer, co-founder David Levin issued a public apology for building KIPP on “white supremacy and anti-Blackness.” The network announced it was retiring its trademark “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan because, Levin said, it “supports the illusion of meritocracy…ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism,” and places a value on “being compliant and submissive.” This was a stunning repudiation of the core values that have made KIPP a magnet for parents of color desperate for an alternative to chaotic and disorderly neighborhood schools where low expectations, for staff and students alike, have been the rule for generations.
The founder of one urban charter network told me recently of his struggle to reconcile the desires of low-income black and brown parents “who are bought into the American Dream, hard work, education, character building, and rigor” with pressure from a vocal group of privileged and progressive teachers who bridle against his schools’ traditional curriculum and high academic expectations. “However, I really don’t know any other way to improve students’ future lives other than a rigorous education,” he said.
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Public education succeeds or fails at one principal task: A school either imparts the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to smooth the transition to a responsible and satisfying adult life, or it does not. In concert with other institutions (families, churches, the military, et al.), an American school can consciously inspire children to play a part in building a more perfect union. Or it can say, in effect, don’t bother. Hardened into orthodoxy, critical race theory insists on the latter. When it demands a place of privilege in our schools, it undermines the very purpose of public education. It is the opposite of welcoming children into the civic sphere; it preaches resistance to it and even its destruction.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with ethnic studies, “culturally responsive pedagogy,” or even critical race theory in public schools. No reasonable objection should be made or accepted to the earnest desire for black and brown students—American children—to see their histories and cultures woven firmly into their education. Nor should any excuse be made to elide our country’s painful history of racism and injustices, or to confront places where there remains room for progress. What schools cannot do while maintaining public support and legitimacy is to abide any kind of racial essentialism or insist that children are required to combat “whiteness.” Schools should not seek to impose an ideology that distills all of history and every human endeavor to a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.
But this grim orthodoxy has been gaining ground in American K–12 education for two generations, and the challenge of dislodging it from schools should not be underestimated. While some states like California weigh ethnic-studies mandates, others, like Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, and New Hampshire, are debating measures “banning” schools altogether from teaching critical race theory and curricula like the 1619 Project. “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” Although well-intentioned and reflecting the discomfort many parents feel with regard to what their children are being taught, such measures erode freedom of expression and would be exceedingly difficult to enforce. It is simply not possible to ban a perspective from schools, particularly one that has been embraced for so long by so many educators.
The picture that emerges, finally, is of an education system drifting into conflict with the ambitions of parents for their children and the public purpose of preparing America’s children for productive adulthood and engaged citizenship. However well-intended their motivations might be, individual teachers cannot assume for themselves powers and privileges that are not theirs to assume. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes, “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” Taken seriously, this is a direct encouragement for schools to treat children differently based on their race. Elsewhere he states the remedy to his unusually expansive definition of racism even more directly: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
It is unlikely that ordinary Americans, if they follow this idea where it leads—schools making a virtue of treating children differently based on race alone—will abide sending their children to consciously “anti-racist” schools. The immense disparities in talent and skill of the nation’s massive corps of teachers and the fad-driven nature of education make it inevitable that there will continue to be bizarre applications of its tenets, such as teaching children chants to Aztec gods, teachers calling students not “boys and girls” but “social-justice warriors,” or professional-development sessions aimed at getting teachers to reckon with the effects of their “whiteness.” Adherents may complain that such incidents are a distraction or examples of poor implementation of a subtle and nuanced suite of ideas. But as long as public education runs on tax dollars and public goodwill, the anti-racist “equity” agenda and the broader impulse toward “equality” will continue to be in tension with each other. School-choice adherents see in all this an argument for school choice, but as Bari Weiss has documented, elite private schools have drunk even more deeply of anti-racism pedagogy and curricula than have public and charter schools.
Ultimately, something has to give. The cost of public education is socialized in America; you pay school taxes regardless of whether or not you have children in public school or have children at all. If our schools encourage a belief that the United States is a fundamentally racist country, and that every institution is designed to maintain white supremacy and cannot be reformed, then it inevitably sets schools on a collision course with the society that supports them. Whether it’s a conscious institutional attempt to be “anti-racist” or merely that an intellectual monoculture has taken root among educators, the effect will be akin to an organism devouring its host. No sane nation will long tolerate an institution whose purpose is to set its children against itself at public expense.
It's no surprise that graduates of education programs who are fixated on social justice education and training promote these concepts throughout college and university campuses.
By: Samuel J. Abrams
Published: Oct 3, 2021
As a college professor, not a week goes by that I don't hear from frustrated students who feel they cannot speak freely. It's not just my students, of course; a 2021 survey found that over 80 percent of American college students self-censor. But it's not only their fellow students who are making students feel ashamed to voice their views; the data shows that Gen Zers—those born after 1996—are less censorious than their millennial elders. Moreover, there's evidence to suggest that some of the pressure of ideological conformity is coming from much higher up—specifically, from university administrators.
Long before they meet their professors, students engage with college administrators. They are omnipresent in residence halls and social spaces where they act as informal advisers. But these administrators also set the terms of engagement and the rules for student discourse, including what can be said and done, what topics are sacrosanct, and what should never be questioned.
And they are very, very liberal.
In fact, college administrators are the most left-leaning group on campus, according to surveys. Liberal administrators outnumber conservative ones 12-to-one. Just a scant 6 percent of campus administrators identify as conservative to some degree, while 71 identify as liberal or very liberal. And 86 percent of administrators believe that their schools should be as concerned with students' "personal values" as with their intellectual development.
If you want to know why more than 80 percent of college students are self-censoring in the classroom, on campus, and online, start with their administrators.
I did just that, surveying 1,500 student-facing administrators in almost three dozen schools. What I found was that these administrators have incredibly narrow views. They are surprisingly monolithic, despite coming from a variety of learning institutions, ranging from large public research universities like the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Florida, to small colleges like Rhodes and Lafayette Colleges, and private schools like Boston and Rice Universities.
How did the administrators get so uniform in their views? What I found in researching college staff was that the majority of administrators'—54 percent—have degrees in education. And reports have shown that graduates of education programs are fixated on a narrow progressive view of demographics, identity, diversity and capitalism, as well as ideas about the oppression they believe permeates American society. These views are also supported by scores of centers, which put out academic statements and initiatives to promote them.
The truth should not be sugar-coated: America's education programs are dangerous for higher education because they adhere to a pedagogy that transforms their graduates into activists. Their training teaches future administrators to deconstruct the society in which they live and then promote their views at work, in dining halls, dormitories, and throughout campus.
It should thus come as no surprise that today's college administrators try to dictate the very language their students are allowed to use, which they see as "a powerful tool that can be used to perpetrate and perpetuate oppression."
In this, college administrators are actually typical of their age cohort. Almost two-thirds of administrators (63 percent) are Millennials (25 to 40 years old), the cohort least likely to feel encumbered by cancel culture, according to surveys. This makes them out of sync with America's workforce more generally, where Millennials make up just a third of American workers (35 percent).
More importantly, there is a huge disconnect between what students are studying today and the background of the administrators who advise them and set the tone of much dialogue on campus. Graduation data show that 21 percent of students today have pursued degrees and training in science, engineering and allied fields, another 21 percent are pursuing management, administration, and leadership degrees and 15 percent are working toward training in sports and health professions.
On the other hand, a minimal numbers of administrators have training in the fields preferred by students. Just 7 percent of administrators have degrees in leadership, 4 percent in sports and health, and 4 percent in science, math, and engineering. Meanwhile only 4 percent of students pursue an education degree, the degree the majority of their administrators possess.
And of course, far more students are conservative than administrators. In fact, just 35.5 percent of students align themselves with liberal or far-left ideology that their admins have, according to recent polls, while 22.2 percent call themselves conservative or far right.
So while it's dangerous, it is also no surprise that graduates of education programs who are fixated on social justice education and training promote these concepts throughout college and university campuses.
Ironically, a refrain heard from college administrators is that in order to be a legitimate educator, those teaching on campus must look like the students that are being taught. This ignores the fact that the very administrators who promote this flawed belief look almost nothing like the students that they claim to advise.
If you want to understand where the woke revolution is coming from, college administrators are a good place to start.
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Dr. Lyell Asher found the same thing. Ed Schools have a long, documented track record for the lowest academic standards, academic envy (especially directed at STEM), and radical politics over the last 100 years. The difference more recently is that they’ve been credentialing themselves to be the administrators of the institutions, rather than merely teaching in them.
