Yes, Teacher-Prep Programs Are That Woke

M y teacher training featured Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets, lectures on acupuncture and essential oils, acrostic poems as final projects, and a solid grounding in critical race theory. Notably lacking was a robust emphasis on teaching, learning, cognitive science, child psychology, behavior management, curriculum, or any other practicalities of the classroom. They were present but secondary to progressive politics.

When I’ve written about my teacher prep before, I’m usually accused of nutpicking — using a fringe example to castigate the many. We assume that prospective teachers go to such programs and learn to, well, teach. Little of the sort happens. The few curricular reviews that do exist suggest that my program is concerningly representative.

One such review from the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal solicited syllabi from three of the most prestigious schools of education in the country to determine the most assigned readings at each. Lo and behold, the syllabi are replete with critical race theory, political activism, and even outright Marxism.

Gloria Ladson-Billings topped the list. Notably, she introduced critical race theory into the academic field of education in 1995. She argues that because of racism’s ubiquity, our society “requires sweeping changes,” and so “liberalism has no mechanism for such a change.” Where the essay actually addresses education — and it does so sparsely — she calls existing school curricula a “culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a white supremacist master script.”

Another common name, Paulo Freire, set the groundwork for an influential approach to education called “critical pedagogy,” which envisions the classroom as a place of advocacy and revolutionary change, not instruction or learning. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is an attempt to map the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy onto the student-teacher relationship. He criticizes schooling that emphasizes knowledge transmission and cites the Russian and Maoist cultural revolutions as models of his thought in action.

Name after name declares a radical bent at these schools. Jean Anyon wrote Marx and Education. Carlos Alberto Torres co-founded the Paulo Freire Institute. Throughout the curricula are explicit references to Marxism, critical pedagogy, radical feminism, and other fringe political stances.

Thought that would be considered extremist among the broader American populace forms the ideological foundations of these schools. Even the so-called moderates on the lists such as John Dewey advance a theory of Romantic education, an approach that centers the child’s own interests and self-directed learning.

The Martin Center review isn’t an outlier either. Another paper by David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, found a similar state of affairs after reviewing 15 different university teacher-prep programs — a mixture of both elite and non-elite campuses. Radicals such as Freire and romantics such as Dewey dominate the curricula.

Steiner makes special mention of what does not make an appearance on these lists: educational conservatives, essays older than 30 years, authors outside of America, and courses on the history or philosophy of education. He notes how few programs asked their teachers to demonstrate competence on the methods of reading instruction, going so far as to call most of the syllabi “intellectually barren.” It is, he concludes, a “serious effort to shape the fundamental worldview of future teachers,” not an effort to form effective teachers.

This imposition of a worldview extends even into public policy. The Illinois standards for teacher preparation encourage teachers to assess their “biases” and how to mitigate their own “racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, [and] Euro-centricism.” Perhaps most gallingly, the standards require that teachers “will support and create opportunities for student advocacy.”

Although seemingly euphonious, such concepts and goals are anything but. Richard Delgado, a founding scholar of CRT, suggests that through such ideas we can “question the very foundations of the liberal order.” In essence, teachers learn such concepts not to actually become less racist, but to turn classrooms into centers of activism. Freire smiles.

These ideas manifest far beyond a few galling, hyper-politicized lessons. They work themselves into the curriculum, behavior policies, and instructional practices across the country. If you take a bird’s eye view of education across the last two centuries, it has been a movement from memorization, grammar, teacher-led classrooms, sequenced curriculum, and clear behavioral expectations and consequences to current events, young adult fiction, and student-directed learning.

In response to progressivism in our classrooms, conservatives have focused their attention on K–12 public schools, instituting bans on certain concepts, broadening school choice, winning local school-board elections, and forcing curricular changes — useful but insufficient efforts. Like over-the-counter medicine, they curtail the consequences but ignore the source.

Ultimately, students and teachers both bear the consequences of our teacher-prep failings. In my first year of teaching, having not learned the skills, my students learned little and my classroom was chaotic. Research confirms that teachers who go through established teacher-prep programs or none at all show little long-term difference in efficacy — unsurprising considering the political nature of these institutions.

While I want to stymie the flow of politics into our classrooms, the real fallout of our woke-ified teacher-prep programs is simply mediocrity. Teachers who can’t teach create students who don’t learn. It’s time that schools of education receive the evaluation, due criticism, and reformation that they deserve.