Among the worst of all elements of higher education are the schools of education. They have long been under the control of “progressives” who have nutty notions about how to teach, and now they’ve attracted the DEI types who use them to propagandize future teachers. Whether the kids learn to read well matters much less than that they learn how to rant about all America’s supposed evils.
Can anything be done? Florida has passed a law that is intended to clean house, sweeping out the junk and putting sound curricula in place. In today’s Martin Center article, Scott Yenor and Steven DeRose look at the prospects for its success.
They write:
Implementation of 1291 started on July 1, and Florida’s Department of Education will now write a rule to flesh out how schools of education can retain the privilege of certifying teachers. Regulating schools of education is vulnerable to the same whack-a-mole shenanigans that plague efforts to rid schools of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. Old practices will get renamed. Old positions will be relabeled. Yet Florida’s law has a hard edge to it. Florida’s Department of Education could prevent uncompliant schools of education from certifying teachers. This would not immediately end such schools, but it would stress them. The law also allows honest administrators a chance to point teetering or fallen schools of education away from corrupt, critical pedagogy and toward standards-based education.
Naturally, there is opposition. Yenor and DeRose tell of the University of Florida’s outgoing faculty senate chair, who wrote to ed-school profs advising them not to cooperate. She claims it’s “harassment” when officials demand to see course syllabi.
Read the whole thing.