How Public Schools Went Woke — and What to Do about It

By Daniel Buck & Garion Frankel

Saturday, March 05, 2022

 

Last year, one of us wrote about how universities have fostered our politicized classrooms. Since then, it seems as if public education has devolved into woke-ism. The media denied critical race theory’s existence in American education for months, only to now admit that it does in fact influence policy and curricula. In response, countless legislatures have introduced “CRT bans” and school-choice bills as a means to combat the apparently rapid progressive capture of American schools.

 

These laws, alongside school-choice bills, are necessary but insufficient efforts. If one tap is contaminated, perhaps it’s a local phenomenon. However, with ever more examples of the woke-ification of public education, it’s safe to assume that there’s something polluting the reservoir and the solution must move higher up.

 

In reality, media coverage is really only now paying attention to what has been a long, ongoing process. A radical theory of education — one that sees the classroom as the locus of societal change, not academic training — dominates our colleges of education. Thus, like a drainage pipe into a common supply, teacher-prep programs around the country dump a politicized approach to education into our schools, and it is here where our reform efforts must focus.

 

This outsized influence of the university on K–12 schools occurs not without precedent. Once before, our nation’s dominant philosophy of education universally altered. Prior to the 20th century, American education was almost universally classical in nature — great books, grammar and rhetoric, direct teacher guidance, a healthy patriotism. However, the establishment of teacher colleges began to change that. Between 1910 and 1930, 88 normal schools — local institutions to train teachers — associated with universities and became teacher colleges.

 

At the most influential of these, Columbia’s Teachers College, John Dewey and William Kilpatrick trained 35,000 students and wrote popular essays that influenced countless more. With such an influence, the progressive pedagogy of Dewey and Kilpatrick — which rejects liberal notions of knowledge worth knowing and direct teacher guidance to instead center a student’s personal interests and exploration — supplanted classical education in American schools. The theory’s association with colleges of education legitimated progressive education and so flooded American schools with proclamations of “best practices” and “expertise.”

 

The influence of teacher colleges hasn’t changed, only the theory within. Today, Teachers College, still one of the most prestigious teacher-prep programs in the country with 90,000 alumni, continues its significant role in determining what occurs in K–12 classrooms. A quick scroll through Columbia’s course catalog reveals that teacher-prep programs now look toward “liberation” rather than virtue. A popular curriculum from Teachers College encourages children to read through critical-race lenses and acknowledges its dependence on critical race theory.

 

The college offers a class in “Black, Latina, and Transnational Feminisms,” which seeks to “engage in an interdisciplinary exploration of feminist scholarship located at the intersections of race, class, and culture.” In addition, the school offers a class in “Anti-Racist Curriculum, Pedagogy, Leadership and Policy.” This trend continues across the college’s course offerings, with frequent mentions of gender, race, class, and inclusivity.

 

Notably, course descriptions rarely if ever mention instruction, curriculum, assessment, or anything having to do with educating children. It amounts to a program in “proper” political opinions, not the practicalities of classroom instruction.

 

And Teachers College is no outlier. An education-policy course at the also influential University of Wisconsin-Madison “[focuses] on the ideas of transformative educators such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks.” Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, an incoherent attempt to explore the parasitic relationship between oppressor and oppressed in the context of the classroom, is considered a seminal work by many teacher-prep programs. References to Freire and other advocates of critical pedagogy appear on the syllabi of Harvard, UC Berkeley, California State-Long Beach, and the University of North Texas.

 

A UW professor, Gloria Ladson-Billings, is considered one of the single most influential thinkers in education. In 1998, she synthesized CRT and K–12 education, and just last year, Indianapolis Public Schools hosted her at a racial-equity training for teachers.

 

Simply look through the DEI offerings at local schools to see that references to Freire, Billings, hooks, and other radical theorists abound. The organization Teachers Without Borders encourages their educators to understand and implement Freire’s theory of “peace education” — ironic, considering that Freire cites Che Guevara and Lenin as exemplary teachers. After the passing of bell hooks last year, countless testimonials appeared online of how teachers implemented her ideas in their classrooms.

 

Woke ideas about race and power did not form ex nihilo in the minds of DEI consultants at K–12 schools. They stem from a decades-long process that saw a noteworthy shift in the research interests of education faculty. As the DEI fad caught on, its teachings made their way to both university and K–12 classrooms. Moreover, the transformation of the university’s pedagogical environment is not an unprecedented event. Once again, Columbia and universities like it are acting like a superspreader event of critical pedagogy and other radical ideas.

 

That our teaching force requires their credentials ensures that the drainage pipe will flow on. Even if we ban explicit instruction in something like CRT, its ideas can still influence policy, curricula, behavior plans, and teaching. Even if school-choice bills passed in every state today, the same teaching force trained in the precepts of Freire and other pedagogues would staff our schools tomorrow. We must decouple the colleges of education and schools by ending teacher-licensing requirements.

 

Thankfully, schools don’t seem to need these schools of education. Research into the efficacy of such programs finds “little difference in the average academic achievement impacts of certified, uncertified and alternatively certified teachers.” More like a degree in business than medicine, official teacher-training may assist in initial hiring but is no guarantee of effectiveness. In fact, many successful charter schools run on a model that relies on well-educated but untrained recent graduates who then undergo rigorous on-the-job training and constant professional development.

 

There are other potential knock-on benefits of ending our licensing racket. Burdensome processes that require years of training and financial investment create an opportunity cost that dissuades talented would-be candidates from other professions. Furthermore, fewer regulatory hoops to jump through could encourage entry into the profession and thereby mitigate the teacher-shortage crisis that our schools currently face.

 

Any attempt at reform — reestablishing classical and liberal conceptions of education in these institutions — would take a 50-year Gramscian countermarch of our universities. As such, our only recourse is to sever the control they have over teacher training.