What Are Schools of Education Teaching Teachers?

T he teaching profession is a modern priestly caste. Not only are educators responsible for the basic academic training of the next generation — a responsibility once also held by religious leaders — but they also shape the worldview, opinions, beliefs, and perspectives of their students.

Such formation isn’t necessarily nefarious. From how they decorate their walls to the books they teach, everything a teacher does inculcates a set of beliefs and habits. Stewards of the next generation, teachers are foundational pillars within society.

So, it seems important to ask: What are teachers learning in university schools of education where they are trained?

In a new report for the American Enterprise Institute, I reviewed the required coursework from ten graduate schools of education. The investigation revealed dogmatic institutions built primarily to shape the worldview of future teachers, advancing doctrines “grounded in frameworks that were either progressive — holding that knowledge is constructed, students ought to control their education, and teachers are mere guides — or critical — advancing the idea that curriculum is oppressive and the goal of schooling is deconstruction.”

What stood out among the 75 courses and over 400 readings under review wasn’t just the ideological balance, but the extremity to which many readings and assignments skewed.

For example, at California State University Northridge (CSUN), prospective teachers encounter readings such as “Queering Elementary Education,” which uses “intersectionality as a guiding framework along with queer theories, educational theories, and feminist theories” to examine “how queer subjectivities have (not) been included in schools via curriculum for elementary school children.” It offers instead “a 23-lesson curriculum for fourth grade teachers that investigates bodies, puberty, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.”

Another reading, “No Gods, No Masters: Practicing Freedom Through Anarchist Civics,” challenges any civic education that encourages students to “develop affinity to the nation-state” or positions “voting and other constitutional processes as the appropriate tactics for social change.” Rather, the article advances anarchism as the alternative solution and suggests that teachers “embrace subversion and fugitivity as important elements of liberatory education.”

I wish CSUN were an outlier. Across the programs, other readings include:

• “Toward an Anti-Racist Linguistic Anthropology: An Indigenous Response to White Supremacy”
• Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You
• “Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and the Historical Context”
• “Power, Politics and Critical Race Pedagogy: A Critical Race Analysis of Black Male Teachers’ Pedagogy”
• “Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and the Historical Context”
• “Translanguaging and Positioning in Two-Way Dual Language Classrooms: A Case for Criticality”
• The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys

Perhaps the most befuddling among schools’ curricula was a short video on “Disability Justice” that suggests effective special education demands an “anti-capitalist politic” and “collective liberation” rather than instructional techniques to manage challenged learners.

Teachers deserve better than this training, which, as I explain in the new report, is “neurotically focused on immutable characteristics and political activism” but “actively hostile toward Western ideals and anything resembling traditional education.” They need to learn how to manage a classroom, write good tests and assignments, provide feedback, sequence curriculum, and plenty else in the nuts and bolts of instruction. Students deserve better, too.

The most obvious corrective is to eliminate the pay premium that many states and districts provide to teachers who earn master’s degrees, which more than half of teachers choose to do.

More substantial reforms would target teacher preparation programs themselves. In 2024, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law Florida House Bill 1291 to prohibit teacher prep programs from grounding themselves in “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” Instead, they must “afford candidates the opportunity to think critically, achieve mastery of academic program content, learn instructional strategies, and demonstrate competence.”

Similarly, just as many red states have now established civic centers at public universities across the country, a handful of red-state governors could establish centers for classical or liberal arts education at flagship public universities. With new personnel pipelines, schools would have a larger pool from which to pull teachers and administrators. A network of such institutions could create a critical mass of classically trained leaders in education, fostering a Gramscian-style countermarch through the institutions.

The reform of university schools of education will not usher in an educational utopia, but if personnel is policy — and it is — it is arguably one of the most consequential levers available to education reformers.