In an article previewing his forthcoming book on civic education, noted author and reporter James Traub argues that conservatives — including me — are wrong to claim that K–12 schools are teaching civics and social studies from a left-ideological point of view. Traub observed dozens of classes in government and social studies during 2023-2024 and says that the vast majority of teachers he encountered take political neutrality as a “sacred obligation.”

At the same time, Traub acknowledges that the academic literature on teaching, statements from educational administrators, and social-studies standards in blue states are all pervasively leftist. He thus concedes that “conservatives aren’t simply making this stuff up.” So how to explain the discrepancy between Traub’s classroom experience and the admittedly leftist cast of the education establishment as a whole?

While I’m sure that Traub was able to learn a great deal from his classroom observations, I have my doubts that putting a famed reporter in a classroom is the best way to expose politicization. Teachers facing a reporter are bound to be on their best behavior. And highly politicized teachers are unlikely to host such an observer at all.

It’s tough to see how the leftward drift of professional education associations could have happened without the agreement of teachers. In 2021, for example, I reported on a keynote address embracing CRT and rejecting political neutrality by the president of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). How do people like that get elected if not with the support of the teachers who make up the NCSS? Just a couple of years ago, the American Library Association chose a Marxist who rejects the concept of political neutrality as its president. A fluke? I don’t think so.

Traub makes much of the fact that conservative critics of K–12 don’t take their evidence of classroom politicization from direct observation. Well, there’s a reason for that. Politicized educators put plenty of effort into deflecting scrutiny. They are not about to allow conservative critics into their classrooms — or to reveal their politics with a conservative journalist sitting in front of them. I and other critics of K–12 politicization have tried for years to get states to pass curriculum transparency legislation. Thanks to massive organized opposition from teachers’ unions, the effort so far has failed. Teachers resist public scrutiny.

My own classroom experience has been at the college level, but it uncannily presaged contemporary trends in K–12. I taught for a number of years at Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, a kind of college version of history, civics, and the social sciences. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the campus trend was heavily away from political neutrality. I was able to observe the shift because many of the lectures and sections in my classes were shared with other teachers. Back then, everything we now call “woke” was taking over the elite college classroom — the gender/sex distinction, white privilege, critical theory in general, and critical race theory in particular. You could see all this not only in the theorists we taught, but in the contrasting approaches to pedagogical neutrality taken by the various teachers. Roughly speaking, the “woker” the teachers, the less politically neutral they strove to be.

Everything I experienced during my years in the academy has been at the center of the last decade’s controversies over K–12 politicization. But when conservatives ferret all this out nowadays, it has to be done indirectly. That’s because most teachers are trying to hide it.

Take a look at this article on anti-Israel bias in the Philadelphia Public Schools. Like Truab’s work, it focuses on dozens of educators — but in this case, educators who reject political neutrality. Here, the district has refused to investigate parental complaints of politicization — much less allow outsiders to observe classrooms. So parents and community members have had to unravel the truth by ferreting out social-media posts and photographing events put on by politicized groups of teachers.

That is not unusual. Most often when conservatives find examples of leftist bias in K–12, it’s because a rebellious teacher has exposed DEI training literature he’s been subjected to, or some other such unauthorized disclosure. Other good sources of information are academic classroom case studies written by teachers themselves. Teachers generally presume that potential critics will not be reading academic journals.

During the presidential campaign, I exposed a radical teacher put in charge of Minnesota’s new ethnic studies curriculum by Tim Walz. This educator favors the overthrow of the United States, and his book encourages teachers to quietly defy prohibitions on the teaching of critical race theory. Disguise and defiance are his themes. This is not the sort of fellow who welcomes conservative critics to observe his classroom.

In 2021, I exposed a video seminar in which a progressive education expert coached teachers on techniques for deflecting parental concerns about politicized education. Her seminar was a veritable handbook of deception. After my piece came out, the video was taken down (as was the Minnesota video where Walz’s education appointee called for the overthrow of the U.S.).

So K–12 politicization, while findable, is not made easily accessible to parents — or to conservative journalists — and intentionally so. In one sense, K–12 leftism is impossible to hide since it’s pervasive in the educational literature, in the public statements of education officials, and more. But when leftist educators feel watched by either parents or outside critics, they clam up. Liberal New York Times reporters aren’t frozen out — at least not to the same extent. But you can bet that teachers under the gaze of even a friendly observer will be on their very best behavior when it comes to politicization.

This, I would argue, is how to explain the otherwise unexplainable — the vast discrepancy between the political neutrality Traub says he encountered among teachers and the pervasive leftism of the official education world.

This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of teachers out there who adhere to a more traditional approach. I know they’re out there because they write me, although regularly cautioning me against directly or indirectly revealing their identities. No doubt, Traub encountered a number of these teachers. But even such educators are at a serious disadvantage when state standards, teacher training, and local curriculum guidelines all push them toward politicization. Teachers can be called to account, with serious consequences, for violating such guidelines. That’s why conservatives are rightly concerned by what even Taub admits is an official environment dominated by politicized leftism in blue states.