Education schools have long been weak when it comes to preparing teachers to do a good job in the classroom. Years ago, Heather Mac Donald summed up the prevailing attitude as, “Anything but Knowledge.”

What about the most essential thing of all, namely, teaching youngsters how to read? As Shannon Watkins reports in today’s Martin Center article, the UNC-system schools aren’t doing very well in that regard.

She writes, “Members of the UNC Board of Governors are not happy. A years-long effort to align teacher training with the best scientifically proven methods to teach reading has fallen flat on its face. Given the grim state of literacy in the state, a January report outlining UNC-System schools’ failures is particularly egregious.” Only one out of 15 programs in the UNC system was rated as doing well at preparing teachers.

It is little wonder that so few students in the state’s public schools are proficient in reading. They aren’t being taught well.

So, UNC is studying the problem — but has studied it before, with scant improvement. Why?

Watkins continues, “The reasons are likely numerous, but one strong possibility is that these efforts were doomed in their infancy. As Terry Stoops wrote for the Martin Center in 2017, the Leading on Literacy report’s recommendations were ‘broad, peppered with jargon, and rarely mention[ed] the costs or resources required for implementation.’ The language animating the advisory group’s and committees’ work over the ensuing years was at times similarly broad, vague, and ‘peppered with jargon.’ Perhaps it’s no surprise that such a complicated layering of bureaucratization came up empty.”

The enemy here, I submit, is the deeply ingrained “progressivism” among the faculty and administrators who run the ed schools.