T he campus tantrum at Columbia University exposed for all to see the institution’s commitment to the fringe political philosophies of postcolonial theory and of DEI more broadly.
Perhaps lesser known to the general public is that Columbia’s education department — aptly named Teachers College — is the oldest and arguably most prestigious education school in the country. It is the Yale Law or Julliard of teacher-prep programs. The ideas that students imbibe there and the content that the school’s professors promulgate reflect the elite consensus in American education. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a review of courses offered exposes an obsession with the same radical politics as the campus protesters.
Scrolling through the course catalogue (both its undergraduate and graduate courses offered at Barnard College and Teachers College, respectively), one hopes that prospective teachers and school leaders will find classes on the practicalities of teaching, such as classroom management, or the principles of the so-called science of reading. Instead, the courses offer a veritable catchall of the worst kinds of progressive neuroses.
One course, Critical Pedagogies, focuses on the works of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist who cites the Maoist and Russian Revolutions as ideals; students in the class will investigate “power dynamics and structural inequalities.” The goal is to raise the “critical consciousness” of future teachers — a term of art coined by Freire that implies a Marxist understanding of the world and its various oppressions. Its instructor, Fawziah Qadir, is herself an adherent to critical race theory and anti-racist pedagogy.
Such classes are ubiquitous. In Making Change: Activism, Social Movements, and Education, students will ask essential questions such as “What does education/teacher activism look like?” and learn about this activism through examples such as the Chicago Teachers Union.
In Ethnographies of Youth Confinement, future teachers will discuss youth resistance movements; the first half semester focuses on “policing and prisons,” and in the second half, they will consider socially constructed identity categories such as race and gender. Instructional theory be damned.
And in Arts and Humanities in the City, teachers focus on developing critical literacies, a theory of literature whereby students can “analyze and critique hidden perspectives and socially constructed power relations” within books; in practice, that means reading Romeo and Juliet through a feminist lens, holding a red pen and marking down points on literary classics for racism or sexism.
Where courses suggest practical, useful information, there’s reason for suspicion. For example, the class title “Language and Teaching in the Primary Reading/Writing Classroom” suggests phonics, spelling, and advice about how to teach little Johnny his ABCs. But its lead instructor is Lucy Calkins, a leading proponent of “whole language,” “three cueing,” “balanced literacy,” and other pseudoscientific, anti-phonics approaches to literacy. What’s more, her bestselling curriculum makes explicit reference to the influence of critical race theory and its leading proponents, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw.
For the past few years, the American education sector has been reckoning with the reality that, in forgoing phonics, it mistaught generations of students. Lucy Calkins was a central figure in that debacle, and while Teachers College dismantled her consultancy shop within the institution, it has kept her on as a lecturer. It’s akin to a medical school hiring a leading proponent of homeopathic medicine.
Other seemingly innocuous classes suffer a similar bait and switch. It’s safe to assume that the class Principles of Teaching and Learning might simply survey competing theories of education or the basics of instruction and cognitive science. But one instructor’s writings involve social justice in music instruction and “decolonizing” education while the other hawks various wishy-washy and dubious theories about “experiential walking” and “affective ways of knowing.”
While it’s tempting to wonder whether — even hope that — Columbia is an outlier, its school of education is not only influential; it’s emblematic. As I’ve written about at National Review before, radical politics permeate such institutions across the country. If personnel is policy, then our teacher-prep programs will all but guarantee that progressives win the battle for our schools even if DeSantis or school-choice advocates win a few skirmishes.
Thankfully, we are not without recourse. The best and most promising route is to create end runs around schools of education. In fact, where there’s no evidence that schools of education improve teacher quality, alternative training and licensing routes such as Teach for America produce better outcomes for teachers and students.
But even in states such as Texas, where alternative licensure is popular, a full half of teachers still proceed through traditional routes. As a private university, Columbia is largely beyond the reach of public policy — though there’s no reason taxpayers need to bankroll this institution through state- and federal-level grants. But governors and their administrations can and should use their power to actually govern schools of education at public universities. This could involve bans on the instruction of politicized topics or the requirement that universities teach certain concepts, such as the rudiments of cognitive science.
Regarding academics, teachers are the single most important school-level factor in a child’s outcomes, and regarding the ideological capture of American schools, teacher-prep programs are the very source of the woke curriculum, policies, and instruction that hit the alarming headlines. Reforming teacher preparation in America may very well be one of the most effective ways to improve our nation’s schools.