Education schools prioritize activism over teaching

Buck requested syllabi from teacher preparation programs at 10 public universities and worked through more than 400 readings from 75 courses at the eight schools that provided them. He sorted each reading as traditional, progressive, critical, or therapeutic, and traditional material was consistently outnumbered across schools. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 45% of the readings fell into the critical category, and in the English language arts track at the University of Texas at Austin, the figure was 90%.Buck is careful about the limits of his own data, noting that with more than 1,600 education schools in the country, his report cannot claim to be representative. That caution is intellectually honest, and it is also why the longer record on which Buck is building is so powerful. Placed in the context of research on education school syllabi that began more than two decades ago, the durability of Buck’s findings is remarkably clear. Beginning in 2002, David Steiner and Susan Rozen reviewed 165 syllabi from 16 schools of education, including Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA. In foundations courses, the most frequently assigned authors included Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, and John Dewey, while E.D. Hirsch turned up on only two syllabi and Diane Ravitch on one, and aspiring teachers were seldom asked to show they could teach children to read.Two years later, Arthur Levine, the longtime president of Teachers College at Columbia University, released Educating School Teachers. Levine was hardly some outsider with a grudge against the profession, yet he concluded that American teacher education was principally “a mix of poor and mediocre programs.”Buck’s study also speaks directly to a fair criticism of that earlier research. When Steiner and Rozen presented their work, the head of the nation’s largest education-school accreditor pointed out that elite schools might not represent the institutions where most American teachers are trained, and Steiner conceded the point. By including regional campuses alongside the flagships in his study, Buck provides a much-needed look at where teachers actually learn their trade.Buck also deserves credit for how hard he had to work to acquire the syllabi. Florida and Texas require public universities to post them, but UCLA refused his public records request and the University of Michigan postponed its response for nearly a year before he went ahead without it. I have long argued that syllabi should be public, and I cannot understand the resistance, especially because these are public universities training public school teachers. Buck has done a real service by showing how difficult it remains to find out what they teach.This June, the National Council on Teacher Quality released its latest review of more than 700 elementary teacher preparation programs, and there is good news in it: the share earning an A for reading preparation doubled, from 26% in 2023 to 53%. While it is sadly the case that 47% of programs still fall short on the core components of scientifically based reading instruction and 21% received an F, the overall improvement matters.Students walk to and from classes on the Indiana University campus, Oct. 14, 2021, in Bloomington, Ind. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) Notably, some of the reasons these concerns have persisted are likely structural. Levine found that neither state standards nor accreditation were doing much to maintain quality, and aspiring teachers must still pass through approved programs while districts reward them for earning graduate degrees. Buck’s sensible and practical recommendations, including eliminating master’s degree pay premiums and tying accreditation more closely to outcomes, directly confront those incentives and deserve serious attention from state policymakers.Education schools can change, and the reading gains above are a good example of how. Because of many years of researchers and parents documenting the gap between the science of reading and classroom practice, 43 states and the District of Columbia have now adopted laws and policies aligned with evidence-based reading instruction. The NCTQ numbers show preparation programs moving too. It took an awfully long time, and there is a lot more ground to cover, but Buck is adding to that evidence.Of course, none of these findings about teaching in traditional ways means that teachers should steer clear of race, inequality, or other difficult subjects, or that every progressive teaching method is wrong. I teach at a progressive college and adore using the progressive approach in many of my classes. The question that I keep coming back to is much more basic: How much time do schools of education spend teaching future teachers how to teach? What a program assigns tells us a great deal about what it believes the job to be. And, over the past several decades, these teacher education programs have made their ideas about teaching very clear, with personal inquiry, grievance, and the primacy of lived experience pushing against that older idea of teaching the basics.These newer, more therapeutic and personal approaches have merit to a degree, but they have dangerously recast teachers as facilitators and not direct educators. They often put inquiry and personal narratives too far ahead of direct instruction and the teaching of facts, essential skills, and the traditional building blocks of becoming an educated and civically capable person.The fact is that a first-grade teacher needs to know how children learn to read, while a middle school teacher needs to know what to do with a room full of 12-year-olds who would rather be somewhere else. A high school teacher and college professor must be willing to state that there is a historical record and there are known facts and truths.And, perhaps most unfashionably, a teacher also has to believe there are things worth knowing and that passing them on to a child is neither embarrassing nor authoritarian — teachers can care about students’ personal experiences, views, and interests, but skills matter, and facts simply must be taught.I love open inquiry and curiosity in the classroom. Children should ask questions, push back, and eventually learn to think for themselves. But that word “eventually” matters here; there are requirements for progressive teaching to actually work. In order for open, robust inquiry to thrive, our students first need a real foundation, and that core is often weak or missing, leaving opinion to stand in for judgment. Our students cannot think critically about something they know little or nothing about.I have spent a lot of time around educational institutions and the people who teach in them. Many people enter education because they care deeply about restorative justice, activism, and making the world better. I don’t doubt their sincerity, but the issue is the striking number of people who describe themselves as activists before they describe themselves as teachers, and that distinction matters for how they see the role they serve.TRUMP GOT A SECOND CHANCE. HE’S BLOWING ITGood teaching can be life-altering, but first there is a student sitting in a room who needs to learn how to read and write, learn some history, math, and science, and acquire enough knowledge to decide for himself what he thinks about it all. Activism around just causes is admirable, and it may even be activism and policies I support, but the job is to be a teacher and not an organizer. Promoting ideologies and political activism is simply not the proper role of the teacher in the classroom.Buck’s study made a powerful contribution by providing carefully gathered and contemporary evidence on questions people have been raising for more than 20 years about what is being taught in our schools of education. The answers are unambiguous, and, after two decades of warnings, education schools are not spending enough time teaching teachers how to teach.