The pervasive problem of "education" colleges

February 27, 2023. How Ed Schools Won (Part 13). No institutions talk more about social injustice and educational inequities than ed schools. And no institutions have done more to increase both of these problems in K-12 education than ed schools. That contradiction has been so obvious for so long that some people have even questioned the motives of the so-called "progressive" educational establishment.

As far back as 1995, for example, the writer and scholar Lisa Delpit reported that many black school teachers she'd spoken with had concluded that the progressive educational schemes imposed on black and poor children made so little sense that they could only be explained by, and I quote, "a desire to ensure that the liberals' children get sole access to the dwindling pool of American jobs."In other words, for these black educators, it looked like self-interested sabotage.

Is that too cynical, too suspicious? Well, maybe. But it helps one see the colossal irony involved when ed schools claim to have expertise in fixing the very inequities that they, more than any other educational institutions, have produced. Their anti-curriculum orthodoxy, coupled with their decades-long failures in reading instruction, have been especially devastating for disadvantaged children. But everyone has suffered. Talk to any college professor in the last 50 years and just ask them how well the K-12 system has prepared incoming college students. Prepare to get an earful.

In 2012, a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that colleges were spending $7 billion a year on remedial education courses, trying to get roughly 50% of college freshmen ready for college-level work. And that leaves out of the equation the 35% of high school graduates who never even attend college.

So the question is: why? Why did professors allow universities to be overrun by the graduates of the very institutions which have made their jobs so difficult? Here are a few reasons:

First, the influx of administrators in the last three decades was something that professors failed to notice until it was too late. And when they did notice, the percentage of faculty with the job projection provided by tenure was already in steep decline, so there wasn't much anyone could do. Then too, most professors have no idea why incoming students are so ill-prepared or where college administrators even come from.

Second, this army of bureaucrats appeared on campuses waving flags of “caring community” and anti-racism such that anyone criticizing them was automatically uncaring, anti-community, and racist. So, they had a rhetorical advantage from the beginning. Even a decade ago, there were still enough faculty committed to open inquiry to fight back, but most of them have either retired or just given up.

But the third reason is that the woke politics of ed school-trained administrators is a kind of fundamentalist version of college faculty's own political leanings. Though crude and overtly anti-intellectual, the political fundamentalism of administrators advances the ideological interest of faculty.

Ed school-trained administrators showed faculty that instead of arguing against opponents, you could just claim that their ideas were endangering students or—and this is the latest authoritarian tactic—these ideas were endangering vulnerable faculty. And with every passing year, incoming professors who have grown up in this woke, intolerant environment, defend it with increasing passion and vitriol. Anyone who refuses to chant their woke doxology is either going to be filtered out of the college professor ranks in grad school or in the faculty hiring process.

So the bad news is there's nothing in place to stop higher education from going further down the same road as America's teacher training institutions and public schools. And that's a disaster—not just for education, but for the nation as a whole. Many, if not most, colleges are actively teaching students an inverted form of American exceptionalism—not that the country is exceptionally virtuous, but that is exceptionally evil. That's especially easy to do when only 11% of the nation's public high school graduates rate proficient in American history. Still, fewer graduates are proficient in world history, which means that America's many failings are made more conspicuous for being completely stripped of any global, historical context.

Most students have no idea, for example, that slavery has been a worldwide practice almost from the beginning of recorded history, and that it was the West, which, even as it often supported and engaged in this horrific practice, also invented the principled opposition to it known as abolition. Nor do they realize that slavery was a problem in various parts of the world throughout the 20th century, and even into the 21st, as The Global Slavery Index from the Walk Free human rights group shows.

And they don't realize either that one of the many things that the fascist right and the communist left shared in the last century was a murderous contempt for freedom of speech, precisely because this freedom put the individual and the unfettered pursuit of truth ahead of some rarified collectivist political vision.

Forty years ago, it was possible that a high school graduate who didn't know these things would discover them in college. It's more likely now, I'm afraid, that in most institutions, the students’ ignorance will either be untouched or reinforced.