Posted on 09/24/2025 6:02:07 AM PDT by karpov
To argue that schools of education have gone bonkers is akin to penning an op-ed that the Titanic sank. The fact is given. Does anyone dispute it?
The most-assigned books and essays for prospective teachers are a heady mixture of race essentialism, gender theory, and outright Marxist kookery. Trainees learn much of critical-consciousness raising, Marxist praxis, and gender as a performative act but little of classroom management, curricular sequencing, or instructional practice. Unsurprisingly, research into the impact of these programs finds that teachers who attend them are no more effective than alternatively trained or even untrained career transitioners.
Since at least the 1960s, schools of education have housed some of our most radical thinkers. Many leaders of the terroristic Weather Underground found refuge in them, for example. And, since then, along with a handful of law schools, education schools have introduced into public consciousness many of conservatives’ bugaboos, from critical race theory to microaggressions and white fragility.
The scholarship—a gracious thing to call it—that such schools produce often reads like the sweaty rantings of a schizophrenic. Skim any education-school publication list, and you’ll find a mess of auto-ethnographies, case studies, and glorified op-eds championing the latest progressive classroom intervention. Notably absent are randomized-controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, or meta-analyses proving the theories actually work.
Education schools are indeed, as a former Harvard president once called them, a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” Such disdain is typically how conservatives discuss them: Schools of education delenda est. Or they follow Milton Friedman’s recommendation to abolish licensure policies and let the market sort it out.
A former classical-school administrator turned education columnist, I come to you, dear reader of the Martin Center, with a different request. The K-12 education system in America has a personnel problem.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Eliminate them.
School choice, parental vouchers for private, parochial, etc.
Why do you need a degree to teach second grade math?
FEDERAL TEACHER EDUCATION SUPPORT
To increase the supply of possible teachers and to cut college student costs, the federal government might pay for students to take courses in classroom management, educational law, English as a Second Language instruction, child psychology and classroom internships so a large percentage of college graduates would be classroom ready.
This could be done by replacing Pell grants only for needy students with Teacher Training grants for all program participants, including students from affluent families.
Starbucks’ barista<->public school teacher
Starbucks’ barista income ~= public school teacher income
I was forced to to take 50% of my courses in content (economics) and the other 50% in “Education” courses in order to obtain advanced teaching degrees. The Education classes were nothing more than a pow-wow with Far-Left indoctrinators. There were plenty idiotic members of my cohort who ate it up though.
A good start would be (1) to end ALL federal, state and local government subsidies: to the schools, their teachers, their administrators. (2) End government subsidizing or offering school loans. (3)Change laws to outlaw unionization of public K-12 and college schools.
As things are today, liberal control of our schools is being subsidized by taxpayer dollars. In other words, conservatives and Christians are subsidizing the people and institutions that hate them. This must end.
Let’s stop with the never ending analysis and start fixing them, 30 years late. Start with massive incentives for competition to public schools.
What struck me was that the School of Education, on almost every single campus, was in the bottom 4, well behind even the Schools of Art, Dance, Sports, etc. Basically reinforcing the old adage, "Those who can't do, teach".
The only School that was consistently below Education, and generally in the Bottom 2 in scores across all 407 schools in our database, were the Schools of Journalism.
Uh...I think AI will fix them...a parent could easily design classes for children up to @15 yrs...then have them “apprentice” in a field of their choice. College s/b only for doctors, maybe engineers. Warehousing them with idiot “teachers” has not worked.
Problem is nobody actually wants to get involved.
The Tea Party inevitably suffered from this. It’s always openly stated that “Somebody ought to do something!” when what is actually intended is that “Somebody else ought to do something!”
You can see it in common well intended responses, “show up and vote”, “pass certain laws”
It’s never “I’m becoming a teacher, one day a professor, one day a head of university”
It’s never “I’m going to be a Charlie Kirk”
It’s never “scheduled mass protests”
Its decidedly impossible to have a change effect with people committed to someone “else” doing something. In most instances the necessary ingredient is safety in numbers and the larger the numbers the more safety there is.
The remarkable thing about Charlie Kirk is not just his resolve. It’s also that Kirk came out of the Tea Party and in the last 6 months of Kirk’s life sit back and marvel at just how alone Kirk truly was. He had his organization, sure. So there’s a couple of hundred people.
Where are the hundreds of thousands Kirk used to be around who stood on the national mall? Yes. It is true to say that when you prior were among hundreds of thousands who you didn’t ask for, and now you only have a hundred or so and you had to hire them.
You’re alone. And that’s the problem. There’s virtually no willingness to simply stand. “Somebody ELSE should do something. But not me.”
The degree is not related to the subject matter. A teaching degree supposedly provides a teacher with teaching technique. It also prepares them to recognize abused children, and other social issues. The basic ideas there are good; but, leftists are more likely to become teachers. They take the opportunity to indoctrinate.
School choice or any other solution won't help until more conservatives go into teaching and the schools adopt a politically neutral mindset.
Direct hit! You nailed it.
Close them.
L
Or....
Hire someone that knows how to add, and leave the squishy stuff up to the family....
Karpov dreams as hard as any leftist with no chance of accomplishment. Get yur kids the hell ou of public school, those of yall who do care for your children but are too blind or addled to actually do something about it, i.e. get them the hell out of clutches of the psychoapths. The only possible way to reform anything in the universities or any other schools is to remove all federal funding from the picture. No funding. No mandates, No federal regulation at all. When they have to operate in the marketthey will reform.That is what this sountry was once all about
No. No federal money for education. No matter how support is proposed it devolves into control by bureaucrats at best and by communists at worst.
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