The Politicization of University Schools of Education
Jay SchalinFEBRUARY 2019
The Long March through the Education Schools
February 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Few institutions receive more attention and more funding than our education system. And it certainly warrants that attention; after all, education plays a big part in determining the future. Reformers abound, for both higher education and the K-12 system. But they have largely missed one of the most crucial components of education, our schools of education, where future teachers are trained.
They are out of sight and unapproachable for the K-12 reformers, and too technical and too much on the periphery for those who focus on higher education’s shortcomings. That has proven a grave error. Education schools are fundamental to all education. They are serving the nation badly, and it’s not just about test scores and graduation rates. Teacher education has become one of the most politicized corners of academia, an institution that is already out of step with the rest of the country politically. Education schools are leading the charge to “transform” the nation, and that transformation is not leading us to a better, freer, more prosperous, more humane society.
This politicization of the education schools is not new, it is not invisible, and it is not occurring through random happenstance or by good ideas pushing out bad ones. It started over 100 years ago in the Progressive era, when the education schools first emerged as a body of experts who focused on “teaching” as a science; many of those experts were socialists who were open about their intentions to change the nation.
But even the damage done to the education system by the twentieth-century Progressives pales compared to more recent efforts by multiculturalists and cultural Marxists in the colleges of education. Politics is now so engrained in the education schools it seems almost impossible for reform to occur. And while not every education professor is politicized, almost no professor of education objects to the wildest schemes of his or her radical colleagues,
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED594180.pdf
