What happens when a wave of populist energy crashes against deeply entrenched structural forces? Very little, unless that energy can be channeled strategically into structural reform.
After the COVID-19 pandemic gave parents a window into what their children were learning, a populist backlash against critical race theory led legislatures in more than a dozen states to pass “CRT bans.” But these bans were only a partial solution. To paraphrase Hemingway, public education went woke in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The sudden shift came in the wake of the death of George Floyd, when the education establishment flipped a permission switch for teachers to promote “anti-racist” activism in the classroom. While CRT bans reset expectations, they did not address the reason why so many teachers felt that teaching activism was appropriate in the first place: because they were trained to.
That’s what makes recent model legislation from the National Association of Scholars such a welcome development. Assembling a coalition of allies, including the Goldwater Institute, the James G. Martin Center, the John Locke Foundation, and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, last week, the NAS released three model bills to reform teacher training and licensure systems.
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As the NAS notes, the education establishment has used “bureaucratic licensure requirements as a central tool to gain power over America’s classrooms.” Before teachers in many states can teach, they must obtain degrees from schools of education. If schools of education primarily taught best practices in reading and math pedagogy, this would be a fine arrangement. Unfortunately, there’s scant evidence that schools of education contribute to improved outcomes and plenty to suggest that they inculcate an ideological-activist mindset. According to my American Enterprise Institute colleague Rick Hess and the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, nearly half of education school professors pursue studies that could reasonably be labeled as “critical race theory.”
To be sure, when forced to defend themselves, schools of education will vehemently deny that they teach critical race theory. They have many other names for it, such as “culturally responsive” education or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” For good measure, the NAS model legislation covers the waterfront of buzzwords, prohibiting state boards of education from approving teacher preparation programs that train teachers in “allyship, diversity, social justice, sustainability, systemic racism, gender identity, equity, or inclusion, or to any ideology or pedagogy that classifies individuals within identity groups.”
In addition to schools of education, the NAS model legislation takes a similar aim at professional development materials and state licensure requirements. The model legislation would require transparency in professional development and force all revisions to licensure requirements to be submitted to the governor and state legislature for approval. This practice would prevent ideological hurdles to classroom entry from being erected on bureaucratic autopilot.
The NAS also proposes a simplified education licensure pathway, focusing on subject matter content and a standardized test thereof, but which would not require an education major or even an undergraduate degree. This would, the NAS insists, “create a corps of teachers with substantially increased preparation in the subject matters they teach, without years captive in education departments and schools, and without a hollow and expensive credential.”
The NAS recognizes that this approach may go further than some legislators might be comfortable with. But on the whole, their model legislation represents an excellent starting point for a long overdue and eminently timely policy conversation. For decades, teacher preparation and licensure has become increasingly politicized without attracting much notice from conservative governors or legislatures. But after two years of controversy over critical race theory, policymakers are surely able to identify the word games played to promote political ideology over effective pedagogy.
Furthermore, the post-pandemic staffing crisis that many schools are experiencing should prompt policymakers to search for creative ways to get talented adults into classrooms. Now more than ever, requiring any form of ideological barrier to classroom entry simply makes no sense.
Unfortunately, there are more powerful constituencies prepared to defend the status quo than push the envelope. Teachers’ colleges won’t like having their monopolies challenged, and teachers unions are sure to oppose an effort to remove an ideological filter from teacher preparation and licensure. Still, by assembling a coalition and an array of practical reforms, the NAS has planted a flag that state legislators would be wise to take seriously. The intrusion of woke ideology into K-12 schools didn’t take place overnight and won’t be fully addressed by CRT bans. It is a structural problem that requires structural solutions and policymakers equipped to advance them.
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Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America page.
