“What do you need, really, to be a teacher, anyway?” asked the late Norm Macdonald in a stand-up routine, before answering his own question: “Let’s say you’re teaching the third grade. What, what do you need? A fourth grade education. Really, anything above that … you’re overqualified, really, you know?”
Norm’s joke was, of course, not serious. It was an exaggeration for comedic effect and not a suggestion for public policy. The question it raises, if not the punchline, though, was a valid one — how much education does one need to teach?
According to pending federal legislation, quite a lot. The House-introduced reconciliation bill, the “Build Back Better” bill, includes a provision for “universal, high-quality, free, inclusive, and mixed preschool services” run by the states but funded by Washington, provided that “at a minimum, [states] requir[e] that lead teachers in the preschool have a baccalaureate degree in early childhood education or a related field by not later than 7 years after the date of enactment of this Act.”
In light of the predictable costs this mandate would impose, one has to wonder: What dire problem is it trying to solve?
The bizarre thing is that it can be hard even to find proponents arguing for this policy on the merits. A New York Times article discussing the bill mentioned this provision and cited an essay it had published four years ago arguing for the requirement. That piece cited “evidence that high-quality early childhood education helps children, especially disadvantaged ones, for the rest of their lives — but that low-quality preschool can hurt more than none at all.” This is all well and good as far as it goes, except that the referenced study made no mention of the education of its educators as a variable.
It’s little wonder that the American Enterprise Institute’s education research fellow Max Eden has denounced college requirements for preschool teachers as “regressive,” declaring that there is “no evidence to support this will help with student outcomes.”
Why, then, are lawmakers considering a federal law that would fund preschool programs only if lead teachers have years of experience in special collegiate programs? After all, how many people genuinely believe preschool instruction is a discipline that requires years to learn and not a matter of brief on-the-job training?
It’s no secret that college graduates are more liberal than the typical person. Pew Research Center polling over the past 20 years has seen the proportions of white Democrats self-identifying as liberal scale directly with education levels. More education tracks with more liberal engagement and activism and familiarity with niche woke jargon. In 2015, the share of “mostly” or “consistently liberal” people was 26% among those with “high school or less” education, 36% with “some college,” 44% with a college degree, and 54% with postgraduate experience.
And those numbers consider people on the basis of education in general — there’s reason to believe that those with college degrees in the humanities would be even further extreme than a generic graduate. A 2016 study that analyzed the party registration of college professors found that more “hard” disciplines, such as economics and law, featured less skewed ratios of registered Democrats to Republicans than departments such as “journalism/communications” and history. (“Education” was not a department studied.) History professors who were registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 33.5 to 1. If increased Democratic registration tracks with more humanities fields, such as education, and with more liberal attitudes, then the above numbers about self-identified liberalism probably understate the ideological slant of this group.
With this in mind, it’s hard not to view this provision in a more sinister and power-centric light. Requiring preschool educators (or at least the “lead teachers” in charge of the rest) to have college degrees is a way to require that an ideologically distinct set of people oversees the full-time instruction of impressionable minds. That is the simplest way of explaining a national requirement that is so stringent yet also so starved for evidence or even vocal support. This rule is about influence and power.
Noah Diekemper is a senior research analyst at Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
