A few years ago, I read E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, a transformative appeal for steering American K-12 education toward deeper academic content and, more fundamentally, toward the primacy of knowledge. The book was a key reason I decided to attend Stanford University’s graduate program in education policy and leadership and reenter the world of education.
While I didn’t expect to be met with the champions of Hirsch’s ideas at Stanford, I could hardly anticipate the indifference that one of the self-professed top education schools in the world would show toward teaching education in a formal sense—that is, what students in K-12 schools ought to learn and how to teach it. Stanford is not alone, as universities have become notorious for under-preparing America’s teachers for the classroom.
During my graduate program, the students and professional academics around me were journeying to make society more equitable through the public education system without grasping what teachers actually did. As the source of most teacher licensure programs in the country, schools of education are failing to develop teachers to impart academic content to their future students and are neglecting the very function of public schooling.
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In its latest review of teacher education programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality revealed disturbing trends.
It showed, most concerningly, that only 25 percent of teacher prep programs adequately teach the science of reading, only 33 percent require students to learn relevant content knowledge in science and social studies, and about half do not adequately cover foundational math. Despite its reputation as one of the world’s top schools of education, Stanford received an F in the literacy component of its program, which failed to adequately cover any of the accepted foundations of reading in its courses on literacy instruction.
Other concerning signs of Stanford’s misguided approach to teacher education exist. Its ideas about mathematics instruction, which downplay the role of the teacher and direct instruction, neglect the sequential knowledge that will help students progress in the subject.
Regarding the humanities, its single class on the arts and social sciences in the elementary teacher prep program explores how “the visual arts and arts integrated learning drive inquiry and investigation into history, social science, and social justice issues.” Nowhere in this course is it discussed exactly what students should know in preparation for secondary education. It is no wonder our children’s basic history and civics knowledge has become, in the words of Robert Pondiscio, a “national embarrassment.”
During my own graduate year, our seminar instructor, a PhD candidate in education, boldly claimed that “content didn’t matter” in K-12 education. This is a proven falsehood to anyone even remotely knowledgeable about the science of learning. In fact, few of the faculty I interacted with in the school of education, many of them sociologists with only a vague notion of what went on inside a K-12 classroom, could answer the question: what ought students to learn in school?
In their quest to make schools more equitable, my professors promoted equity as both the means and the end and ignored exactly how schools drove toward equity. Without recourse to academic standards, equity in isolation is not enough. Indeed, a classroom is perfectly equitable if each student isn’t learning anything. This way of thinking has resulted in ill-advised policies like slashing advanced classes in schools.
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In other words, it is not the purpose of an education system to simply be equitable. Rather, public schools make society more equitable because they raise the education level of those who, in the past, didn’t have access to formal education.
If public schools’ function is to teach, those making education policy should be greatly concerned with what they teach and how to teach it best. Instead, schools of education are creating a generation of educators who ignore the central problems that concern teachers and students’ families, like how children learn to read or what academic subjects will be most relevant to upcoming generations. Social theory will not tell prospective teachers how their future students can become scientists or historians or, more simply, how to help a third grader who struggles to sound out words.
Throughout his decades-long career, E.D. Hirsch has championed public schooling not only as the conveyor of knowledge but as the great equalizer, the institution that allows all Americans to participate in their democracy fully. Today’s schools of education certainly share the latter sentiment, but they have forgotten that it is interwoven with the former—schools equalize because they enable all children to access the rich stores of knowledge that were once only the privilege of the few.
Because they comprise of most teacher licensure programs, universities play a fundamental role in our public education system. It is their responsibility to adequately prepare teachers for the classroom. By forsaking that duty and ignoring what teachers actually teach, universities do an immeasurable disservice to the institution of public education.
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Cover by Jared Gould using ChatGPT Text-to-Image tool
