Too many college kids can’t even read and write.

At UC San Diego, “In the 2025 incoming class, … [freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards] constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates.” Even Harvard University has started offering remedial mathematics classes.

Americans shouldn’t be surprised: student scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in reading and mathematics show dismaying declines across the nation. All K-12 students, and not just those going to college, seem to have learned shockingly little in their classrooms.

Partly this is because of disastrous education policies, such as the destruction of school discipline or equitable grading. But a crucial component in the decay of student knowledge is that their teachers don’t know what they’re teaching either. These teachers—themselves the mistaught students of an earlier generation—far too frequently have never learned the subject matter they’re supposed to teach.

If teachers never learned their lessons, how can their students be expected to?

The radical education establishment, which includes foundations, bureaucrats, and accreditors, has used licensure requirements as a central tool to gain power over America’s classrooms. These licensure requirements forced teachers and education administrators to undergo extensive training in educational pedagogy, and little in subject-matter content. The radical establishment, disconnected from real-world classrooms, used the requirements to restrict entry to leftist ideologues and careerists who could mouth politically correct buzzwords such as equity and social justice. They also generally reduced the supply of teachers and education administrators and wasted the time and money of would-be teachers by requiring them to learn a hollow curriculum rather than subject matter content knowledge or directly applicable knowledge of cognitive psychology and statistics.

The best way for Americans to improve student educational outcomes is to strengthen content-knowledge requirements for teachers. Teachers who know what they’re supposed to teach at least have a fighting chance of getting students to learn how to read and add—and to learn history, science, and everything else they need to know for college, career, and citizenship.

The National Association of Scholars’s (NAS) Education Licensure Core Curriculum Act, the latest addition to its Model Education Licensure Code, would be a good way to improve new teachers’ content knowledge.

The model Act reforms teacher licensure requirements by creating a core curriculum of courses that teacher applicants must have taken before they can apply for a teaching license. The Act creates different core requirements for four different classes of teacher licensure: Kindergarten Through Grade Six Requirements; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Requirements, Grade 7 – 12; Humanities Requirements, Grade 7 – 12; and Social Studies Requirements, Grade 7 – 12. Each of these teacher licensure requirements requires teacher applicants to have taken eight subject-matter courses. The Kindergarten Through Grade Six Requirements require broad interdisciplinary knowledge, while the three Grade 7 – 12 teacher licensure requirements require deeper knowledge in, respectively, the STEM disciplines, the humanities, and the social sciences.

These requirements do not directly challenge the role of education schools and their allies to distort teacher training. They do, however, ensure that teachers will have a large minimum of solid content knowledge to prepare them for their classrooms.

Meeting teacher licensure requirements with solid content knowledge will also pressure education schools to reduce the amount of useless, counterproductive, and/or politicized pedagogy they impose on their students. Perhaps as importantly, creating an Education Licensure Core Curriculum will improve the accountability of teacher preparation programs to policymakers and the public. Policymakers and the public will be able to oversee a limited number of carefully defined teacher preparation courses and hold colleges and universities accountable for how well they are taught.

NAS’s model Act cannot solve every aspect of teacher education. It does not solve the problem of politicized and softened undergraduate courses in subject-matter disciplines, especially those in the humanities and the social sciences, which degrade teacher preparation. But creating an Education Licensure Core Curriculum would delimit the arena of future curricular reform needed to improve teacher preparation and make clear what needs to be done. This model Act is a necessary part of education reform, even if it is not the final one.

Making sure that all America’s math teachers know calculus is the best way to ensure that all the incoming freshmen at UC San Diego will know elementary math, and that no Harvard freshman will need to take Remedial Math. The same is true for every K-12 subject.

Reforming teacher education is the high road to success in the broader campaign for education reform.

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Image: “024/365 – I have hated math since I was a kid because I never got it. It seems like I’m catching on a lot more in my current math class, of course this is a remedial math class so that could be part of it.” by THEMACGIRL* on Flickr