How to Get Wokeness Out of Schools By Jordan Adams
https://tomklingenstein.com/how-to-get-wokeness-out-of-schools/
When Glenn Youngkin cast his vision for education by saying, “We need to be teaching students how to think, not what to think,” he expressed a common conservative understanding. But this is not quite right. Although conservatives must ensure schools teach students how to think, and it’s quite impossible to teach students what to think or to conclude, they must use their authority unashamedly to establish whatstudents in America’s public schools think about.
Curriculum — what students learn — lies at the heart of education. It’s why schools exist. But for many American schools today, curriculum is full of critical race theory, historical revisionism, and graphic, sexualized content.
The thirty-odd states with conservative governors, state superintendents, or state boards of education and the 9,000 school boards in Trump-voting districts across the country should be working immediately to fix that, providing an education that is woke-free, academically effective, and pro-America.
Can conservatives actually change what students learn about in America’s schools? Yes, but it’s not easy. Conservatives must understand how Leftist ideology gets into schools in the first place before they can create the plan for getting it out.
How Woke Ideology Gets into Schools
Federally, there are no national standards or curricula, but there is a national education cartel: big publishers, National Council for the Social Studies, American Historical Association, National School Board Association, Common Core, American Federation of Teachers, and the rest. Most model standards (the C3 Framework for social studies, for example) are adopted with relatively minor edits by states while curriculum publishers lobby state superintendents, departments of education, and school boards with woke-laced, low-quality materials.
State superintendents, even conservative ones, have traditionally turned over the standards writing and curriculum vetting work to career bureaucrats and their asinine and cumbersome “review and revision” process, an internal department creation treated as sacrosanct but with almost zero basis in state law. They hire vendors from D.C. or New York City to facilitate reviews, assemble committees of the most loud-mouthed (and, by definition, left-wing) educators in the state, and cement woke and ineffective standards and materials.
In almost every state, the law requires schools to teach these state standards. Because of this, district staff dismiss any non-conventional (slightly conservative or traditional) curriculum that a board or community member might propose as not ““standards-aligned.”
But the “standards-aligned” criteria are a lot of bluster. In reality, the standards are so vague and poorly written that anything can satisfy them and few, if any, states or districts actually enforce their use. And although state-approved curricula are not usually mandated, many come with financial incentives or else discourage districts from using alternatives by requiring them to jump through bureaucratic hoops to do so.
Despite all this, the 9,000 school boards mentioned above still have the authority to approve curricula and therefore an opportunity to do the job the state doesn’t. Unfortunately, this seldom happens in any meaningful way for a few reasons.
First, curricula and instructional materials are a labyrinth. Reviewing this mountain of material, in short order — especially for the majority of school board members without education backgrounds and who serve in purely voluntary, non-compensated positions — is time-consuming at best, daunting at worst.
Second, many school board members, even conservative ones, aren’t interested in curriculum. Although a fatal disposition and a true dereliction of duty, it is unfortunately all too common among local board members, especially conservatives.
Third, district administrators and union leaders emotionally blackmail and berate any school board members who do try to take a stand for “not trusting” teachers, questioning the “experts,” “micromanaging,” and not “staying in their lane.”
For the states and boards that do take the time to review materials, the education blob throws up a new series of hurdles.
For instance, the word “curriculum” means different things to different groups along the way. School boards (and states) may claim that they have vetted curricula, but this usually means they’ve only reviewed the student-facing text.
Following the successes of Libs of TikTok, Parents Defending Education, and some state laws in revealing what goes on in classrooms, however, most publishers and administrators are not so blatant as to put ideological content directly in the student-facing (and therefore parent-viewable) materials.
Instead, ideological content is found in the peripheries, in curricular guidance for teachers such as “teachers’ editions” or in a district’s customizable curriculum or learning management system (CMS or LMS), an online platform for teachers and sometimes students to access.
Is all of this made available to boards for approval or made accessible to parents? No. Unless explicitly requested, publishers or district staff do not consider teachers’ editions or curriculum management systems part of the “curriculum” and do not include them for board or state review.
The biggest issue, however, is found in supplemental curricular materials. These are the “optional,” oftentimes third-party resources, professional development, websites, and shared lesson plans. They are either presented by administration to teachers as “optional” resources, accessed through links in official materials, or introduced by individual teachers, sometimes of their own creation but often just pulled from somewhere on the Internet. All of this is done without board approval or parental access. In fact, this is how the majority of woke content makes its way to children.
It’s a ghost curriculum, because it’s seldom recorded, reviewed, or vetted. Not only can it be woke; it’s also terribly ineffective for students’ academic success.
How Conservatives Can Take the Classrooms Back
Working up through the levels of government, what can conservatives do?
Local School Boards Must Scour Materials
A condition for conservative support for school board candidates should be their commitment to review instructional materials page-by-page and line-by-line. Their review must include all materials and resources that will be made available to students and teachers, not simply the primary textbook or platform. And they must be willing to reject publishers unwilling to make such disclosures or changes.
The review must also include any piecemeal acquisitions by a district or school (for example, library books or professional development). Administrators should document and report every purchase or donation proposal for curriculum and instruction-related materials and services, and boards should review and approve them prior to use.
Finally, districts should establish a process for reviewing and documenting supplemental materials introduced by individual educators. Such a process would require educators to upload their lesson plans prior to teaching them and to receive approval from a curriculum supervisor or principal. Besides preparedness being the mark of good teaching, this documentation discourages purposeful violations of policies or laws and makes it easy to identify who is responsible when violations occur.
State Authorities Must Overhaul Their Systems
Superintendents need to direct their departments to conduct a similar review of curricula that looks beyond the student text to include teachers’ editions and the myriad links to third-party content contained within them. Better yet, they can create an optional open education resource (OER) that districts may use for free and that is vetted as it is built.
State superintendents also must take control of standards-writing: streamline the process, include only the best teachers and organizations, and rely on cognitive science and classical education principles instead of the failed status quo. In many cases, this will require state boards of education and superintendents to grow a spine, too, and for conservative electoral efforts to ensure these boards represent their constituents.
All of these, however, are only as trustworthy as the people responsible for implementing them. For any real renewal in American education, personnel is policy.
In the short term, therefore, state superintendents and school boards can enlist trusted third-party support to audit curricula or facilitate standards writing, reclaiming from the administrative state their rightful though long-neglected authority over what students learn about in schools.
But making American education great in the long run will take a lot more. It will take a new generation of teachers and administrators at the local and state levels.
To get there, states must overhaul teacher and administrator certification and preparation programs. Alternative, straightforward pathways should be the new standard route to becoming a teacher or administrator, attracting and allowing the very best college students, professionals, and former law enforcement and veterans to enter the classroom.
Mentor teacher programs that retain the best teachers and train new ones should become the cornerstone. A district should be allowed to honor its most effective teachers with reduced class loads, the opportunity to train, observe, and coach new teachers, and an accompanying pay raise.
To make all this possible, laws must rein in government unions and reduce the number of district nonteaching staff members. End tenure and collective bargaining agreements that don’t allow for teacher merit pay. We should be paying our best teachers more than our worst and be able to remove those who are ineffective.
The Trump Administration Must Lead the Way
The Department of Education historically does amazingly little when it comes to academics. But if the Trump administration were to revive its 1776 Commission or adequately prepare for America’s Semiquincentennial Celebration, it could play the decisive role in an American education renaissance.
Those 9,000 school boards in Trump Country and many more in purple districts need air cover against the education monopoly populated by woke bureaucrats.
The Trump administration should create a set of model standards for the nation — the America First Standards, or something to that effect. They should certainly cover history and civics, but they could be written for every subject area: reading, math, science, health, physical education, and the rest. They should be based on accurate history, borrow elements from the rapidly spreading classical education movement, and involve politically moderate cognitive scientists, long jilted by the education establishment for daring to question its prescriptions.
The standards, of course, would be entirely optional, but as President Trump’s signature vision for what all American children should study, state boards of education and superintendents would have the cover — nay, mandate — to use them as the foundation for their own standards.
With an accompanying list of curricular options aligned with these national model standards, thousands of school boards will have the backing from the Trump administration to get sound curricula in their schools. And with a new generation of teachers and administrators, schools will have the personnel necessary for effectively teaching them.
Leading up to this election, Republicans were trusted more than Democrats on education for the first time possibly ever, and they won an electoral landslide in the process. This landslide is due as much to the radicalism of the destructive Left, which shows no signs of ebbing, as to the re-founding of the GOP by Donald Trump. Conservatives can make plenty of structural reforms to education at lower levels — and they should — but the second Trump administration can usher in an American renaissance by using the power voters have given them to deliver the content and curriculum American children deserve.
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