Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education eliminated two major teacher-training programs: the $70 million-a-year Teacher Quality Partnerships program, as well as the $80 million-a-year Supporting Effective Educator Development grants. This is terrific news, not just for the budgetary savings, but because it strikes an emphatic blow at training that has promoted dubious dogmas and politicized classrooms.
The move was met with predictable outrage in the nation’s schools of education and the ranks of left-leaning education associations. But it was a welcome and overdue correction, one that deserves to be celebrated.
The Department of Education noted that many of the teacher preparation and training programs featured social-justice activism, a hyper-fixation on race, and recruiting strategies “implicitly and explicitly based on race.” Grant proposals included programs that instruct teachers to address “systemic forms of oppression and inequity” and pressure trainees to use “abolitionist pedagogies and issues of diversity in classroom management.”
Putting an end to federal support for this stuff is a big deal. After all, it’s a mistake to blame the nation’s teachers for the toxic DEI and gender dogmas that took root in so many schools in recent years. In fact, while I’ve worked with educators for decades, I’ve known precious few elementary teachers eager to discuss gender or make kids fill out privilege worksheets. In fact, even when diversity, equity, and inclusion was flying high in 2022, most teachers said they opposed teaching “the idea of critical race theory.”
In truth, much of the blame for the toxic agendas that have cropped up in schools should be reserved for the education professors, consultants, and bureaucrats who train (and bully) the nation’s teachers.
Unlike teachers, who actually live in their communities, know their students, and interact with parents, these academics and consultants run campus trainings or do fly-bys in which they promote their personal agendas and then scoot out of town with a paycheck.
While teacher training has long been a subject of concern, a wave of Freedom of Information Act requests in recent years have shone a bright light on the problem.
The Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia hired trainers from “The Equity Collaborative” to teach educators that “independence,” “individual achievement,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “White individualism.” Trainers in Seattle taught teachers that we live in a “race-based white-supremacist society,” that schools commit “spirit murder” against Black children, and that White teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”
In Buffalo, New York, trainers designed a curriculum requiring schools to embrace “Black Lives Matter principles.” Teachers were told to promote “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” Kindergarten teachers were directed to discuss “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.”
Trainers in Davis, California, taught teachers how to “decolonize their language and deconstruct that which they’ve been taught about gender.” In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, teachers were told that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.”
The trainers who deliver these sessions don’t see the practical consequences for students and families. They treat students as abstractions and schools as laboratories. And educators, fearful of being labeled bigots or racists, have been bullied into playing along.
It’s good news that the Department of Education is going to stop underwriting a lot of this. State officials and local school boards would do well to follow suit.
But this rapid-fire approach to eliminating teacher training programs raises questions. Is zeroing out these programs an excessive response? Isn’t it more sensible to take a scalpel to the troubling stuff while protecting the useful training?
Here’s the thing: There’s hardly any evidence that teacher training actually improves teaching. A massive 2014 meta-analysis by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, for instance, evaluated 643 studies of professional development in K–12 math instruction. Of those, only thirty-two even asked whether professional development caused student improvement and just two found evidence of positive, reliable results.
Linda Darling-Hammond, former president of the American Education Research Association, has acknowledged that the “training [educators] receive is episodic, myopic, and often meaningless.” As the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless has politely put it, “In a nutshell, the scientific basis for PD is extremely weak.”
Instead of spending resources on useless training programs, schools should focus on making sure that teachers know the substance of what they’re going to teach and then give them practical support at tasks such as curricular planning and classroom management. Meanwhile, the billions spent on teacher training could be put to better use. The funds could be targeted to provide big pay bumps for educators who do exceptional work, teach high-need subjects, or mentor young colleagues.
Ultimately, defunding teacher training isn’t much of a trade-off after all.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.
