Colleges of Education and the Teacher as Activist Pipeline
34
Total Number of States
67
Total Number of Universities
112
Total Number of Syllabi
58
Total Number of Course Catalogs/ Descriptions
Number of Syllabi or course descriptions containing:
19
Bell Hooks
54
“Critical Race Theory”
28
“Critical Theory”
18
“Oppression” and/or “Power”
55
Paulo Freire/ Pedagogy of the Oppressed
16
Robin DiAngelo
34
“Queer” or tenets of queer theory
20
“White SupremACY”
28
“Whiteness”
*This report is not exhaustive and will be updated over time.
Executive Summary
Across the nation, parents and policy makers have been pushing back against school districts that have been implementing radical ideologies such as critical race theory, queer theory, decolonization, whiteness, and anti-meritocracy. Unfortunately, these ideas are being ingrained into both current and future teachers, becoming part of K-12 lessons, classroom culture, and worldview.
At Parents Defending Education, we took a look at what America’s current and future K-12 educators are being taught in colleges of education across the country. This report highlights these findings from institutions of higher learning, ranging from small private colleges to large state institutions and elite universities.
We did a broad search for college of education syllabi and course descriptions from undergraduate-level to graduate-level that focused on selected search terms found listed below. Because a vast majority of K-12 teachers and administrators take college courses beyond undergraduate to either move up the district pay scale, meet state certification requirements, or transition into administration, a comprehensive look at colleges of education is presented within this report.
Contained within this report are over fifty colleges and universities, including 110 syllabi and 53 course descriptions that reveal the pervasiveness of radical left-wing ideologies in undergraduate and graduate education courses. Most course syllabi are from the last five to six years, though sprinkled throughout the report are older syllabi meant to show how long some of these ideologies have been around in the colleges of education.
For example, featured in the report is a dive into Portland State University’s Elementary Education program and courses, including lessons and materials. The school’s College of Education features guiding principles for future teachers that include becoming “anti-racist” educators who can “identify oppressive conditions, including micro- and macro-aggressions.” Course content includes the study and application of critical race theory, oppressor versus oppressed activities, “white supremacy culture,” tenets of queer theory, and teachers as activists.
The report also highlights Colorado State University’s ethnic studies track which includes teacher certification. Courses leading to degree completion include topics such as critical theories, queer theory, whiteness, and white privilege.
In 2022, 274,450 (or 6.7%) of college graduates (totaling 4.11 million) earned education degrees. According to the data collected, 89,410 students earned bachelor’s degrees while 151,710 students earned a master’s degree in education.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, per government data, there were 2,217 teacher preparation program providers with a total enrollment of 600,011 students.
FEATURED EXAMPLES
- Colorado State University (CO): The university offers students an ethnic studies major with teacher certification track which includes an “Intro to Ethnic Studies” course that focuses on “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “Trump and the politics of hate and White radicalism.”
- Trinity College (CT): The college’s “EDUC 312: Education for Justice” course states that it will “examine theoretical approaches to critical and liberatory education, as well as how these theories take hold in practice, both in formal and informal schooling settings.”
- University of Florida (FL): The school’s course titled “EDG 7224: Critical Pedagogy” includes a focus on white fragility and multiple readings of Robin DiAngelo texts.
- University of Michigan (MI): The School of Education’s course titled “How People Learn” focuses students on examining “learning from the perspective of educational justice and equity, always seeking to understand how power, privilege, oppression, and resistance impact learners, learning outcomes, and pedagogies.”
- Portland State University (OR): The school’s “Social Studies Methods: Teacher as Activist” course states that “prospective elementary educators will study persistent historical, social and political issues, conflicts and compromises in regard to power, inequity, and justice and their connection to current events and movements.”
- University of Pennsylvania (PA): The university offers a graduate level course titled “Activism Beyond the Classroom” which focuses on left-wing radical activism and readings from Black Lives Matter founders.
- University of Texas at El Paso (TX): The school’s “TED 6319: Ethics in Education” course states that it seeks to “deconstruct ‘social amnesia’ of individualism and its effects on collective’s ‘social agency and sociological imaginary’ within contexts of postcoloniality in contemporary society” and includes “Marxist thought” and reading Angela Davis.
- University of Utah (UT): The College of Education’s Department of Education, Culture, and Society was created specifically for the “study and pursuit of social justice in education” and offers a long list of left-wing based courses such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Education,” “Whiteness Theory and Education,” and “Critical Race Theories: A Focus on FemCrit and LatCrit.”
- George Mason University (VA): Graduate-level courses include content such as the “three pillars of white supremacy,” examining the role that white supremacy and whiteness play in a queer classroom, and the text A Marxist education: Learning to change the world.
- University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point (WI): The college’s “English Education Methods” course states that its “primary goal” is to help students “develop into careful, critical, antiracist English Language Arts educators” and includes an assignment where students create their own “Intersectionality wheel” that includes a person’s “privilege and power” and “systems of oppression.”
The Portland State University College of Education states that its vision is for educators and counselors to “create a just and equitable world.” Degree programming is centered around the idea of the “Teacher as Activist.”
The program includes “Touchstones for Anti-bias/Anti-racist educators” which states that the school’s elementary education program is guided by “recognizing the histories of colonization, settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and neoliberalism upon which the United States and its systems of education have been built and sustained.”
Content featured in the required courses include topics such as “white supremacy culture,” forms of oppression and privilege, critical race theory, and queer theory.
In the spring of 2024, the College of Education graduated 45 students with elementary education degrees, 81 with secondary education degrees, and a total of 398 degrees.
Below is an example of a course from the elementary education degree track.
The course description for “Identity and Social-Emotional Learning” states that “prospective elementary educators will examine core components of and factors influencing social emotional learning, identity formation, and executive function development in this course.”
The document states in the course introduction that “teachers play a significant role in establishing classroom and school environments that promote culturally elevating social-emotional learning (SEL) among students.” It also shares that the “teacher candidates take a deep dive into their own identity, vulnerability, and social emotional experiences in preparation for managing a classroom of learners” and that they will utilize a “lens of transformative social emotional learning (tSEL), teacher candidates center anti-racist and restorative justice practices that correspond with elementary students’ lived experiences and community-sustaining practices in classroom procedures, instruction, and daily interactions with students.”
During week one of the course, students engage in an activity titled Social Identity Mapping which has students list various forms of oppression in which individuals land on a spectrum of target and agent status. When evaluating the form of oppression, white males would occupy the category of “agent” while a female “Person of Color” would occupy the “target” category.
Other identity examples of “agents” of oppression include “heterosexual,” “rich, upper class,” born in the “USA,” “media beauty,” “married” and “monogamous,” “of appropriate age,” and “Christian.”
Another week one course activity includes students engaging with the Wheel of Privilege and Power which promotes the idea that those identity categories listed closest to the center are the most privileged/powerful.
During week four of the course, students engage with a document titled White Supremacy Culture which lists characteristics that are “damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group.” Listed characteristics include “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” “defensiveness,” “quantity over quality,” “worship of the written word,” “paternalism,” “power hoarding,” “fear of open conflict,” and “individualism.”
The course focus for week five is “Addressing Racial Injustices: Acts of Oppression, Microaggressions and Implicit Bias” and includes “affinity spaces.” The syllabus includes a document on “Caucuses” (also known as affinity groups) that states that causes are “times when people of color and white people within an organization meet separately in order to do” different work.
Read the full report on Portland State University here.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGES OF EDUCATION
ES designates the inclusion of ethnic studies courses at that institution
- California Polytechnical Institute
- California State University Dominguez Hills
- California State University San Marcos ES
- De Anza College ES
- Diablo Valley College ES
- Modesto Junior College ES
- Moorpark College ES
- Sacramento State University ES
- Santa Clara University
- Stanford University
- University of California Berkeley ES
- University of California Davis ES
- University of California Irvine
- University of California San Diego ES
- University of California Santa Cruz ES
- University of Redlands
- University of San Diego ES
- University of Southern California
- Westmont College ES
- Sam Houston State University ES
- Stephen F. Austin State University
- Sul Ross State University
- Texas A&M University Commerce
- Texas A&M University Texarkana
- University of Houston ES
- University of North Texas
- University of Texas at Arlington
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Texas at El Paso ES
