July 20, 2022
When Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn commented on university teacher education programs in late June, he not only struck a nerve with teacher advocacy groups but he also struck at the root of the decay that has taken hold in our public schools.
Arnn made his comments at a private event while on stage with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Afterwards, a secretly recorded video of the event was made public by a Nashville television station and then widely reported.
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country,” Arnn said.
He was also unsparing in his assessment of the presence on campuses of the “diversity” movement: “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators . . . Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”
The Hillsdale president was castigated by the usual suspects—various teacher groups in Tennessee, teacher college apparatchiks, and a spokesman for the state association of schools. Naturally, Lee was attacked for his silence as Arnn spoke.
Critics sniffed in indignation. They feigned outrage that anyone would dare to tell the truth about the nation’s schools of education.
Arnn is correct. The situation is arguably worse in education schools and education departments than what he portrayed. A half-century of studies have shown this to be the case.
But more than just producing teachers, university education schools and, to an extent, departments of education at colleges without a free-standing ed school reside at the core of today’s overall decline not just of K-12 education, but also higher education.
This is the case for a number of reasons. Low-quality undergraduate and graduate students flock to these programs created in “educational leadership,” “higher education administration,” and “student affairs.” Then they stream these graduates into college bureaucracy jobs created just for them by their cronies in administration. Next there is the near-complete ideological colonization of ed schools by the noxious doctrine of critical pedagogy and its handmaid “antiracist pedagogy.”
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