To improve K-12 education, Linda McMahon should target radicalized education schools
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon started as the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment. Her first target for a knockout as secretary should be radicalized education schools.
With the recent publication of the National Assessment of Educational Progress report, Americans are increasingly aware of the absolute failure of our K-12 public education system to produce kids with the requisite knowledge and skills to compete in the global economy.
McMahon might be tempted to focus like a laser on raising test scores in the here and now. Undoubtedly, she should take immediate steps to reverse the downward spiral.
However, she should also set her aim for teacher colleges that produce unprepared and politicized educators. Student achievement will languish as long as education schools are churning out teachers who see their primary roles as developing the next generation of social justice activists.
When I entered my own doctoral program in education in January 2018, I was taken aback at how little foundational scholarship was required. Most coursework relied on far-fetched ideological theories rather than providing rigorous data-informed resources to improve student learning.
Paulo Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” served as an education bible, and was required reading in most classes. Friere declares, "No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors.”
In other words, the role of teachers in their minds is not to teach kids to be successful, but to empower students to overthrow the system that created their success.
Today’s education schools are training teachers to “decolonize the curriculum,” a pedagogy based on stripping the curriculum of all scholarly influences and promoting perpetual revolution.
And the results speak for themselves — our kids are failing.
More and more teachers are speaking out about how their teacher education programs failed to prepare them to teach students how to read and write.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, a second grade teacher in Utah stated, “My college education and teacher prep program left me prepared to address how members of the LGBT+ community and students of color may feel inside of a school, but blindsided about what to do if a student cannot read in third grade. My preparation was filled with diversity, equity, and inclusion training and very little practical support.”
In 2022, the Center for Organizational Research and Education published a report that found that California spent upwards of $36 million on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in K-12 schools. What does California have to show for its expenditure? According to EdSource, only 7 percent of Black students there are proficient or advanced in reading. Latino students scored slightly higher, with 19 percent scoring proficient or advanced. Looking at all of California’s fourth graders, only 31 percent scored proficient or advanced in reading.
In a letter posted in 2024, the dean of UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies wrote, “Since the mid-1990s, UCLA’s Departments of Education and Information Studies have been housed together within the same school, continuing each department’s long commitment to using teaching, scholarship, and service to dismantle systemic inequity and increase social justice.” Dean Christina A. Christie’s letter continues to tout the department’s commitment to equity and justice, but fails to comment on the importance of teaching students how to read.
UCLA is not alone in its negligence. Founded in 1870, Hunter College hosts New York state’s oldest teacher preparation program. Hunter’s School of Education holds “that the transformative power of education, an essential tenet of democracy, can only be realized by interrupting societal inequities and injustices.” Only 31 percent of New York’s fourth graders are reading at proficient or advanced levels.
McMahon has the opportunity to turn our teacher training pipeline around. First, she can strongly encourage that K-12 school preparation programs possess requisite skills on the basics required to teach their subject matter. The Department of Education possesses the power of the purse and can withhold funding from universities that fail in their basic mission.
McMahon can expose the extreme agendas in today’s education schools, putting university presidents on notice that this radicalized approach to educating teachers must stop. And alongside the Department of Education, congressional leaders must focus on recalcitrant education schools' deans and failing to adequately prepare teachers.
Only when teacher’s colleges go back to the basics of training teachers to teach kids to read and write will we see improvements in our kids’ learning. McMahon has a unique opportunity to deliver a knockout in order to save American education.
Brandy Shufutinsky, EdD, is the director of Education and Community Engagement with the North American Values Institute.
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