How To Create "Woke" Know-Nothings
Consider what I hear from a number of my professor friends: High school grads arrive at college unable to write, think, or manage logical thought.

There's a piece at Quillette on the state of teacher education, which prioritizes ideology over all else -- more than ever. Lyell Asher writes:

The less there is to distinguish ed schools from diploma mills, the more power their graduates have been wielding on college campuses--and not just over students. In the fall of 2018 San Diego State took the inevitable next step by creating several faculty positions in "Diversity and Inclusion" and "Equity in Education," positions which will report to the ed-school-trained Associate Vice President for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion. More recently, ed schools at North Carolina State and University of Colorado at Denver launched, respectively, PhD and doctoral programs in "educational equity," just in time to meet a rising demand.

It would be one thing if ed schools had demonstrable expertise in achieving the laudable goal of educational equity. Ideological bias and even low academic standards might be a price worth paying if the institutions had a record of helping low-income and minority students close the learning gap that exists between themselves and their more advantaged peers. But they have no such record--just the opposite in fact.

Their longstanding opposition to coherent, grade-by-grade, knowledge-based curricula, for example, is one of the reasons why colleges and universities have had to spend seven billion dollars a year on remedial courses in an attempt to get 40 percent of first-year college students ready for college-level work. For more than half a century, most ed schools have been in thrall to "constructivist" and "child-centered" theories of learning which stigmatize content-specific curricula as being intellectually stultifying and politically repressive. So it's no surprise to learn that a recent call to "defund math and STEM" is issued from a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Illinois College of Education. As fashionably radical as it may sound, the defunding proposal is just the latest variation on a century-old set of bad ideas, ideas which have contributed significantly to a situation in which "America's high-school graduates," to quote an NPR headline, "look like other countries' high school dropouts."

The record of ed schools on the pedagogy of reading instruction is nothing less than a national catastrophe. Despite more than half a century's worth of scientific evidence showing that systematic instruction in phonics is, for most beginning readers, the royal road to literacy, the latest report from the National Organization for Teacher Quality found that only one-third of graduate ed school programs surveyed give aspiring teachers adequate instruction in the science of reading pedagogy. Many schools neglect this science in deference to an antiquated "progressive" orthodoxy which insists that phonics instruction is unnatural, and that "student-centered" teaching will minister to the "whole child" with "whole words" and "whole language."

...The students who suffer most from this rejection of science are the very ones whose interests education schools have long claimed to be serving: black, Latino, and low-income students, whose disproportionate rates of delinquency, poverty, and incarceration correlate with disproportionately high rates of illiteracy. It's these same students who also lose the most in a content-poor, skills-based curriculum. As ED Hirsch showed in Why Knowledge Matters, when students from poor backgrounds aren't given the content knowledge that their more advantaged peers pick up at home, they're often further behind them when they finish school than when they started.

...The 2019 National Report on Educational Progress reveals shockingly low levels of subject proficiency among high school seniors: only 37 percent are proficient in reading, 27 percent in writing, 25 percent in math, and 12 percent in American history. College professors have experienced these deficits first hand for decades. They know how ill-prepared most first-year students are for college-level work, and they know too that it's the lack of content knowledge, not its possession, that's genuinely repressive.

But college faculty will accede to the latest round of "equity" programming, whether out of ideological sympathy, intimidation, or indifference. Whatever the motives, the educational costs of their acquiescence will be borne by the same group of disadvantaged students who have born it for 60 years in the nation's K-12 public schools. There's nothing equitable about that.

This has become something of a theme: "Anti-racism" training is racist (against whites), and "diversity" programs at schools serve to keep poor minority students down.

Will people start to wake up and smell the scam? Who? When? How?