RUTHFULLY YOURS

The debates over critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology can feel like people on either side are talking past one another. Truth is, they often are.

There’s a lot more agreement than it seems. Parents and teachers tend to think that the Left has a point when it says schools should do a better job teaching about America’s complex racial history, and that kids should feel welcome in school regardless of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Meanwhile, most Americans share concerns about CRT dogma that demonizes hard work or personal responsibility as legacies of “white-supremacy culture” and don’t want teachers discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with eight-year-olds.

Indeed, it’s pretty clear that most Americans reside in both camps — think of it as the “inclusive but sensible” coalition. The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life has found that, among Republicans and Democrats alike, more than four in five say social-studies textbooks should discuss slave-owning by the Founders, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the maltreatment of Native Americans, and agree that students should read “works by a racially diverse set of authors.”

At the same time, polling by the Economist and YouGov finds that more than half of Americans who are familiar with CRT say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of it and 55 percent think teaching CRT is “bad for America.” This spring, Public Opinion Strategies found that two-thirds of registered voters deem it “inappropriate for teachers or school personnel to discuss gender identity with children in kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

Given that kind of commonsense agreement, why are schools riven by bitter fights over whether educators should teach that America is a “white supremacist” nation or talk to first-graders about gender identity? Who is responsible for pushing this toxic tripe?

It’s mostly a mistake to blame the nation’s teachers and school leaders. In three decades of working with educators and writing about education, I’ve known precious few kindergarten teachers eager to talk about gender or make kids fill out “privilege worksheets.” Education Week reports that 56 percent of educators oppose teaching their students “about the idea of critical race theory” and that just 29 percent self-identify as liberal (5 percent as “very liberal”).

Instead, the lion’s share of the blame should be reserved for the farrago of education-school faculty, diversity consultants, foundation-financed frauds, and bureaucrats who train our nation’s teachers. Unable or unwilling to improve the quality of teaching, too many of these unaccountable charlatans have instead taken to promoting personal agendas, pushing outrageous practices, and browbeating school staff into parroting radical doctrines.

Teacher training is a big industry. The federal government provides states and districts more than $2 billion a year for teacher training, but the total far exceeds this figure. The largest 50 districts alone spend an estimated $8 billion annually on teacher professional development (PD), and their teachers spend about 10 percent of their work year (nearly four weeks) in training sessions. Back in 2014, the Boston Consulting Group estimated that total spending on teacher PD in the U.S. topped $18 billion annually.

Unlike teachers and school leaders, who actually live in their communities, know their students, and interact with parents, these consultants tend to drop by, do their dance, and then scoot out of town with a bag full of cash. While these trainers have long operated without much scrutiny or vetting, the CRT debate has prompted a wave of Freedom of Information Act requests that raise red flags.

Last July, the Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia hired trainers from the “Equity Collaborative” to teach educators that they mustn’t “profess color blindness” but instead need to accept that “addressing one’s Whiteness (i.e., white privilege) is crucial for effective teaching.” Teachers were taught that “fostering independence,” “individual achievement,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “white individualism.”

Trainers in Seattle Public Schools taught teachers that the U.S. is a “race-based white-supremacist society,” that our education system commits “spirit murder” against black children, and that white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.” In San Diego, trainers have taught educators that “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.”

In Buffalo, N.Y., trainers designed a curriculum requiring schools to embrace “Black Lives Matter principles.” Teachers were told they should promote “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists” and seek “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” Kindergarten teachers were directed to discuss “racist police and state-sanctioned violence,” and fifth-grade teachers to teach that a “school-to-grave pipeline” exists for black children.

Trainers in Davis, Calif., taught teachers how to “decolonize their language and deconstruct that which they’ve been taught about gender.”

The Eau Claire Area School District in Wisconsin held training in February 2022 for educators on gender identity. The trainers told teachers to find ways to “strategize the support of your LGBTQ+ students, without the support of their parents.” Teachers were taught that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers were instructed that “all students have the right to be referred to by their chosen names/pronouns, regardless of their legal or school records,” that refusing to “respect a student’s gender identity” violates district policy, and that “no parent/guardian permission or notification is required for student-initiated name changes” (boldface and italics in original).

Offering these sessions is often a lucrative side hustle for trainers who otherwise work as academics and writers. Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, charges an average fee of $14,000 per event and collects an estimated $700,000 a year in speaking fees. Lesser-known Seconde Nimenya charges $10,000 to $20,000 a gig for her diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training. Her clients include a raft of schools and colleges and the Association of California School Administrators.

Anti-racist firebrand Ibram X. Kendi was paid $20,000 by Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools to give a 45-minute virtual presentation and participate in a 15-minute Q&A as part of “Racial Truth and Reconciliation Week”; the district spent another $24,000 to buy his books. Shawn Andrews, self-billed as a “Diversity & Inclusion Keynote Speaker,” charges $15,000–$20,000 for in-person events. But that would be pocket change for Kimberlé Crenshaw, the foundational CRT guru, who charges $50,000 to $100,000 per speaking engagement.

Keep in mind that teachers actually teach kids and talk to the parents of their students. This tends to keep them grounded. These trainers, on the other hand, aren’t expected to linger in classrooms or live with the practical consequences of their diktats. Instead, they’re free to treat students as abstractions and schools as laboratories. And educators, fearful of being labeled bigots or racists, get bullied into mouthing the consultants’ woke pieties.

What to do about all this? Here’s a suggestion that’s as simple as it is radical: Just stop funding it. Federal policy-makers, state officials, and local school boards should cease cutting checks for teacher training. It may not end the nonsense, but it’s a good start. It would also put an end to the use of taxpayer dollars to promulgate ideologies that many taxpayers oppose.

Is this an excessive response? Do we really want to gut the forms of training that are useful just to target the toxic stuff? Here’s the thing: There’s hardly any evidence that teacher training 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 studies, only 32 even examined whether PD caused student improvement, just five of the 32 met the evidentiary bar set by the What Works Clearinghouse, and just two of the five showed positive effects due to PD.

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.” In his own research review, he summed things up thus: “When I hear people say that we know what good PD is, or that we know how to improve teaching but lack the will to do so, my initial reaction is that people who say such things are engaged in wishful thinking. We are flying by the seat of our pants.”

The billions of dollars that districts currently allocate for teacher trainers could be put to better use. It could provide pay bumps for educators who do exceptional work, teach hard-to-staff subjects, or it could underwrite mentorship programs for young colleagues — in the expectation that more sustained, serious support might help reduce high rates of attrition among new teachers.

Eliminating these training sessions would free up valuable teacher time. When teachers were asked this spring in the Merrimack Teacher Survey which tasks they would like to spend less time on, professional development was one of the most popular responses. Indeed, several years ago, the New Teacher Project surveyed “successful” teachers and reported that they found PD sessions far less useful than additional practice, observing colleagues at work, or receiving feedback from mentors.

Defunding teacher-trainers could also help draw some of the venom out of the fierce cultural debates over schooling. Eliminating the toxic shenanigans of itinerant ideologues would leave more room for local educators, parents, and community leaders to find common ground.

Of course, zeroing out teacher training won’t stop aspiring teachers from being run through a gauntlet of woke dogma in education school. Indeed, nearly half of the faculty at the nation’s biggest and most influential education schools report that their work addresses the DEI agenda, and about one-third of those say they do so as critical theorists. Defunding the teacher-trainers won’t correct everything. But it’s a vital first step, one that will take a big bite out of the teacher-training complex and offer a win-win to families, educators, and schools. Policy-makers, take note.