Why school choice will NOT fix the public schools.

The teacher staffing pool is corrupted in the colleges of education.

School choice WILL NOT fix public schools, and that’s just a reality that we’re going to have to start coming around to.

Today on Louder with Crowder, Keri Lake said that school choice is one of the fastest ways to clean up the curriculum in schools.

Corey A. DeAngelis @DeAngelisCorey

Kari Lake: "every [Arizona] parent can decide if they want to move their kid to a different school–and the money follows And when I get in office we're going to try to get more money to each student [School choice] is actually one of the fastest ways to clean up curriculum"

I hate to break the news, but that is patently false. And we need to be honest about that.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not opposed to school choice. School choice is a net positive for a number of reasons.

1. It changes the paradigm in education to give parents greater control.

2. It forces the schools to ask serious questions about how they attract the best students and makes them more accountable to the communities they are serving.

3. It gets the public used to the idea of “shopping around” for a school, and teaches them how to evaluate “good” schools from “bad” schools. This is a critical step in the change management process I’ve discussed previously.

All of those things are good and present positive steps in the right direction.

However, just because it’s a net positive does not mean that it will clean up the curriculum being taught, for one simple reason.

Teachers control the curriculum in their classrooms. And the teacher staffing pool is completely corrupted.

Let me break it down for you.

Where do teachers come from?

The vast majority of teachers are trained in colleges of education or have at least a bachelor’s degree from a different discipline.

Teachers learn how to be teachers in college. In addition, in some states, licensure requirements dictate that teachers undergo implicit bias or anti-racism training. So, if the staffing pool doesn’t get corrupted in college, then they could still get you after you graduate.

However, most of the staffing pool is corrupted in college. That’s four years of daily instruction in a place where social justice is integrated into the curriculum in almost every subject they will take courses in.

That means that idyllic young students enter the universities…and come out as something very different. They are taught to believe it is their job to teach kids to be activists, sometimes even before they teach them how to read.

And remember, because this is what they’ve been taught by the people they trust, they don’t know any other way. The students who learn how to be teachers in these colleges believe this is what good teachers look like. They are victims of the ideology as much as anyone.

School choice will not change what the colleges teach, and this is the critical point at which the teacher staffing pool is corrupted.

Think of it this way. Almost every single teacher who makes up the teacher staffing pool today was indoctrinated into the woke ideology by a professor who was also indoctrinated into the woke ideology when they themselves were students.

And that means for every one good teacher who makes it out of the colleges of education without succumbing to the woke ideology, nine teachers are lost.

The students who graduate from the colleges of education make up the teacher staffing pool. That is, the group that schools hire their teachers from. If a teacher is submitting a resume to go teach at a school, they come from the teacher staffing pool.

The same teacher staffing pool is used for almost every single school in existence - the public schools, the private schools, and the charter schools.

I’ll reiterate: The vast majority of schools hire from the same pool of teachers. There are some exceptions to this, but not enough to make a difference. Parents may be able to choose the school their children attend, but they do not control which teachers that school hires. And schools simply do not have enough choice within the staffing pool to only hire non-woke teachers.

Remember, for every one non-woke resume they get, they get nine woke resumes. And because the majority of the administration in schools are woke themselves, they don’t perceive this as a problem.

That means it doesn’t functionally matter which school your kids go to - they will be taught by teachers who have been indoctrinated into the woke ideology. This is virtually inescapable. Good teachers will exist in every school, but most of the time those teachers are afraid to speak up because they know they are surrounded by people who will try to destroy their careers if they do.

Now, here’s the really scary part: If we fired every woke teacher tomorrow, it still wouldn’t solve the problem. We wouldn’t have enough non-woke teachers to replace them with.

Because the corruption of the teaching pool has been going on for so long, there are not enough non-woke teachers to fill all the teaching positions in public schools. For every 10 good teachers, we have 100 total teaching positions to fill. We do not have the human resources to put a good teacher at the head of every classroom. It will take at least two generations to create enough non-woke teachers to fill the number of positions we need, and that is an aggressive estimate.

Our only solution is to separate the state and education.

Functionally, the teacher staffing pool problem makes it very difficult to fix the schools without a complete revolution in education to separate education from the state. Remember, it is the state licensing boards that dictate who becomes a teacher and by what standard - we must remove the state from the process in order to fix the problem because we need more non-woke teachers.

This is why the public schools cannot be saved - they are not where the problem is being created in the first place. They hire from the pool of teachers they have been given by the colleges of education. The problem exists in public schools because the colleges of education have completely corrupted the teacher staffing pool.

To solve the problem, you must first identify the root cause of the problem.

Republicans believe the root cause of the problem is the curriculum. And they are wrong.

• The curriculum is almost always selected by the teacher. Even if the school has a standard curriculum, once the classroom door shuts, the teacher runs the show.

  • The school boards can’t fix this. There are only two states where school boards have a say over the curriculum - Vermont and Connecticut.

• The teachers select their curriculum based on the training they’ve received in the colleges of education, where they learned how to be teachers.

The root cause of the problem isn’t the curriculum - it’s how the teachers are being trained. School choice doesn’t solve for that. It simply gives parents other schools to send their kids to, but the teachers in those schools are coming from the same staffing pool that’s been corrupted by the colleges of education and reinforced by the state licensure requirements.

School choice is a worthy step forward that teaches the public what it’s like to have choices beyond what they are given by the state. But it will not fix the public schools because it will not fix the problem where it is originating.

Download the full infographic to explain to people why school choice won’t fix public education.

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