For much of 2025, it looked like the right was winning its war on woke. President Donald Trump came into office on a tidal wave of enthusiasm, and he launched a flurry of executive orders aimed at ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and gender theory in schools.
But in early November, woke candidates came roaring back in elections in New York, Virginia and New Jersey. Woke is not dead — it is very much alive in educational institutions, public employee unions and other progressive enclaves. In fact, new data from Politics at Work, a combined data initiative of the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan, shows that the education sector is the single most left-leaning segment of employees in America. Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1 in K-12 classrooms.
This would not be a problem if teacher-activists kept their politics separate from their work. But one need look no further than the proliferation of boys in girls’ sports, Black Lives Matter and pride flags on school walls, and DEI practices to see that too many schools have become incredibly politicized places.
Why is the teaching profession so overwhelmingly left-wing, and why do so many of its members force their politics on kids? The answer is found on college and university campuses across the country, where teacher training programs indoctrinate their students in progressive ideology.
CRITICS SAY K-12 ETHNIC STUDIES PUSH TEACH STUDENTS ABOUT CISHETERONORMATIVITY, BLACK PANTHER PARTY
For instance, the University of Georgia requires its Elementary Education majors to take "Exploring Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Diversity." The course’s first objective is to imbue students with an understanding of "diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice in schooling." A syllabus shows this course trains teachers to be foot soldiers of the progressive movement: "We are attempting to make a difference at the level of practice. This course doesn’t merely explain discrimination and oppression; it also supports developing anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, anti-xenophobic, and social justice advocacy."
Columbia University has historically been home to one of the country’s most prestigious teacher preparation programs. Lately, students there have been studying "Making Change: Activism, Social Movements and Education." This class teaches all the wrong lessons: It has students "learn from the examples … the Chicago Teachers Union, the Tucson Unified School District fight for ethnics studies, BLM at Schools," and other progressive movements.
The Chicago Teachers Union and BLM are among the worst possible examples of education leadership. The former has delivered some of the worst academic achievement in the country and has refused to release a financial audit for five years running. The latter is trying to defund the police in schools, enact race-based hiring practices and institute failed "restorative justice" policies that eliminate discipline, allowing schools to devolve into chaos.
These misguided colleges are not alone. Future teachers at Michigan State University must endure six classes on "Justice and Equity." At the University of Maryland, future high school teachers are taught "a social justice-oriented approach to teaching social studies." Arizona State University is training future teachers in "Education for Social Transformation" and "Inequality and Diversity in Education.
The harm done by these courses is not only in what they teach future teachers, but what they don’t teach them. Every minute spent injecting radical politics into classrooms is a missed opportunity to guide future teachers on how to educate the next generation.
The need for teachers who focus on fundamentals has never been more acute: On the latest Nation’s Report Card, only 34% of high school seniors could read proficiently, and only 22% of them rated proficient in math.
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This is catastrophic for the United States. Any college that truly cares about the future should equip tomorrow’s teachers with the skills to correct it. Sadly, our future teachers are wasting their time and tuition dollars on how to engage with feminist pedagogies or inflict Critical Race Theory (CRT) on children.
As the public turns away from the false promises of radical progressivism, a new report from the Defense of Freedom Institute details how teacher unions remain a stronghold of wokeness in America. They routinely advocate for radical gender identity policies that allow boys in girls’ sports and spaces, oppose school choice at every turn, and mobilize their teacher members to protest enforcement efforts to stop illegal immigration.
Any state that wants to eradicate DEI and CRT from its public schools should closely examine the teacher training programs at its state universities. Universities should take an honest look at whether they are helping teacher candidates become good educators or if they are training them to impart ideology rather than knowledge and skills.
Students’ needs are straightforward, but teacher training programs are churning out too many graduates with no ability to meet those needs. Wokeness in schools will end only if colleges stop training teachers to spread it.
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