by Christopher Jacobs

The New York Times featured an in-depth essay from writer Nikole Hannah-Jones last week about the lamentable state of elementary and secondary education in the United States. The essay's contents deserve (and are receiving) much criticism, thanks in part to Hannah-Jones sacrificing her daughter's educational outcomes on the altar of wokeness and racism. But moral failings aside, the "1619 Project" author shines a spotlight on the failures plaguing American students not just in inner cities but across the map.

The recent release of results from last year's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests confirms on a macro level what Hannah-Jones described at length from a micro perspective. The international test of 15-year-olds showed that American youths continue to lag behind those in many other peer nations — which might have something to do with the woke ideology pervading the schools that educate the next generation of teachers.

Plummeting Reading Scores

The PISA results brought discouraging news regarding the global competitiveness of American students. The Wall Street Journal noted that since 2018, "math scores in China have improved by an impressive 21 points (equivalent to roughly one year of learning) while those in the U.S. have fallen by 15 (three quarters of a year of learning)." And whereas more than half (54 percent) of students in the four Chinese cities tested qualified as "top performers," fewer than 1 in 10 (only 8 percent) American students did. This is not a positive development given the importance of engineering and computer science in the global economy.

If anything, the PISA reading test results proved even more worrisome. Americans' reading scores plunged by 14 points since the last round of tests in 2022, and they now sit near their lowest point this century.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which organizes the PISA tests, noted that reading scores have declined generally since 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the blame may point in the direction of smartphones and social media shortening attention spans. The OECD notes that "the share of 'hasty readers' — students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers — almost doubled between 2018 and 2025."

Education Schools’ Woke Obsession

But in the United States at least, another factor may help to explain students' poor academic performance. A separate paper by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) illustrated the ideological obsessions within graduate schools of education, which train the next generation of teachers going into American classrooms.

The AEI study examined course reading materials and syllabi for master's programs at 10 public graduate schools of education. As the paper notes, because many school districts pay higher wages to teachers with master's degrees, these graduate schools have a ready-built pipeline of potential students.

Consider the titles of just some of the course readings in one school's curriculum:

  • "Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible?"
  • "Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective"
  • "Writing, Rioting, and Righting Como Negra: A Testimonio of Black Latinx Erasure in Bilingual Education"
  • "Black Languaging [sic] as Anti-Racist Pedagogy in the World Language Classroom"
  • "World Languages for Black Linguistic Reparations"
  • "Toward an Anti-Racist Linguistic Anthropology: An Indigenous Response to White Supremacy."

Note that these are all titles from syllabi at the University of Texas, a publicly funded institution in a purportedly conservative state.

Other readings highlighted in the AEI paper focus less on critical race theory than on leftist theories of education — that is, allowing students to "learn at their own pace" and in the way they prefer. These readings and philosophies could prove just as damaging to students as explicitly Marxist ideology because they ignore and undermine proven concepts such as phonics that can help children learn.

Of course, as the AEI paper notes, it's difficult to know precisely how these texts are being taught without sitting through lectures. But it's fair to question whether Cal-State Northridge, which requires readings such as "Queering Elementary Education: A Queer Curriculum for 4th Grade," is focused on giving potential teachers the tools that will best help them succeed in elementary school classrooms.

A Better Future?

American students deserve the best education possible so they can succeed in the 21st-century economy. The AEI paper and PISA results raise serious questions about the quality of the education they are receiving and the outcomes from it.

There is an obviously better option. Rather than wasting government funds — state and local spending, not to mention federal student loan dollars for teachers' graduate degrees — to promote topics such as "queering elementary education," give parents the education dollars and let them select the schooling option that meets their children's needs. It's the best, and perhaps the only, way to prevent a lost generation of uneducated American youth.