In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, college presidents scrambled to issue condemnations of racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. They often buttressed those condemnations with promises to expand their institution's administrative bureaucracy. For instance, among other things, the University of Kentucky will
institute cultural proficiency and diversity training for faculty and students, and install "diversity and inclusion officers" within each of its 17 colleges. Out west, the University of the Redlands issued an
18-point plan, including an "Activist Residence" program, racial climate surveys, anti-racism workshops, racial healing workshops, and enhanced hiring procedures and performance evaluations that will monitor contributions to "diversity and inclusion." Similar plans are afoot in colleges across the nation.
However well intentioned, these programs will likely increase inequities rather than reduce them, and push the nation's colleges still closer to the low level of its public schools. The reason? As I have
explained before, most of the college administrators who work in offices promoting "Diversity and Inclusion" and "Equity and Social Justice" and the like have been credentialed by the same dysfunctional institutions that have monopolized the training and licensure of K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) teachers, principals, and superintendents for 50 years — education schools.
A century ago, Harvard president Lawrence Lowell
described the university's education school as "a kitten that ought to be drowned," and in the decades since, successive studies have reached the same conclusion: Most of our training schools for K-12 teachers lack rigorous standards for admission, graduation, and research — but they're filled to the brim with ideology.
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