The Patriot Post® · Miseducating Our Teachers

Larry Arnn, longtime president of the plucky conservative outpost known as Hillsdale College, came under fire last week for laying out the hard truth about public school education in America. At a private event with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Arnn told invited guests, “Teachers are trained at the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

Cue the outrage.

Arnn’s remarks were secretly recorded and shared with the Leftmedia to ensure that 30 seconds of cherry-picked quotes from the two-hour event could be taken out of context to stir the appropriate storm of controversy among leftists.

Governor Lee, a Republican, came under fire from teachers unions and the Leftmedia for not pushing back. Of course, what the perpetually outraged opposition wanted was a response to what they thought Arnn said, not what he really said.

Lee didn’t take the bait. His press secretary released a brief statement: “Under Gov. Lee, the future of public education looks like well-paid teachers and growing a workforce to support our students and build the profession.”

Lee himself weighed in, too: “We believe in our teachers. I’ll put ‘em up against any teachers in the country, the best and brightest, and we have taken actions to be supportive of them.” He also defended Arnn’s comments by explaining that he was taking on “activism on the Left.” And, Lee said, “I disagree with left-wing activism in public education.”

Leftists have Lee in their sights because he recently announced that Tennessee had entered into an agreement with Hillsdale to assist in fixing the state’s struggling public education program. Hillsdale will support the opening of 50 charter schools in the state, employing a K-12 curriculum that emphasizes Western culture and an appreciation of American history and values — all things the Left despises.

The Washington Post’s education analyst breathlessly reported that Hillsdale is a conservative Christian college, that Hillsdale has a similar program in place with the state of Florida, and that Arnn has ties to — horrors! — former President Donald Trump. Frankly, we’re impressed that this snowflake could even type legibly with such a case of the vapors.

Arnn’s quoted comments weren’t exactly an artful way to present his case, as he explained, but that doesn’t make what he said any less true. Many teachers will freely admit, if not publicly, that their training was woefully inadequate. As for the intellectual heft of our educator class, several studies going back over the last decade have found that teachers had below-average SAT, ACT, LSAT, and GRE scores compared to their peers in other academic areas. What’s more, teacher licensing exams are set at a fifth-grade level, and candidates tend to reside within the bottom 30% of their college peers. As for credentials, teacher certification programs since the 1950s have proven to have no connection at all to one’s actual teaching ability or one’s possession of the skills necessary to raise student achievement.

Needless to say, there are countless public school teachers who do great work, often in spite of the training they’ve received and the school boards to which they answer. But their level of success can only be as good as the resources at their disposal. University education programs aren’t interested in turning out teachers armed with raw real-world knowledge in the subjects they’ll teach, or with the latest and most effective teaching techniques. As with the students, it’s all about indoctrination.

The proof is in the results. This is why Lee turned to Arnn and Hillsdale for help. The best measures of student academic achievement have found that only 21% of students graduating from Tennessee public schools are proficient in reading. Only 17% are proficient in math. And these proficiencies use the national average as a baseline, which is horrible in itself. How horrible? The U.S. public education system ranks in the bottom half of developed nations. Think about that.

To say that our public education system is broken only addresses part of the problem, though. The crux of the issue is that we’re raising generation after generation of kids who are deliberately not being taught to think for themselves or to question the world around them or to be curious. Instead, they’re being fed a false narrative by a dogmatic ideology that can only succeed so long as it continues to crank out educational robots.

The time has come to kick this system to the curb and let the Hillsdale Colleges of the world have a shot at educating our kids. They could hardly do worse, and they’re likely to do a whole lot better.