“Even my teacher at the first day of class, she said, ‘everything is political,’ and I didn’t understand what she meant until I started doing the content.”
Adrianna Mobley should have been excited to be accepted to Michigan State University’s elementary education program, ranked the top elementary program in the nation. Excited, that is, until she stepped into her “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education” class this fall. Required for all elementary education majors, the class dives deep into the demonization of free market principles, meritocracy, and American values.
Higher education isn’t a vacuum. Colleges of education and far-left teachers unions are known to push curriculum saturated in Critical Race Theory, breeding K-12 educators ready to pass the narrative to the next generation. It should be no surprise that 58 percent of K-12 teachers in America lean towards or identify with the Democrat Party, disproportionate to the 47 percent of the general public, Pew Data shows. A study of 2022 campaign contributions from the Educational Freedom Institute revealed that 68 percent of K-12 teachers and 93 percent of college professors donated to Democrat candidates or committees.
But how bad is it in the classroom? Take the course mentioned above from Michigan State University’s supposedly top-ranked elementary education program. It’s described on MSU’s website as “understanding self, schools, and society; emphasizing racial justice, equity, and social identity markers.”
According to Mobley, the course materials and conversations have a constant focus on race and a consistent dismissal of capitalist principles unlike anything she had experienced. “As somebody who’s grown up in the school system … I don’t remember anything like this happening before,” Mobley told The Federalist.
Course materials shared by Mobley show that one of the class units included an interview with activist and educator Angela Davis, formerly an official member of the Communist party and collaborator with the Black Panther Party.
“Racism is integrally linked to capitalism,” Davis said in the video, “and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”
“This is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism,” the video concludes. It would seem that MSU agrees.
In a class assignment, Mobley referenced an article from The Federalist arguing that a system has no moral agency, and thus “systemic racism” is a misnomer skirting the actual problem in legitimate instances of racism – people.
In response, Mobley’s professor (LinkedIn pronouns listed as “she/they”) argued that “Systems are in place and gain traction over time, momentum which builds into norms. Therefore there ARE operators constantly putting forth the systems which we see as normal – it’s us!”
She went on to reply to Mobley that “if we’re teachers going about our business as usual in a school which perpetuates inequitable outcomes for students of color or low-income students, we are … perpetuating those inequalities,” according to assignment records Mobley shared with The Federalist.
Another required video claims that “America can never be a meritocracy” until it provides “an equal starting point and equal resources.”
After one class discussion, Mobley’s professor asked to speak with her. “She told me that it seems like I’m going to have a really hard time. It was kind of like pushing me, almost, to think that I wasn’t going to do well, or it was going to be too difficult for me because I had opposing views,” Mobley told The Federalist.
Mobley told The Federalist that her professor has not been hostile toward her. However, her professor did warn her that the tone taken in Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education was not unique to that class.
“She said that this is a [recurring] theme throughout all of the teaching program. So Critical Race Theory and DEI are all concepts that elementary education is centered around,” Mobley told The Federalist.
The Federalist asked MSU whether it supported the professor’s remarks advancing a narrative of systemic racism and asked whether the school supports using materials from a self-professed communist and former Black Panther Party collaborator to teach its students. The Federalist also asked whether the school agrees with the assessment that its education program is apparently so dependent on radical concepts like DEI and critical race theory that students with opposing viewpoints could have a hard time succeeding, but did not receive a response to the questions.
Other required classes in MSU’s elementary education sequence echo leftist ideology, including “Pedagogy and Politics of Justice and Equity in Education,” and three one-credit seminar classes titled “Justice and Equity.“ Mobley is enrolled in another required class, “Engaging Elementary Learners in Science: Culture and Equity. “
Equal Opportunity Indoctrination
MSU’s clear current and past commitment to leftist ideology isn’t limited to its education program — or even the English language. The Department of Romance and Classical Studies can teach you how to be woke in at least four languages, posting guides for “inclusive language in the Romance languages,” along with “Resources for DEI and Social Justice,” as reported by The College Fix.
A 2019 employee training, reported on by Campus Reform, cautioned against calling people “sir” or “ma’am,” and encouraged employees to use “they” in place of “his” or “hers” — grammar notwithstanding. It even claimed that phrases like “no problem” or “I apologize” could be “triggering.”
The university’s $38 million Multicultural Center (MCC) is designed to “create a space recognizing students of historically oppressed backgrounds to learn and grow together along with the resources they need to succeed and graduate from a predominately white institution.” The Center’s FAQ page describes a “desired outcome of intersectionality.”
Students reserving the space are advised that the MCC “prioritize[s] booking requests made by students and student groups, events that advance the [student-developed] educational mission of the MCC, and events that support one or more of the 5 Pillars of the MCC (i.e., Education, Intersectionality, Community, Advocacy & Activism, Healing).”
The Center “could potentially come into conflict with” the Trump administration’s efforts to rid institutions and schools of discriminatory DEI policies, Louis Galarowicz of the National Association of Scholars told The College Fix earlier this year, if it “engages in racially discriminatory practices, such as limiting scholarships, positions such as postdoctoral fellowships, and programs based on race.”
MSU also has a page on its official website titled “Inclusive Excellence and Impact” which advertises workshops through the Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion it seems could risk running afoul of Trump’s DEI cleanse.
The Trump administration has threatened withholding federal funding from schools that employ discriminatory DEI policies. MSU did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry asking how the university reconciles receiving federal funds in light of its promotion of DEI-adjacent programs and an apparent commitment to anti-American critical race theory in its education department.
Patterns in Education
Leftist indoctrination in teaching programs is visible across the nation. At American University, elementary education students receive “antiracist education,” acknowledging “beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices along with the structures, policies, and institutional systems that create barriers and perpetuate inequities in classrooms and identify concrete strategies to dismantle those barriers.”
Georgia State University elementary education students won’t escape without passing classes like “Exploring Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Diversity in Educational Contexts” and “Culture, Equity, and Responsive Pedagogy.”
Graduate students will encounter similar courses at schools like University of California — Los Angeles, or in University of Washington’s Elementary Teacher Education Program.
Writing for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Greg Forster argued that “The central concept in the ideology that rules education schools, with an iron fist, is that real pedagogy means the liberation of the oppressed. The idea is that good education is primarily a tool of political liberation,” an idea ringing throughout Mobley’s class. “Therefore, if you want to teach people how to educate, teach them how to liberate,” Forster explains.
He argues that, to obtain the master’s degree often demanded of teachers, aspiring teachers are faced with the “knowledge that in education school you’ll have to sit through endless ideological indoctrination, and the whole experience will be of little value to you as a teacher.”
Trump won settlements against Brown University and Columbia University earlier this year, hinging their continued federal funding on cooperation with ending racist practices in hiring or admissions, protecting women’s select spaces and more. The president has also sought to rid federally-funded K-12 schools of race-and-gender-obsessed instruction and practice.
Still, the ideology aspiring teachers must swim through to graduate and be certified will inform the K-12 education of their students. “I thought that it was going to be about how to … teach children, not indoctrinate them and give them no choice about what they’re learning,” Mobley told The Federalist, “and that’s exactly what they’re doing to me.”
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