How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps

Not your child's school or teacher? Wanna bet? A 2017 RAND Corporation survey found that 99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary schools use "Materials I developed and/or selected myself" in teaching English language arts.

Putting teachers in charge of creating their own lesson plans or scouring the internet for curriculum materials creates an irresistible opportunity for every imaginable interest group that perceives-not incorrectly-that overworked teachers and a captive young audience equal a rich target for selling products and pushing ideologies.

There are 75 different lesson plans and resources for conducting "Privilege walks" and more than 100 lessons and resources on "Preferred pronouns" at Teachers Pay Teachers, another lesson sharing megasite.

Prior to legislative efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there were only three school districts in the country known to have expressly authorized teachers to use the New York Times 1619 Project in lesson plans: Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey.

A 2019 study published by the Fordham Institute rated most of the materials on Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers as "Mediocre" or "Probably not worth using." A similar report from The New Teacher Project found that students "Spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren't appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn't ask enough of them-the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject." Disadvantaged students were the hardest hit.

Choose-your-own-adventure lesson planning inevitably results in gaps and repetition when there's no coherent blueprint for what students should learn, or when those plans are disregarded by schools and teachers.

Absent regulations specifically requiring teachers to post all lesson plans and materials online on a daily basis, including material they create or find on the internet, it's nearly impossible to say with any certainty what occurs inside the black box of the public school classroom. 

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