"Inadequate to Appalling": Administrator Training

"Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults" w/Dr. Lyell Asher

“Inadequate to Appalling: Administrator Training (Part 3). To understand the intolerant, anti-intellectual attitudes held by many college administrators, it helps to know that most of the ones who worked directly with students got their graduate training from education schools, or “ed schools” as they're called. These are the schools that have been training and licensing teachers and administrators in the K through 12 school system for the better part of a century.

Unfortunately, ed schools are notorious for their low academic standards and woke politics. Among their many dysfunctional programs, the ones that train school administrators are the very worst. They're so bad that in 1987, a report by the National Commission on Excellent and Educational Administration recommended that out of the 500 programs in administration 300 of them should be closed—not reformed, but closed.

It's an understatement to say that ed schools ignored this recommendation. Instead of closing programs during the next 20 years, they opened over 100 more and they did absolutely nothing to fix their low quality. Why not? Low-quality programs bring in tuition dollars and they don't require much in the way of investment. And since K-through-12 teachers and administrators get salary bumps not according to what skills they've gained, but according to what advanced degrees they have, ed schools are incentivized to make their degree programs as painless and as academically shallow as possible.

We know all of this thanks to a four-year study supervised by Arthur Levine, a past president of Teachers College in New York. The most prominent ed school in the nation in 2005, Levine and a team of researchers reported that most teacher training programs in school administration were, as he put it, “inadequate to appalling” even at some of the country's leading universities.

“The system is designed,” Levine wrote, “to create an army of unmotivated students seeking to acquire credits in the easiest way possible.”

But while Levine's study was underway, still more degree programs were being created, especially for the growing ranks of college administrators. Degrees in higher education and higher education management would soon be followed by degrees in educational equity and social justice. Education degrees having little or nothing to do with genuine scholarship and much to do with absorbing and promoting dogma.

In other words, the least rigorous academic programs in the nation's most dysfunctional academic institutions, schools of education, were sending even more of their graduates to administrative positions in America's colleges and universities. And they arrived there without knowing or without caring, that the anti-intellectual attitudes they'd be promoting at these universities had been wrecking America's K-through-12 schools for more than 60 years.

What could possibly go wrong? I'll be explaining what went wrong in the next videos.

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Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)