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Shock report slams Portland State University for training rookie teachers to hate America - and maps the 67 schools that breed classroom activists
Portland State University (PSU) has been flagged as one of America's worst schools for turning rookie teachers into social justice activists.
The Oregon school's College of Education is cited as having one of the most politically-loaded such courses in the country.
Its trainee teachers study America's 'histories of colonization, settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and neoliberalism,' course materials show.
Worse still, says a new report, the 126 teachers who graduated from PSU in spring can go on to spread these ideas to more than 120,000 K-12 students.
That's according Parents Defending Education, a conservative watchdog, which flagged PSU and 66 other progressive teacher-training schools.
An educational session at Portland State University's College of Education, which has been flagged in a new report for its politicized methods
Parents Defending Education mapped the 67 teacher-training schools that lean too heavily into politics
They're listed in a report, CorruptED: Colleges of Education and the Teacher as Activist Pipeline.
The group's president Nicole Neily said it's time to scrutinize the 'qualifications of the individuals spending eight hours per day with our children.'
'Colleges of education in both red states and blue states have become little more than political ideology factories,' Neily told The Mail.
As a result, she said, 'teaching degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed on.'
PSU, which educates some 26,000 students on a $98 million endowment, did not answer the Mail's request for comment.
How to teach America's 54 million K-12 students has become a battlefront in the culture wars.
Progressive teachers, backed by left-leaning unions, increasingly build cultural and political ideas into lessons.
They focus on race and identity, seeking to overturn perceived historic injustices against women, LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities.
But conservative parents and politicians say this amounts to political indoctrination, which they say creates divisions.
It's better to focus on teaching kids how to read and write, they say.
Florida, Oklahoma, and dozens of other mostly-red states have restricted identity-based lessons in their public schools in recent years.
This month, Richard Woods, Georgia's Republican superintendent of schools, warned that an Advanced Placement course in African American Studies breached state rules about teaching divisive racial concepts.
Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty and other campaign groups are pressuring principals to pull sexually explicit and other edgy books from their libraries.
Portland State University's taxpayer-funded College of Education is a hotbed of activism, researchers say
The schools often teach the controversial 'wheel of privilege,' which breaks society down into identities of winners and losers
Politically active teachers include Olivia Garrison of California, who said she helped students change their gender identity without parents' knowledge.
The Mail has uncovered dozens of examples of teachers crossing the line into activism.
We showed how Kimberly Martin, the former DEI coordinator for Royal Oak Schools in Michigan, helped transgender students 'hide' their gender and nicknames from parents.
Parents Defending Education's founder Nicole Neily
We also revealed how Jennifer Haglund, a counselor for Ames Community Schools in Iowa, was spreading her 'own activism' and progressive values in an educational setting.
In another instance, Olivia Garrison, a progressive nonbinary California high school teacher, says it can be their role to protect trans kids from their parents by helping them to change sex in class.
Against this backdrop, PDE examined the materials used in teacher-training academies to find out what role they played in politicizing schools.
They found 67 universities across 34 states that were training teachers with politically-leaning course texts.
This included 54 teaching critical race theory, which examines America's past slavery and racism.
Dozens of others taught everything from 'white privilege,' to 'white supremacy' and queer theory.
They found two controversial texts were often on reading lists — Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.
The woke colleges frequently used the 'wheel of privilege' diagram, which breaks down society into those with 'power' and the 'marginalized.'
It illustrates the idea of 'intersectionality' hatched by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1990s, about overlapping systems of 'privilege' and 'disadvantage.'
It asserts that straight, white, men, for example, get many breaks in life, while queer, black women face discrimination on all fronts.
It's used frequently at Portland's education department, says the PDE report.
After graduating, teacher activists go on to share their ideas with thousands of K-12 students throughout their careers, the report says
Kimberly Martin (left), a Michigan educator, and Jennifer Haglund of Iowa, have said their jobs are in part political
PSU's objective for rookie teachers includes making them 'anti-racist' educators who 'identify oppressive conditions, including micro- and macro-aggressions' and try root them out, college documents show.
It even has a course called 'Social Studies Methods: Teacher as Activist' for aspiring elementary school teachers.
It involves 'recognizing the histories of colonization, settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and neoliberalism upon which the United States and its systems of education have been built and sustained,' course materials say.
PDE's report highlights dozens of other educational schools with similar classes — from Arizona State University to the University of Washington.
California is home to the most progressive teacher training schools, with Stanford University, the University of California Berkeley, and eight others.
Texas is not far behind, with eight such woke schools, including the University of North Texas and Sul Ross State University, researchers said.
'It's time for these programs to be overhauled,' Neily told The Mail.
'And for policymakers to reimagine what the pipeline to get qualified individuals into classrooms should look like going forward.'