Schools of education have faced recent attacks from writer and conservative activist Christopher Rufo and others for indoctrinating future educators rather than teaching the knowledge and skills needed for success in schools. Is that charge true? Our examination of the books required in education courses, made possible by an extensive online archive of syllabuses, tells a more complicated story.
Almost since their inception, the schools of education that train most teachers and leaders have faced attacks from outsiders and even some insiders for low academic standards, indifference to academic content, and failure to cover the knowledge and skills that teachers and their principals need in schools. Indeed, not long ago, one of us (Maranto) made that last claim in Education Week.
Other critics, including bestselling author Rufo, make somewhat darker accusations. They argue that schools of education have embraced critical theory—approaches, including critical race theory, that analyze structures of power and their relationship to social oppression—to the point that they see the primary goal of schooling as political indoctrination. Aspiring teachers are being taught, they say, to fundamentally change U.S. society rather than the knowledge and skills that would support and largely reproduce that society. This controversy is hardly new. As far back as 1932, Teachers College, Columbia University professor George Counts, who had earlier penned works praising Soviet education, wrote Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?
What is different today than in the 1930s is our ability to examine claims of indoctrination empirically. In a recent paper, education professors David Marshall, Tim Pressley, and Andrew Pendola, found that at the annual conferences held by the field’s leading scholarly organization, the American Educational Research Association, in the years 2021 to 2025, papers employing critical theory dominate. Equity, justice, and usually inclusion or identity were the leading themes at each conference. In contrast, a survey Marshall et al. conducted indicates that the topics that most concern classroom teachers (student behavior and discipline, technology and AI, mental health and well-being, and parent involvement and support) are rarely addressed at AERA. That said, only a fraction of education professors, disproportionately those at “research-intensive” universities, attend AERA annual meetings.
To test the claim that ed. schools are more ideological than practical, we recently used a tool unavailable to earlier researchers, Open Syllabus, to sample course syllabuses at 34 of the nation’s largest schools of education. They are “largest” in the sense that they train the most educators. Open Syllabus is a nonprofit digital archive that relies on both crowdsourcing and machine learning to gather English-language syllabuses. While it is not exhaustive, Open Syllabus is a widely used and representative resource for syllabuses from higher education institutions.
Of our original list of 34 universities, 20 primarily offer online coursework. Four are traditional regional universities: Northwest Missouri State University, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Hunter College of the City University of New York, and American University. Six are more elite, selective universities: Teachers College, Columbia; Harvard; University of Southern California; University of Pennsylvania; University of Texas at Austin; and George Mason University (with a well-regarded educational leadership program). Combined, in 2024, those 34 schools graduated 31,538 students with degrees in education-related fields. Unfortunately, we were unable to find syllabuses available on Open Syllabus for four of the schools on our list: Relay Graduate School of Education, Concordia University Chicago, and University of Phoenix.
To test the claim that ed. schools are more ideological than practical, we recently used a tool unavailable to earlier researchers.
With those caveats, three findings stand out. First, in both undergraduate and graduate courses that include educational leadership as a topic, a wide range of readings are assigned. Across the 4,322 courses that have syllabuses with “educational leadership” as a topic, no book appears more than 88 times. Somewhat surprisingly given it does not focus on education, the book used in 88 courses is Reggie McNeal’s A Work of Heart, which draws lessons from four Biblical leaders. This reflects the fact that three of the four largest education programs are at Christian universities. In addition to first-ranked A Work of the Heart, six books with Christian themes are also assigned in many courses. In contrast, it is not until the 48th most-used text that we find the more left-leaning academic article “Cultural Diversity and Leadership” by Ayoko and Hartel.
Second, graduate education courses are less apt to be Christian and more apt to lean left. The three most-assigned authors, John Creswell (with three research-methods texts on the most-assigned list), Robert Marzano (with readings such as Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement), and Harry Wong (whose The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher is the most-assigned text overall) are very applied and generally nonideological. Yet, other authors may fall on or adjacent to the critical theory left, including 9th ranked Paulo Freire, Sonia Nieto (12th), James Banks (15th), Marie Clay (17th), and arguably John Dewey (11th).
Third, and here Christopher Rufo may have a point, there are stark differences between types of universities, with online providers more practical, elite universities more (left) ideological, and others generally in between in their required readings. Surveying education courses generally, applied pedagogical texts dominate the lists, but the story diverges when looking at types of universities. Online teacher- and leader-preparation programs are far more likely than programs at elite universities to assign texts on research methods, statistics, and evaluation (at least 10% of texts); literacy and language learning; and special education (as much as 15%), that last perhaps because not knowing special education law can get a school system sued.
Half the readings assigned in elite programs, on the other hand, covered philosophy, history, and social science frameworks. Studies of the philosophical orientation and party affiliation of professors in the humanities and social sciences have found that these academics are generally left leaning, so texts in their fields are likely to reflect that outlook. The four regional schools resemble elite schools (almost 40% of the required texts were philosophy, history, or social science). Online schools were very different: Just 5% of the readings are in those subjects.
In sum, as in many other professions, elite schools may focus on the more theoretical topics valued by the national leaders in the field, while nonelite schools prioritize practical preparation. Our analysis should be replicated by others. But we find that Rufo may be wrong regarding the education of most teachers and principals in schools, though possibly right about many of the foundation officers and government officials—more likely to be products of elite institutions than educators generally—who determine policy and regulatory environments.
