(Daily Signal)—Who is teaching the teachers? Critical theorists, DEI peddlers, and all manner of indoctrinators who have weaponized the American education system to further their ideological and cultural goals.
That’s my conclusion after reading a study released Wednesday by the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Buck.
Buck reviewed the syllabi of many of America’s top graduate schools of education and found that they were not only ideologically uniform, but that they were mostly “advancing dogmas grounded in progressive and critical theory frameworks rather than exposing prospective teachers to intellectually diverse ideas and training them in pragmatic instruction and classroom management methods.”
Most Americans have caught on to the reality that our nation’s top schools are overwhelmingly bastions of the Left. But many still don’t realize just how much the ideological bent of these schools affects nearly every major institution across the Western world.
What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. Instead, the political and cultural milieu that’s fostered there is spread everywhere else, by design. And nowhere is that impact more pernicious than in K-12 classrooms.
Buck stressed that among the institutions he was able to review there was a heavy emphasis on “immutable characteristics and activism” rather than “preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom.”
For instance, teachers are being taught to “queer education” rather than teach math. Future teachers are being told that special needs education requires an “anti-capitalist politic” and “collective liberation.”
“That these critical texts appear so frequently, often without any degree of traditional or practical balance, presents to the outsider a concerning picture about the state of these institutions,” Buck wrote.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Graduate schools of education are explicitly putting ideology above rigorous pedagogy of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Buck offered some specific examples.
The UCLA program instructs future teachers to “embody a social justice agenda”; “attend to the moral, cultural, and political dimensions of teaching”; and “mirror the diverse, caring, anti-racist, socially responsible learning communities.”
The focus is primarily on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Buck provided a list of some of the articles provided for CSUN’s “reflective teaching course.”
- “Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis into Teacher Education”
- “Queer of Color Literacies as Subversive Reading Practice: How Queer Students of Color Subvert Power in the Classroom”
- “Queering Elementary Education: A Queer Curriculum for 4th Grade”
- “Striving for Critical Reflection in Multicultural and Social Justice Teacher Education: Introducing a Typology of Reflection Approaches”
At the University of Texas at Austin, Buck found numerous readings that relied on critical theory, like “Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible?,” “Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective,” and “Writing, Rioting, and Righting Como Negra: A Testimonio of Black Latinx Erasure in Bilingual Education.”
The syllabus for one of the courses at UT Austin began with a land acknowledgement and warned against “an onslaught of political attacks around issues of race, gender and sexuality” that have been “particularly intense in our state.”
This was just a smattering of what Buck found.
These institutions not only teach the teachers, but they also largely control who can become a teacher to begin with. They are training the indoctrinated to go forth and convert America’s children. They provide administrative and teaching staff for schools all over the country.
The bias is systemic. Our education system has been turned into a vast machine of ideological replication.
As Buck noted in his report, “many state and district policies encourage or even require teachers to pursue master’s degrees.”
While it can be possible to become a teacher without pursuing one of these advanced degrees, the path to success is often narrow, limited, and capped.
He wrote that many states “mandate automatic salary increases for teachers with such degrees, and two states actually require teachers to earn a master’s to become fully licensed. Even if states don’t explicitly mandate such pay bumps, 90 percent of the nation’s largest school districts pay teachers with advanced degrees more.”
This despite evidence that advanced degrees provide no guarantee of quality teachers. In fact, according to one study Buck cited, there is some evidence that graduate degrees make teachers worse at their jobs, assuming that their job is educating America’s schoolchildren. Clearly, it isn’t.
It’s easy to see why K-12 education, even in deep-red states typically skews far to the left.
Schools are being fed a steady diet of teachers who have been taught to put activism first. Other teaching skills, in Buck’s assessment, are often shunted to the side, treated as merely ancillary to the primary role of the teacher as an activist.
So, what needs to be done?
It’s highly unlikely that these graduate schools of education will suddenly reform themselves.
As I’ve written time and again, DEI, critical theory, and the constellation of ideas that we often call “wokeness” is essentially their religion.
What must be done is first to break their grip on the gatekeeping function they’ve created for themselves.
Drop certification requirements that demand new teachers must have graduate teaching degrees. Allow schools to have greater flexibility in how they hire and from where.
Break the chain that tethers the ideological conformity of higher ed to America’s K-12 system. That will both open the pool of hiring to those who haven’t gone through the ideological wringer and will additionally pressure graduate schools of education to reform or see their pool of students dry up.
Maybe then the schools that decide to get back to basics, that place emphasis on a traditional education will be rewarded by making their graduates more desirable to K-12 schools, and especially to fed up parents.
Just as importantly, we need to start defunding these schools. Stop giving away federal loans to essentially fund programs that rely on critical theory and all manner of toxic nonsense.
The end of the West is being funded by American taxpayers. That needs to stop.
Nothing will change until the power these graduate schools have within the whole system is shattered.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
