Future Wisconsin public school teachers are being instructed to teach controversial transgender, racial and political theories to children beginning in preschool, a new report has found. 

The 44-page report, co-authored by Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), revealed that state universities are indoctrinating education students to teach the radical principles. Flanders, along with co-author Dylan Palmer, performed a wide-ranging records search across all Wisconsin’s public universities that teach education. They asked for the syllabus, assignments and reading list for education courses—the classes future teachers must pass in order to teach in the state’s public schools.

“There’s a huge amount of liberal indoctrination going on,” Flanders told Washington Watch on Monday, Aug. 8, according to an article on WashingtonStand.com. “We found it across every public university in the state that has an education program.”

Many of the education courses start by defining Biblical morality as beyond the pale, Flanders said. The “Multicultural Education” course at the University of Wisconsin at Superior requires students to take the “Human Relations Attitude Inventory,” which asks how strongly they agree with such statements as: “Homosexuality is unnatural because it is contrary to human nature,” “We should not notice differences in people’s skin color”; and “Whites are just as likely to be victims of racism as racial minorities”—all of which the course intends for students to reject, the Washington Stand article said.  

The university then instructs students to begin introducing radical gender theory to children as young as 3. At UW-Whitewater, students read a chapter titled “Just Another Gay Day in the Campus Three-Year-Old Room.” At UW-Green Bay, would-be teachers must read the book “Safe Is Not Enough: Better Schools for LGBTQ Students” by Michael Sadowski, which the report explains “argues that teachers must bring conversation about gender and sexual identity into the classroom, encourage advocacy, and foster the LGBTQ identification of young students.”

Other titles students in the University of Wisconsin’s education classes must read include:

• “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy”
• “Playing with Gender”
• “When the Gender Boxes Don’t Fit”
• “Trans Woman Manifesto”
• “Supporting Transgender and Gender-Expansive Children in Schools”

UW-Stevens Point, education students must read portions of the CRT canon, including Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby.” Flanders noted that, while he has no objection to students being exposed to such theories, these mandatory education courses present these theories without any opposing viewpoint, as though they were uncontested truths.

These criteria mean that teachers will be “discussing racial politics, gender politics, sexual identity, transgenderism, ahistorical anti-American history, and culturally revolutionary ideas with children as young as five or six years old,” according to the report.

“There’s even more in there than what’s listed in our report,” Flanders told Backholm. “It’s still a small sample from each university. But it’s likely that almost every class that a [prospective] teacher is in” has similarly biased content.

“When we’re looking for the origins of the stuff that we are seeing in our classroom today, what we’re learning here is it’s not just teachers organically coming up with this stuff themselves,” explained Flanders. “Instead, it’s the process that’s been going on for years and years throughout their entire education.”

The results can be seen in Wisconsin classrooms, where test scores continue their multi-year decline. In the 2020-21 school years, only one-third of students from third through eighth grade passed the state’s Forward test, down eight points from 41% in 2018-19. Scores on the ACT, which state law requires every high school junior to take, have eroded from 20 in 2014-15 to 19.6 in 2020.

Teaching educators radical political theory instead of subject matter or pedagogical techniques likely affects these outcomes, Flanders believes. “It’s a fixed pie. There’s a set amount of hours in the day and a set amount of classes that a teacher is taking. And inevitably, some of that content is being replaced by this sort of material that really is not related directly to what they’re supposed to be teaching, but takes up that time.” 

He added, “We see the results in schools that are seeing declining performance relative to where they were a decade ago.”

The report appeals to Wisconsin lawmakers to rewrite Section 118.19(8) of the Wisconsin statutes, “which mandates that the Department of Public Instruction grants teacher licenses only to those who have ‘received instruction in the study of minority group relations,’” where highly controversial theories are being propounded as undisputed fact.

Photo: Ken Wolter/Alamy