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“Even my teacher at the first day of class, she said, ‘everything is political,’ and I didn’t understand what she meant until I started doing the content.”

Adrianna Mobley should have been excited to be accepted to Michigan State University’s elementary education program, ranked the top elementary program in the nation. Excited, that is, until she stepped into her “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education” class this fall. Required for all elementary education majors, the class dives deep into the demonization of free market principles, meritocracy, and American values.

Higher education isn’t a vacuum. Colleges of education and far-left teachers unions are known to push curriculum saturated in Critical Race Theory, breeding K-12 educators ready to pass the narrative to the next generation. It should be no surprise that 58 percent of K-12 teachers in America lean towards or identify with the Democrat Party, disproportionate to the 47 percent of the general public, Pew Data shows. A study of 2022 campaign contributions from the Educational Freedom Institute revealed that 68 percent of K-12 teachers and 93 percent of college professors donated to Democrat candidates or committees.

But how bad is it in the classroom? Take the course mentioned above from Michigan State University’s supposedly top-ranked elementary education program. It’s described on MSU’s website as “understanding self, schools, and society; emphasizing racial justice, equity, and social identity markers.”

According to Mobley, the course materials and conversations have a constant focus on race and a consistent dismissal of capitalist principles unlike anything she had experienced. “As somebody who’s grown up in the school system … I don’t remember anything like this happening before,” Mobley told The Federalist. 

Course materials shared by Mobley show that one of the class units included an interview with activist and educator Angela Davis, formerly an official member of the Communist party and collaborator with the Black Panther Party.

“Racism is integrally linked to capitalism,” Davis said in the video, “and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”

“This is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism,” the video concludes. It would seem that MSU agrees.

In a class assignment, Mobley referenced an article from The Federalist arguing that a system has no moral agency, and thus “systemic racism” is a misnomer skirting the actual problem in legitimate instances of racism – people.

In response, Mobley’s professor (LinkedIn pronouns listed as “she/they”) argued that “Systems are in place and gain traction over time, momentum which builds into norms. Therefore there ARE operators constantly putting forth the systems which we see as normal – it’s us!” 

She went on to reply to Mobley that “if we’re teachers going about our business as usual in a school which perpetuates inequitable outcomes for students of color or low-income students, we are … perpetuating those inequalities,” according to assignment records Mobley shared with The Federalist.

Another required video claims that “America can never be a meritocracy” until it provides “an equal starting point and equal resources.”

After one class discussion, Mobley’s professor asked to speak with her. “She told me that it seems like I’m going to have a really hard time. It was kind of like pushing me, almost, to think that I wasn’t going to do well, or it was going to be too difficult for me because I had opposing views,” Mobley told The Federalist.

Mobley told The Federalist that her professor has not been hostile toward her. However, her professor did warn her that the tone taken in Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education was not unique to that class. 

“She said that this is a [recurring] theme throughout all of the teaching program. So Critical Race Theory and DEI are all concepts that elementary education is centered around,” Mobley told The Federalist. 

The Federalist asked MSU whether it supported the professor’s remarks advancing a narrative of systemic racism and asked whether the school supports using materials from a self-professed communist and former Black Panther Party collaborator to teach its students. The Federalist also asked whether the school agrees with the assessment that its education program is apparently so dependent on radical concepts like DEI and critical race theory that students with opposing viewpoints could have a hard time succeeding, but did not receive a response to the questions.

Other required classes in MSU’s elementary education sequence echo leftist ideology, including “Pedagogy and Politics of Justice and Equity in Education,” and three one-credit seminar classes titled “Justice and Equity.“ Mobley is enrolled in another required class, “Engaging Elementary Learners in Science: Culture and Equity. “

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