Nowhere have the ramifications of “the long march through the institutions” been more apparent than in colleges of education.

New revelations seem to emerge every day of yet another program being stuck in the mud of critical theory. A University of Minnesota K-12 model curriculum includes lesson plans about “settler colonialism” and creating protest art. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education offers dozens of courses explicitly rooted in social justice themes, with one issuing a call to “liberate” youth. Many of Stanford’s general education courses have students respond to drag ballet troupes, ICE incidents, and the war in Gaza.

None of this is new. Since before the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence of the politicization of schools of education has been abundant. But while the tenor of the backlash has remained the same, the legal situation has not. Across the country, more than a dozen states have banned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, along with many of critical theory’s tenets, in higher education. Meanwhile, 21 states have informed the Trump Administration that they do not use DEI in K-12 education, with a few, most notably our home state of Texas, banning it outright.

However, two problems have emerged in the efforts to eliminate ideological education. The first is that many colleges of education employ scholars whose research agendas, at face value, appear to run afoul of these new state laws. While educators may hold personal or professional disagreements with policy, their role as public employees requires them to follow established law in good faith. Schools are not meant to implement political agendas that voters have explicitly rejected. If colleges, through their professional programs, are preparing students for the world as it exists, they should adjust accordingly.

The second problem is that while teachers have garnered so much public attention, they have relatively little power to enact reform in the classroom. What’s more, evidence suggests that teachers generally share the same politics as the average American.

The real power lies with school and district leaders—superintendents and their immediate subordinates.

Yet there is surprisingly little analysis of how colleges of education affect superintendents’ ideological development. One promising avenue lies in the academic work superintendents themselves carry out. As teachers become superintendents, they typically produce dissertations or records of study that reveal their priorities and ideological commitments.

To explore these beliefs, we investigated all of the published material written by graduates of Texas A&M’s superintendent preparation program since 2013. We chose to start with 2013 because we could monitor more than a decade’s worth of records before Texas’s Senate Bill 12, which solidified the state’s 2021 ban on critical race theory and restricted funding for DEI, gender identity-based, and sexual orientation-based groups and programming. This gave us a solid foundation for examining what future district leaders wrote about and when.

Texas A&M’s Ed.D. in Educational Administration (PK-12) is a long-standing, practice-focused doctoral program that prepares aspiring K-12 leaders, particularly superintendents, through a cohort model aligned with Texas certification standards. This example is noteworthy because The Wall Street Journal ranks Texas A&M as the best public university in Texas and the No. 1 university in the SEC, largely due to its reputation for providing an excellent return on investment for its students.

With that sort of pedigree, it is reasonable to assume that other programs will emulate aspects of A&M’s model, or at least that A&M is not offering a dramatically different education than one would expect elsewhere.

Instead of a traditional dissertation, candidates in Texas A&M’s Ed.D. program complete a “record of study,” a problem-of-practice research project consistent with the program’s orientation toward preparing future district leaders. These projects, therefore, offer a revealing snapshot of the issues those future leaders consider most important to investigate.

Within this program, we analyzed 58 records of study. Of these, 17 (29.3%) contained content related to concepts that Texas considers to be DEI for legal purposes. While none of these featured standard bugaboos like positive citations of the 1619 Project, they did contain content ranging from lamentations that no one is listening to educators pursuing culturally relevant pedagogy, to administrator perceptions of students’ LGBTQ identities, and to assumptions that disproportionate rates of school discipline are inherently problematic. Many also deal with equity framed around race and gender-based contexts.

What was especially startling was that state laws had no discernible impact on reducing the prevalence of these themes.

Before Texas’s ban on Critical Race Theory in 2021, the percentage of projects containing DEI material was 29.3%. Since then, 29.4% of the records of study have contained some form of DEI material. In other words, changes in state legislation have had absolutely no impact on what future superintendents and district leaders write about. They are still applying the same sorts of theories and thinking about the same sorts of things.

This means that changing the law alone is not enough to stem the tide. After all, the Texas Educators’ Code of Ethics already demands that “the educator shall comply with state regulations, written local school board policies, and other state and federal laws,” and that, more importantly, teachers “shall not intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly engage in deceptive practices regarding official policies.” The existence of the rule, however, does not guarantee that the people tasked with enforcing it were trained to see it as binding.

If nearly a third of emerging district leaders are being trained within critical frameworks that consider those ethics to be oppressive or illegitimate, we should not expect compliance to be a straightforward affair. Indeed, it has not been. Austin ISD had to settle with the state attorney general’s office after an investigation alleged that the district had continued to use materials associated with the 1619 Project. Even small-town Waller ISD encouraged students to “manifest justice” and included library books with sexually explicit material.

The problem, therefore, lies less in classrooms themselves and more in those who administer them. Universities understandably have broad latitude to conduct research on controversial subjects—something state law, both in Texas and beyond, explicitly protects. But professional certification programs are not supposed to be focused on deconstructing public institutions or critiquing hierarchical power dynamics. They are supposed to prepare future leaders in education to implement the policies that voters, through their elected representatives, have chosen.

When district leaders complete research grounded in concepts that state law prohibits for K-12 education, and when a sizable proportion of superintendents and administrators do not respond to changes in state law, then there is a sharp disconnect between the policies voters adopt and the training of those who implement them. Just because there is a carve-out in state law for research does not mean that administrator prep programs do not have a responsibility to prepare leaders for the world as it is, rather than the world they wish it would be.

If policymakers want these laws to matter in practice, they need to pay closer attention not only to what happens in classrooms, or even in school districts, but also to the graduate programs that train their leadership. After all, the ideas future superintendents study and internalize during their training often shape the priorities they later bring to their districts. Otherwise, the “long march through the institutions” will continue unabated.