Education
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Title: Inside a Public School Social Justice Factory
Source:
Weekly Standard
URL Source: http://www.weeklystandard.com/insid ... ustice-factory/article/2011402
Published: Feb 1, 2018
Author: Katherine Kersten
Post Date: 2018-02-01 09:49:10 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 1315
Comments: 12
For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution. The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.” “Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.” The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.” As a result, the school system’s obsession with “white privilege” now begins in kindergarten. At Edina’s Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, “Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!” Highlands Elementary’s new “racially conscious” elementary school principal runs a blog for the school’s community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags—along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming “Gay Marriage Is Our Right.” On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: “F is for Feminist,” “C is for…Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,” and “T is for Trans.”) At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological reeducation campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: “By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.” The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course—required of all 10th-graders—that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of “Colonization,” “Immigration” and “Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.” One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’” (The negative review has since been deleted from Edina High’s “Rate My Teachers” page; but this is a screenshot from before it was memory-holed.) Increasingly, families who are serious about education are leaving the Edina schools. For example, Orlando Flores and his wife pulled their son—an academic superstar—out of Edina High School in his senior year to escape its hyper-political environment. Flores, who fled a Marxist regime in Nicaragua as a child, had this to say: “Years ago, we fled Communism to escape indoctrination, absolutist thinking and restrictions on our freedom of speech. If we see these traits in our schools in America, we must speak out and oppose it.” Flores says that when his son was at Edina High, teachers routinely pushed politicians and political positions they favored, shamed and browbeat students with dissenting views, and forced them to defend themselves against baseless allegations of racism. According to his son, he says, classroom discussions were often “one-sided indoctrination sessions,” and students feared their grades would be penalized if they spoke out. The final straw for the Flores family occurred when an English teacher subjected their son and a classmate to a lengthy, humiliating and ideologically charged grilling—unlike that faced by other students—after the boys made a presentation with which she disagreed following racially-charged incidents in Ferguson, Missouri. When Flores’ son requested an apology, school authorities indignantly took the teacher’s side, says Flores. Fearing retaliation, the boy asked to transfer to another English class. There, a student teacher informed the class they would not be reading classic books because “dead white men are boring,” according to Flores. Flores believes that “Race and racism should be discussed” at school. But “relentlessly obsessing about race—pretending it’s the only thing that matters—is counterproductive and harmful to everyone,” he says. Like Edina students, the district’s faculty and staff must submit to racial equity re-education. One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative. The widow of a bus driver who had been required to attend the training sent the entire 25-page instructional curriculum to Center of the American Experiment, where I am a senior policy fellow. The training session was entitled “Edina School DIstrict Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology. The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. There’s been a single positive point of data: Black students’ reading scores—all ages, all grades—have slightly increased, from 45.5 percent proficiency in 2014 to 46.4 percent proficiency in 2017. But other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017. The drop was most notable at the high school level. Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 30 percent proficiency in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2017. In reading, scores for black students in 10th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 51.7 percent proficiency in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017. Recently, conservative students at Edina High School filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the district has violated its members’ rights of free speech and association. The suit grew out of events following a Veteran’s Day assembly in the high school gym on November 9, 2017. There, a group of veterans spoke about their military service, and the school band played the National Anthem and Taps. During the music, some black students “protested” by refusing to stand, slouching by the bleachers, talking loudly, and blaring music on their cell phones. Members of the school’s unofficial Young Conservatives Club (YCC) responded by criticizing the protesters’ behavior, at school and on social media. In response, the protesters and their allies harassed the conservative students, with groups “as large as 30 students . . . daily surrounding club members and threatening to injure them if they did not change their political views,” according to the lawsuit complaint. In addition, a group styling itself the “Edina High School Anti-Fascists” (you have to see the group’s Twitter feed to believe it) posted a threatening YouTube video aimed at the YCC, which declared, “[W]e will not stop until every tentacle of your evil monstrosity is sliced off at the nerve.” When the conservative students complained, the school’s principal “responded to their security concerns by saying that [they had] brought it upon themselves by criticizing the protests” at the Veterans Day program, according to the complaint. The principal disbanded the YCC after pressuring its president to show him texts its members had sent one another about these incidents on the club’s private GroupMe. Yet school authorities apparently took no disciplinary action against the protesters and other students who had threatened and harassed YCC members. The Edina Public Schools’ “policies suggest that ‘all are welcome here,’” the complaint asserts, “but what EPS really means is that all are welcome except conservatives.” The Edina school district is just one example of the ideological hijacking of legitimate academic instruction in the name of racial equity. There’s more to come. Last October, the Star Tribune ran an op-ed that praised the Edina schools’ racial equity crusade, and condemned what the author described as America’s vicious history of violence and oppression—evidenced today by “Eurocentric curricula,” “hypersegregated schools,” and “biased standardized tests.” Our nation’s “racist practices,” she wrote, are what “allowed this country to expand geographically and to amass its great fortune.” White students, she asserted, must become “racially conscious” to learn “how their own worldviews are limited by whiteness.” The writer was Dr. Annie Mogush Mason, program director of elementary teacher education at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where the next generation of Minnesota’s teachers are being formed.
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#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
Flores, who fled a Marxist regime in Nicaragua as a child, had this to say: “Years ago, we fled Communism to escape indoctrination, absolutist thinking and restrictions on our freedom of speech. If we see these traits in our schools in America, we must speak out and oppose it.” Public schools are nothing more than government indoctrination centers for kids. . It's been this way since at least the 1960's in my opinion - this is another example that we are living in the final stages of freedom. Maybe. Or Minnesota might revive its Republican party. There's no reason for parents to put up with this crap. Spend a fortune on public skrools and a bunch of unreconstructed Marxists SJWs indoctrinate your kids while they fall behind their cohorts in other states, for no good reason? Minnesota is far gone as a Blue state. But so was Wisconsin until Scott Walker came along. I'm not sure the GOP has cultivated a farm team in Minnesota to take advantage of the Left's bumbling.
Martin Luther King is one of the last people on earth who should be referenced for anything. He was an absoutely corrupt radical left wing activist from the word go..
Sure but you can't deny his statements on ideals of racial harmony have not formed a substantial portion of the justifications for modern race policy. MLK was always the standard of the Left. We need to make them live up to it, not alter his agenda in ways so radical as to obliterate the aspirations of racial equality that we were sold this bill of goods to promote. Wow, is that a clumsy grammar or what?
We were sold a bill of goods all right. He advocated marxist organizing, then ended ended his talks by saying he advocated non violence. It was a conditional nonnonviolece as long as he got his way. Meanwhile he gathered people behind him ready to make war and declared, "I don't know how long I can hold them back." He did't intend to hold them back. He cultivated them as a tool to be let loose if his demands weren't met. It was a shrewd method of revolutionary organizing. People bought into it and now he is worshipped as a non violent saint.
Sure but you can't deny his statements on ideals of racial harmony have not formed a substantial portion of the justifications for modern race policy. MLK was always the standard of the Left. We need to make them live up to it, not alter his agenda in ways so radical as to obliterate the aspirations of racial equality that we were sold this bill of goods to promote. Yes, Robert, you are technically right; except that the Progressive MSM chose to instead to ignore King's hypocrisy and instead lionize him and his words -- yes, just like their other Prog hero, JFK. TC, you are also spot on -- the Left has used MLK as the standard bearer of leftist idealism...but as we note, ONLY when convenient. Conservatives have been backed off of criticizing MLK or exposing his charade lest they be slammed from all angles and loudly as "Racist!!!" The power of that Race-Card will apply in perpetuity as far as King is concerned, unfortunately.
Forgot to ping you to the above
That was true in large part...although by contemporary standards, MLK is angelic.
And the ultimate legacy of that is how we wound with a Marxist Kenyun as president for eight years.
My standards come from reality, not passing public fads that people have been talked into.
I understand where you're coming from, but today's standards of behavior are relative. I don't have to tell you the radical difference and "norming" of America's culture sociology during the ten years between 1960 and 1970.
Well stated truth of the matter.
For example, Orlando Flores and his wife pulled their son—an academic superstar—out of Edina High School in his senior year to escape its hyper-political environment.
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.
#2. To: Deckard (#1)
It's been this way since at least the 1960's in my opinion - this is another example that we are living in the final stages of freedom.
#3. To: Tooconservative (#0)
It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal
#4. To: rlk (#3)
Martin Luther King is one of the last people on earth who should be referenced for anything. He was an absoutely corrupt radical left wing activist from the word go..
#5. To: Tooconservative (#4)
we were sold this bill of goods to promote.
#6. To: Tooconservative (#4)
RLK: "Martin Luther King is one of the last people on earth who should be referenced for anything. He was an absoutely corrupt radical left wing activist from the word go.."
#7. To: Rlk (#6)
#8. To: rlk (#3)
Martin Luther King is one of the last people on earth who should be referenced for anything. He was an absoutely corrupt radical left wing activist from the word go..
#9. To: All (#5)
It was a shrewd method of revolutionary organizing. People bought into it and now he is worshipped as a non violent saint.
#10. To: Liberator (#8)
That was true in large part...although by contemporary standards, MLK is angelic.
#11. To: rlk (#10)
My standards come from reality, not passing public fads that people have been talked into.
#12. To: rlk (#5)
We were sold a bill of goods all right. He advocated marxist organizing, then ended ended his talks by saying he advocated non violence. It was a conditional nonnonviolece as long as he got his way. Meanwhile he gathered people behind him ready to make war and declared, "I don't know how long I can hold them back." He did't intend to hold them back. He cultivated them as a tool to be let loose if his demands weren't met. It was a shrewd method of revolutionary organizing. People bought into it and now he is worshipped as a non violent saint.
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