The Anti-Defamation League received widespread criticism over the past week after it came out they changed the definition of “racism” so that only white people could be labeled as racist.
It turns out they’re using this same definition in their “No Place For Hate” program and teaching millions of children in over 1,800 K-12 schools across America that only white people can be racist.
High schoolers in a Massachusetts biology class were asked during a lesson on human genetics to erase “gendered terms” from their vocabulary.
In a lesson on human genetics, Needham High School biology students learned to use inclusive language when discussing sex. An accompanying slideshow, which Parents Defending Education released last week, defines gender as an individual’s “psychological sense of self” and asks students to research “gender fluidity” in nature.
Progressive ideology has crept into classrooms across the country. Radical education activists have called for “antiracist” math curricula that eliminate such “racist” practices as showing your work and arriving at the correct answer. One Virginia school district has proposed eliminating homework grades and extra credit assignments to promote “equity.”
The presentation boasts popular progressive arguments on gender and sexuality. One slide includes definitions of “anatomical sex,” “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “attraction” and says that sex is not gender.
“Sex (sometimes called biological sex, anatomical sex, or physical sex) is comprised of things like genitals, chromosomes, hormones, body hair, and more,” the slide provides as a definition for anatomical sex. “But one thing it’s not: gender.”
That slide defines “gender identity” as an individual’s “psychological sense of self.”
“Who you, in your head, know yourself to be, based on how much you align (or don’t align) with what you understand to be the options for gender,” the slide reads.
Eliminating “gendered terms,” according to another slide, ensures that “people with diverse (a)sexualities, (a)genders, bodies, and (a)romantic orientations are included and respected.” Discussing biological sex in terms of men and women “marginalizes” those born with both male and female genitalia, “who have been persistently discriminated against.”
After giving examples of hermaphroditic and sex-transitioning plants and animals, the presentation ends with an assignment: Students must research other examples of “gender fluidity” in nature.
Needham High School principal Aaron Sicotte told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement that the school is “proud” of its curriculum and hopes that lessons “appropriately reflect the needs of a diverse student body and the standards, values, and high academic expectations of the Needham community.” Needham High School’s course catalog notes that lessons in biology—including those offered to freshmen—and physiology include lessons on human sexuality. Parents have the option to remove their children from lessons they deem inappropriate.
A 5th grade teacher working in the North Penn School District made white elementary school children apologize to black kids for their skin color, according to irate parents.
The sensational claim was made during a school board meeting by the mother of a child who attends AM Kulp Elementary School.
“I actually pulled my daughter out of AM Kulp because of the 5th grade teacher who lined those students up, from whitest to darkest,” she said.
“(The teacher) made them turn around and made the white ones apologize to the black ones – now do not tell me that did not happen in this district,” the mother added.
“You need to put an end to this. Kids do not see color and you are segregating them and you are separating them. This is not OK. Do something or get out of those damn chairs!” she concluded.
The mother’s complaint was bolstered by a further claim by another individual at the meeting who described how the same teacher forced children to take part in a ‘privilege walk’ multiple times.
NewsGuard, a controversial service that ranks news sources read by clients online based on how trustworthy it considers them to be, will soon be available for free to millions of schoolchildren in the US.
The New York-based company signed a licensing agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, making the service available to members and their students, the two said this week.
AFT President Randi Weingarten called the deal a game-changer when it comes to helping kids, “particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction.”
She called NewsGuard “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”
The service was launched in 2018, when the position that Big Tech should openly censor information that it deemed undesirable was not as pervasive in the US as it is today. NewsGuard ranks thousands of news sources with a “street light” color code, and puts a nutrition label-like explanation on each one to explain the score.
The service comes in the form of a browser plug-in and costs $2.95/month, except for users of Microsoft Edge, since Microsoft licensed it to be a built-in feature of its browser in 2019.
NewsGuard claims to be apolitical and to apply a rigorous process when assessing the integrity of news outlets. After its launch, skeptics, however, questioned the abundance of people linked to the US government among its advisory board.
One of them, Richard Stengel, who served under Barack Obama as the Department of State’s public affairs chief, said on the record that state propaganda was fine and that all nations subjected their citizens to it.
For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.
We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.
What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.
These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.
If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?
Spend enough time studying the “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs sweeping school districts across the nation and you’ll find that they are following in the footsteps, on a several-year delay, of one of America’s most progressive cities: Seattle.
It’s worth examining, then, how all that worked out in Seattle. Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better.
At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.
Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.
As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.
The academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on “power and oppression.” But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers. What follows is the never-before-told story of America’s first “woke” school system.
A mother in Carroll County, Md., reported that students, including her daughter, were recently given race and gender privilege scorecards to complete as part of their preparation for an upcoming reading assignment in English class. Accompanying the scorecards were other media elaborating on the concept of privilege.
When the daughter questioned her teacher on what privilege has to do with learning English, expressing concerns that the material seemed “racist towards whites” and that it “portrayed the police in a negative light,” the teacher reacted by saying it was actually good to have those feelings and that the purpose of the lesson is to foster uncomfortable conversations.
The girl’s mother sees things differently, calling such topics in the classroom “absolutely appalling.” She continued: “They’re teaching our kids to view and treat people based on their skin color, rather than treating each other as individuals. How this belongs in an English class is beyond me.”
The Concerned Parents of Carroll County Maryland, a local group organized to remove political indoctrination in schools and promote common-sense COVID policies, were originally sent the classroom documents. The group has received similar reports from many students and parents throughout their community’s school system.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the far-left “1619 Project” – which has been widely criticized by historians – said during a segment on Sunday that she did not understand why parents should get a say in what their children learn in school.
Jones made the remarks during a panel on NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” when pressed on how parent’s involvement in education shaped the governor’s race in Virginia.
“Well, I would say the governor’s race in Virginia was decided based on the success of a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated as race – as being called racists. But that was a propaganda campaign,” she claimed without providing any evidence.
“And I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” she later added. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job. When the, when the governor or the candidate said that he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that. But that’s just the fact. This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool, because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature. And I think we should leave that to the educators.”
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.