Tag: public schools

Rhode Island Teachers Busted Offering Students Bonus Points to Defend Critical Race Theory at School Board Meetings

At least two teachers in Rhode Island have been busted offering students bonus points to defend Critical Race Theory during school board meetings, either in person or through written testimonies.

Documents obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE) revealed that two teachers in Barrington, Rhode Island, offered five bonus points to each student on their next test if they defended CRT.

The teachers, Alison Grieco and Jennifer Bergevine, were trying to stop House Bill 6070, which prohibits the “teaching of divisive concepts.”

“The legislation aims to prevent the teaching of critical race theory, which includes concepts that ‘an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,’ ‘an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,’ and ‘meritocracy or traits such as hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race,’” Breitbart reports.

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40 Percent of Teachers Say Civics Education Should Focus On Critical Race Theory

More than 40 percent of teachers say civics education should be focused on critical race theory, according to a Heritage Foundation study released Monday.

The report found that 43 percent of teachers are familiar with critical race theory. Of those teachers, 55 percent supported the doctrine, which teaches that American institutions are inherently racist. Forty-one percent of teachers said civics education should focus on critical race theory, while 57.5 percent of teachers said critical race theory should be included in civics education. Parents were marginally less supportive of critical race theory compared to teachers.

Parents and educators have feuded over the future of American civics education in recent months. Voters in Virginia and Texas have ousted pro-critical race theory school board members in recent elections. Red state legislators have moved to ban critical race theory, while blue states have encouraged it. The Illinois State Board of Education in February approved standards that asked teachers to “mitigate” behaviors that stem from “unearned privilege” and “Eurocentrism.”

The Heritage Foundation conducted the survey, first reported by The Federalist, of 1,003 teachers and 1,012 parents from December 2020 through February 2021. The report’s authors claim that teaching critical race theory in schools could reverse “the immense progress this country has made in race relations and equality.”

“Young Americans are taught not to be proud of their country, but to see it as an oppressor,” the study says. “In order to reverse this destructive and dangerous trend, it is essential that schools teach America’s founding principles, while at the same time build strong relationships between parents and teachers.”

While critical race theory in schools has made headlines over the past year, 65 percent of parents said they were not familiar, or unsure if they were familiar with, critical race theory. Just under 57 percent of teachers said the same.

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New Jersey school board removes holiday names off school calendar to prevent ‘hurt feelings’

Have a Merry “day off” and a Happy “day off”!

That’s the message from the school board of Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey, which unanimously voted Thursday to remove holiday names from their academic calendar following an uproar over renaming Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, according to reports.

Now holidays like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as Jewish holy days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will simply be listed as “day off.”

“If we don’t have anything on the calendar, we don’t have to have anyone [with] hurt feelings or anything like that,” board member Dorene Roche told Fox 5.

Another board member, Ronald Conti, reportedly said before the vote that “I don’t think really it is the board’s responsibility to be naming these holidays. Either take them off or just adopt whatever the federal and state governments are doing.”

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Massachusetts School Committee Allows Real-Time Crime Center To Monitor Students Live

How does a school committee respond to a year of remote student learning? How will the Springfield, MA School Committee respond to post-COVID schooling?

Now that public schools are reopening (just in time for summer vacation) what are officials worried about? Is it face-to-face learning? Is it in-person interactions with students? Nope, it is mass surveillance and how to let Real-Time Crime Centers (RTCC) monitor students under the guise of public safety.

As MassLive reports, the decision to let the Springfield Police Department monitor students in real-time “feels tone deaf.”

The school committee took a half hour to decide that the best way to make students and faculty feel safe is to allow Big Brother to monitor them in real-time.

It is becoming more apparent to even casual observers, that our public schools resemble our prison system. Our schools are increasingly tied to the school-to-prison pipeline with CCTV cameras watching a students’ every movement; to weapons detectors at entrances, to vape detectors in bathrooms, and to police officers waiting for students to commit an infraction.

Will tying school surveillance cameras to RTCCs be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back?

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Massachusetts High School Forces Students To Accept Concept Of ‘Systemic Racism’ In Essays

Students in one 10th-grade history class at a Massachusetts high school last month were tasked with creating slides to highlight the effects that “systemic racism” had on George Floyd’s life.

According to Parents Defending Education, a national grassroots nonprofit group dedicated to combatting state-sanctioned racism under the cloak of critical race theory in K-12 schools, sophomores at Concord-Carlisle High School were assigned a prompt based on required reading from the Washington Post.

Students were asked to create a slide outlining “one form of systemic racism, how it impacted Mr. Floyd’s life and how he responded,” after they read the piece, “Born with two strikes: How systemic racism shaped Mr. Floyd’s life and hobbled his ambition” in the Washington Post.

Parents Defending Education published the assignment shown below, where it appears students were offered no opportunity to dissent from the premise that the United States was systemically racist and oppressive, an idea at the heart of critical race theory, a once-fringe theory being forced into the U.S. educational system.

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