by Virginia Allen
It’s no secret that the far left has infiltrated higher education with its radical ideas. But now, woke ideology has come for K-12 classrooms across the country.
“As parents, we send our kids to school to learn to think critically, to figure out how to solve problems, and to respectfully discuss and resolve differences of opinion,” Ashley Jacobs, executive director of Parents Unite, said Friday during the new organization’s first conference.
“But,” Jacobs said, “our educational systems are not enabling these skills, and in some cases, [they are] stifling them.”
About 100 educators, parents, students, and thought leaders gathered earlier this month in Boston for Parents Unite’s “Diversity of Thought in K-12 Education” conference. Speakers addressed the rise of critical race theory and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology within public and private schools, and what parents can do to combat what the group sees as radical indoctrination of the next generation.
Established in May, Parents Unite describes itself as a bipartisan organization founded in response to the one-sided woke agenda being promoted in private or independent schools as well as in public schools. A small group of mothers, including Jacobs, formed the nonprofit when it realized that many independent schools no longer were teaching children how to think, but what to think.
The left is making a “huge push” for what it calls diversity, equity, and inclusion, “and it’s been going on for years,” Jacobs, 52, said. But, she added, parents aren’t seeing true diversity of opinion within classrooms:
You want to be inclusive, and you want to explore all these different kinds of people and cultures. But the implicit assumption is that that makes for more interesting classrooms, because people share the things that make them different in a way that’s meaningful. But that’s not what we’re seeing. So, then [diversity] becomes window dressing …More than 20 speakers addressed the “window dressing” taking place within classrooms across America during the two-day conference.
Critical race theory, which teaches that race drives every issue in society and that whites intrinsically are privileged and use this privilege to oppress people of color, was at the center of discussion throughout the event.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project promotes some of the tenets of critical race theory by claiming that America was racist at its founding. During the 2019-2020 school year, the Washington-based Pulitzer Center reported that more than 3,500 classrooms used material from the widely criticized 1619 Project.
Educators’ embrace of critical race theory has led to “suffocating empathy,” Ian Rowe, who led a network of charter schools in New York City for 10 years, said Friday.
Schools are lowering standards for students of color because of an assumption that they are oppressed, and so will not perform as well as white classmates, Rowe said.
Rowe pointed to the San Diego Unified School District as an example of this misguided empathy.
In 2020, San Diego schools implemented a new grading policy under which teachers no longer consider behavior, work submitted late, or attendance when determining grades. The school district made the change in an effort to address what it called racial inequality.
Policies motivated by critical race theory, such as the new grading system in San Diego, “hurt kids” because they communicate a victim narrative instead of challenging young people to work hard and overcome obstacles, Rowe said.
Think private schools are doing a better job teaching students how to use logic and reason and resist woke groupthink? Andrew Gutmann, also known as the “Brearley dad,” likely would answer no.
During the conference, Gutmann told the story of how he gained national attention in April after pulling his middle school daughter out of The Brearley School in Manhattan and writing a letter to fellow Brearley parents explaining his actions.
“If the [Brearley] administration was genuinely serious about ‘diversity,’ it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Gutmann wrote in the letter, published by writer and commentator Bari Weiss.
Brearley, an all-girls school with annual tuition of $54,000, not only instituted elements of critical race theory in the classroom but required parents to attend anti-racism training.
In his letter, Gutmann described this training as “so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners.”
Although many other education leaders, teachers, parents, and even some students voiced concerns at the conference over the injection of critical race theory into K-12 education, nearly every speaker had recommendations on how to restore civil discourse and diversity of thought to schools.
What follows are seven takeaways from the Parents Unite conference on strategies to promote true diversity of thought and push back against indoctrination of students.
1. Present Alternatives
2. Get Involved
3. Demand Transparency
4. Help Draft a ‘Chicago Statement’
5. Connect to Resources
6. Spend Time With Your Kids
7. Have Courage
Read more here - Source: www.dailysignal.com
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