Insanity, thy name is public education

[ProdigalHorn]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/insid...-factory/article/2011402#.WnMtR5Ur6h8.twitter

Fixing our racial problems, one school bus driver at a time...

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.

Ridding this nation's youth of hate...

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.”

And most importantly, improving our educational excellence!

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.

 

[Mr. Deez]

The real culture war has always been in education. The Left had understood that for a century. The Right is just starting to figure it out. If they get to drill Marxist ******** into them for hours per day for 12 years at taxpayer expense, eventually large numbers of them are going to start believing the Marxist ********. I think your can counter it on an individual level, but not enough parents are going to be on the ball enough to keep it from fostering a colossal and insurmountable advantage for the hard Left.

For example, where are the parents of these kids in Edina? Why aren't they fighting this? To do this, some elected official had to approve of it. How come that guy still has a job? It's because there parents are checked out and don't give a crap. Well, that had consequences.

 

[ProdigalHorn]

For example, where are the parents of these kids in Edina? Why aren't they fighting this? To do this, some elected official had to approve of it. How come that guy still has a job? It's because there parents are checked out and don't give a crap.

I'm not sure it's about being checked out, I think it's about being resigned in some cases. You go to a school board meeting to complain, but the board is stacked with people who have the same viewpoint, so they basically shut you down. And the other parents don't want to look like a kook or a religious nut, so they just kinda look at the floor and pretend it's not happening. Or maybe they just say "hey, what's wrong with teaching our kids not to be racists?" Unless you're truly committed to moving forward, what do you do?

What really kills things is the moderate democrats, who refuse to acknowledge that this stuff is going on. When conservatives rail against bias, or post links to schools that are trying to pull this stuff, the response is generally "conspiracy theory nuts" or "you're just cherry-picking stuff, it's not really that bad." At this point, I don't think it's fixable - public schools are pretty well entrenched in the whole SJW cause, and the fact that any new teachers are going to be first-wave millennials who are really the initial products of that mindset means that it's only going to get worse, and it will in fact be coming to public schools everywhere.

But hey, all the kids will be nice to anyone who agrees with them, and will quickly and violently ostracize the ones who don't. So bigotry solved, apparently.

 

[Mr. Deez]

I'm not sure it's about being checked out, I think it's about being resigned in some cases. You go to a school board meeting to complain, but the board is stacked with people who have the same viewpoint, so they basically shut you down. And the other parents don't want to look like a kook or a religious nut, so they just kinda look at the floor and pretend it's not happening. Or maybe they just say "hey, what's wrong with teaching our kids not to be racists?" Unless you're truly committed to moving forward, what do you do?

The problem isn't the parents afraid to fight at the school board meetings. As you indicated correctly, it's usually a waste of time for an individual to go complain about something like this to a school board. They obviously believe in this horse crap, or they wouldn't have adopted it in the first place.

The problem is parents who have no idea that they have a school board or who their school board members are. Those parents are checked out, and they are many. They are the reason school boards can do this and get away with it.

At this point, I don't think it's fixable - public schools are pretty well entrenched in the whole SJW cause, and the fact that any new teachers are going to be first-wave millennials who are really the initial products of that mindset means that it's only going to get worse, and it will in fact be coming to public schools everywhere.

I agree that it's pretty much too late, that the millennials are a product of this, and that their entrance info the education field is going to make the problem much worse. However, though I engage in millennial bashing from time to time, it gets old, because it begs the question of why millennials are the way they are. We largely (though not entirely) believe and have the values that were instilled in us by our parents. Why did their parents do such a piss poor job instilling Western values? Why were they so indifferent that they let radicals take over their children's schools and teach their kids such terrible values and beliefs? At some point, the previous generation needs to assume a little responsibility as well.

 

[ProdigalHorn]

Why did their parents do such a piss poor job instilling Western values? Why were they so indifferent that they let radicals take over their children's schools and teach their kids such terrible values and beliefs?

It's 100 percent on the parents. Millennials are a product of what we've raised them to be. And they're not all like that - it's a broad brush for sure, just like everything else.

Basically, from what I've seen, the issue of human nature is that the people who are most emotional or invested in something tend to be the people on the extreme, because they're the ones most motivated to change things because everything is so much farther from where they want it to be. And the middle is more than happy to let the gung ho people handle the work, so that fringe 10-20 percent invariably is handling the teaching, the journalism, the local government, civic organizations, all the avenues that allow you to Affect Change. Progressives will always gravitate toward careers that allow them to shape opinions, because that's their goal.

Add to that the very real element of guilt that progressives can tap into... there's no question that we hesitate to shut down special interest groups who can make emotional appeals. We tend to cut them some slack because we figure that their hearts are in the right place and they're good people, and all that. And frankly, there are some legitimate issues that they may tap into.

Then combine with the fact that so much of the issues have to do with information that's put into textbooks and lesson plans, things that parents won't see unless they look for it. If I ever have kids, I feel like I'm going to have to sit with them and read their homework with them because who knows at this point what they're being told. And then there are the things that teachers are just going to say. I remember my english studies teacher was pretty liberal, and wasn't shy about showing it, but fortunately she wasn't as militant about pounding it into people.

But you know I also think that we've basically lost the ability to articulate "Western Values" as opposed to Eastern values. What are they? Why are they great? How did those things make this nation successful - and more to the point, why would they have succeeded even without the flaws and failings i.e. slavery? We have a generation that has been taught that everything we did happened because we enslaved people, and there's no attempt to contextualize that or even to be accurate about it. We talk about slavery as if it was something completely unique to this nation, completely associated with whites and "minorities" - which of course doesn't make sense on a global scale anyway. So no one knows what it means to be influenced by Western thought other than it apparently makes you racist and willing to exploit other people.

Basically, we're being taught about our history by people who hate our history and see it in the most negative light possible. And then we wonder why the idea of standing for the anthem is all of a sudden controversial, or why the ACLU thinks it's offensive that we use the word "American" in an SOTU address, or why chanting "USA" should be considered threatening to minorities - even legal ones.

 

[Mr. Deez]

Progressives will always gravitate toward careers that allow them to shape opinions, because that's their goal.

Great post, and you're correct, but their monopoly on that has to be broken. Conservatives need to push their kids to choose careers that shape opinions. We need fewer conservative kids becoming doctors, engineers, and CPAs and more becoming journalists, teachers, professors, and yes, lawyers. Most of the time, there's less money in those professions, but if conservatives don't break into them and soon, it's over.