I'm not sure how I missed this last year, but kudos to The Dispatch for flagging this lunacy as a prime example of how "anti-racism" wokeness is poisoning education. We've written about some of the madness, including stifling "woke" cultures at elite private schools, and some activists' efforts to inject identity politics into math. But this concession to the mob by a group of charter schools is about as cartoonishly illustrative of the problem as it gets. The insane ideologues are winning, and this is what their "victories" look like:
It’s more accurate to say that anti-racist education means something very different from what most observers bargained for. Last summer, the famed KIPP charter schools announced they’d be abandoning their longtime slogan: “Work Hard, Be Nice.” Why? The announcement explained: “The slogan passively supports ongoing efforts to pacify and control Black and Brown bodies in order to better condition them to be compliant and further reproduce current social norms that center whiteness and meritocracy as normal.” Those unfamiliar with anti-racist dogma are frequently surprised to see it invoked in this kind of assault on foundational virtues. They tend to presume that such instances are outliers. Unfortunately, it’s more accurate to say that KIPP’s move was a telling snapshot of contemporary anti-racist education in practice.
"Work hard, be nice" is some of the earliest advice I was given as a student and as I embarked upon my career. I've passed it along to countless young people in speeches to campus groups. Working hard and treating people nicely is a competitive advantage over people who will do one thing, but not the other – or neither. It's also just the right way to comport oneself. But apparently, this mission statement was thrown out by KIPP charter schools because it "passively supports" the 'pacification' of "Black and Brown bodies," whatever the hell that means. Furthermore, these concepts allegedly "center whiteness and meritocracy," which is a stunningly racist commentary unto itself. Hard work and kindness are white values? That's bigoted trash. One parent is quoted in the article above saying, "We did not immigrate to this country for our children to be taught in taxpayer funded schools that punctuality and hard work are white values." More:
The anti-racist agenda is sprawling, encompassing subjects as seemingly far afield as math. California’s Department of Education has proposed an “anti-racist math framework” intended to rectify the “problem” of Asian Americans filling an outsized share of seats in gifted programs. The framework would “ban grouping students by ability or merit, all but eliminating algebra for middle schoolers and a crucial two years of calculus for high schoolers.” The Oregon Department of Education has urged teachers to be trained on “ethnomathematics” in order to purge “white supremacy” from math curricula (purportedly racist practices include requiring students to “show their work” or putting an emphasis on “getting the ‘right answer’”). Anti-racist education has become a racialized justification for all manner of bad, long-discredited ideas. Like hippie educators of the early ’70s, anti-racists want to end grading as conventionally understood.
Attempts at objectively measuring learning or academic achievement and capacity are increasingly portrayed as racist relics that require uprooting. In California, the state's university system has announced that it will now ban consideration of SAT and ACT standardized test scores in the college admissions process:
Under new policy, “no University of California schools can consider SAT or ACT scores in determining admission offers...if scores are submitted by students, they will not be viewed by those looking over admissions applications...” https://t.co/J8dhVL27Dr
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 17, 2021
Activists claimed that the tests were "racist metrics" that hurt people of color and the disabled. The state's university system responded by deciding that the exams wouldn't just be de-emphasized; they could not play any role whatsoever, even an optional one, as officials weighed transcripts. I understand that these tests aren't perfect and that wealthier people have more resources available for tutors and prep courses. It's fair for admissions officers to recognize those socioeconomic factors as they make decisions. But strong scores can also be a ticket to opportunity for underprivileged students, based on their innate abilities. Showcasing those abilities is now considered an offshoot of white supremacy, or something, so they're gone. Meanwhile, at Penn State:
Pigskin powerhouse Penn State has jumped on the woke wagon. The sprawling public university will replace pronouns such as he/him/hers with they/them/theirs; replace traditional student designations such as freshman and sophomore with “first year” and “second year” and; replace “underclassmen” and “upperclassmen” with “lower division” and “upper division,” according to Penn State News. “Terms such as ‘freshmen’ are decidedly male-specific, while terms such as ‘upperclassmen’ can be interpreted as both sexist and classist. Terms such as ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ are parallel to western male father-son naming conventions, and much of our written documentation uses he/she pronouns,” states the resolution...Penn State announced in 2018 that it was dropping the titles homecoming “king” and “queen.”
"Parallel to western male father-son naming conventions." Do these people hear themselves? The scary thing is, they do – and they think they're so righteous that everyone else's language should bend to their capricious and ever-shifting whims. One can be respectful and affirming toward non-binary or trans people, who represent a tiny fraction of society, without rewriting the English language and uprooting definitions used by almost everyone else. This is crazy, but it's steadily advancing. This isn't the gender studies department at Swarthmore. It's a Big Ten public university plopped in the middle of a blue collar midwestern state. Normal people either need to fight back against these excesses, or resign themselves to the radical re-imagination of society, dominated by woke enforcers and cancel mobs. Decline is a choice.
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