Ignorance is not bliss, it's a prescription for failure

Mark Twain? We don’ need no Mark Twain!

Boston charter school is in danger of being shut down because of its lack of a wokeful curriculum

A Boston-area charter school is in trouble with state regulators because it focuses on “the fundamental ideals of our American Culture” and embraces “the melting pot theory by highlighting our citizens’ and students’ commonality, not their differences,” writes Molly Ball in Time. New state standards require cultural responsiveness.

Students at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School, which attracts a diverse student body, do well academically, writes Ball. “Test scores and graduation rates routinely rank among the state’s best.” Attrition is low. The wait list is huge.

But, after 23 years, the K-12 school is worried its charter will be denied in 2023.

Eric Henry, a black father with triplets in fifth grade, complained about the racial slurs in Tom Sawyer, which is approved by the state as part of the public-school curriculum. A Puerto Rican–Palestinian social worker, Zinah Abukhalil-Quinonez, is angry that Mystic Valley didn’t issue a statement that “Black Lives Matter” and doesn’t celebrate Black History Month.

And who can’t appreciate the breathless wonder of a professional eddikater when she discovers that books like “Tom Sawyer” exist and that children are permitted to read them?

“This is horrible,” wrote Olympia Stroud, a program coordinator at the Massachusetts department of elementary and secondary education (DESE). “How long have these books been in the curriculum?” Stroud forwarded the concerns to a supervisor, Benie Capitolin, who called the matter “heartbreaking.” “If our system can’t protect Black and brown students from unsafe environments,” Capitolin wrote, “how can it possibly educate them?”

DESE issued a draft report in September citing Mystic Valley for not fully meeting the new standard, writes Ball. The school sued, uncovering emails showing “DESE employees were secretly coordinating with the school’s critics, including the Henrys, the NAACP and local racial-justice activists unconnected to the school.”

In their emails, the activists advocated a “stealth approach,” using “cloak and dagger” tactics. And DESE went along, adding employees to the review team who were concerned about the school’s racial climate, then deliberately delaying the review for months to allow parents to submit official complaints. When none materialized, the department created informal focus groups that they packed with the same complaining activists, then incorporated the groups’ feedback into its report, the documents show.

You might think that the answer to dissatisfaction with the education your child is receiving at a charter school is to remove her and enroll her in the standard public school down the street, but Group Think demands uniformity throughout the hive — deviation must not be tolerated, nor permitted to exist.

Would it be racist to wonder whether those triplets of the angry black father are doing well at school? Math are hard, especially if correct calculations are demanded.