Gooder and harder

classroom poster offered by D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

My previous post condemning the Minneapolis school system for establishing an illegal policy of firing white teachers ahead of black ones missed a salient point, one which reader Hmm points out: who deserves to feel the effects of CRT more than the very teachers who’ve been spewing it in classrooms? The lawyer in me was outraged by the lawlessness of the plan to discriminate illegally, but really, isn’t this exactly what those same teachers have been demanding?

Woke teachers are as responsible as the school boards that hire them for the damage they’ve done to their pupils, so why shouldn't they pay the price? For instance, Why can’t Tyrone read?

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.

Related reading: Max Eden, The Rise of “Woke” classrooms”. City Journal, June 19, 2020

“There is no apolitical classroom” Lorena German, Committee on Anti-Racism for the National Council on the Teaching of English (NCTE).

School will be a very different place next year. Classes will be less full. Desks will be rigorously sterilized. And, if the education establishment has its way, teachers will be aggressively “woke.”

“We are living at a time of obscene inequities and merely trying to compensate is not enough,” the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) recently announced. “Equity is more than making things more accessible and AASA’s work on equity must go further and become actively anti-racist. . . . Leading a system-wide effort requires that we ensure that cultural responsiveness permeates all levels of the district.”

…. Education Week’s “Classroom Q&A” blog tells teachers that “As Dr. Ibram X. Kendi would say, there is no ‘not racist.’ There is only racist and anti-racist. Your silence favors the status quo and the violently oppressive harm it does to black and brown folk everywhere.” Antiracism, in the current formulation, does not mean equal treatment of others; it is an all-encompassing ideology that demands constant questioning of one’s own actions and motives and the actions and motives of others, with total vigilance about one’s own purportedly implicit racial biases.

….. For their part, the National Committee on Social Studies’ Early Childhood/Elementary Community has promised to overhaul content, explaining that “to stop the systemic, and we are talking about system-wide policies and practices, the systemic pattern of dehumanization . . . we need to start early. WE, as educators, and family members, need to flood our children with counter messages. . . . Messages that show #BlackLivesMatter and that it is essential to elevate that message until there is no racial inequality in economic opportunity, no racial inequality in education, no racial inequality in incarceration rates, and no brutality from police and others.”

This sounds like a call for an open-ended propaganda campaign. Indeed, in a public letter, the National Association of Secondary School Principals called on school leaders to create “culturally responsive schools” in order to build a nation “worthy of our highest ideals and intolerant of the idea that one man has the right to end the life of another because of his skin color.” If one truly believes that America today is a nation tolerant of that idea, then “flood[ing] our children with counter messages” might be the only moral course of action.

Those messages would come not only through new books but also through guided discussion of current news. New York State’s “Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education” framework encourages teachers to “incorporate current events, even if they are controversial, into instruction” and to “utilize tools . . . that encourage students to engage with difficult topics (power, privilege, access, inequity) constructively.”

… As cultural and political polarization reaches more and more areas of American life, one still holds out hope that schools can remain a relatively apolitical oasis where children can learn to read, write, and develop skills of socialization. The NCTE insists, however, that “there is no apolitical classroom.” With so many in the education establishment now taking this stance, the culture war appears headed for many classrooms—whether parents like it or not.