Connexion
Unsurprisingly, “anti-racist” teaching methods are not helping students learn in the classroom.
When I founded the 1776 Project, a national super PAC dedicated to electing conservatives who opposed critical theory in the K-12 classrooms, the mainstream media, the teacher’s union, and Democrat politicians insisted that I was peddling unfounded fear to concerned parents. In the three years since I began my mission to flip school boards, it is not only evident that critical theory is alive and well in our nation’s primary and secondary schools, but also becoming a billion-dollar business funded by tax dollars.
The Hayward Unified School District, located in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is host to the failing Glassbrook Elementary, where 474 predominantly Latino children spend a decade barely learning to read, write, or do math. As of last spring, less than 4 percent of students were proficient in math and 12 percent in English.
With the blessing of parents and educators, the school board approved a $250,000 contract with the for-profit company Woke Kindergarten, which specializes in addressing “anti-racism” training for students and teachers through a federal program to improve failing schools. School officials believed that if they could confront the legacy of racism and white supremacy, students’ grades and attendance would improve. The opposite happened.
After two years of using Woke Kindergarten, math and English scores hit new lows despite the district telling the San Francisco Chronicle that attendance had improved and suspension rates were down, allowing the school to get off the state watchlist for failing schools. In fact, not only was Glassbrook still on the watchlist, but their ranking had declined since using the “anti-racism” program.
The massive public outcry from the exposé by the San Francisco Chronicle forced the district to quietly end its contract with Woke Kindergarten. “The controversy was becoming a distraction,” Hayward officials said.
It’s important to note that the district didn’t apologize for wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a program that didn’t work and was not only openly hostile to the cornerstones of America, but also deeply antisemitic. They didn’t even bother pretending to be ignorant of the program’s intentions or the beliefs of its founder.
“I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples, against Indigenous people, has no right to exist,” Woke Kindergarten founder Akiea Gross said in a recent Instagram post. “Y’all the demons. Y’all are the villains. We’ve been trying to end y’all. Get free of y’all.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement, “anti-racism” became popularized by author Ibram X. Kendi with his best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist. The ideology centers around the false notion that racism is the single cause of all racial inequities, from incarceration rates to salaries to educational achievement. Thus, the only way to remedy racism is to be an “anti-racism” activist who looks to promote “anti-racism” discrimination that seeks to remedy all inequities in the world. In other words, race-based discrimination must be used to overturn the systemic problems built in our white colonizer capitalist society. Per Kendi’s own explanation,
The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination towards equity.
“Anti-racist” consultants in K-12 education seek to bring this aggressive racialist ideology to the classroom. Even though Gross got booted from Hayward, plenty of other “anti-racist” professionals are making a small fortune peddling this pedagogy to students, teachers, and administrators.
According to Parents Defending Education, consultants have earned over $22 million from public and private funds over the last few years promoting “anti-racism” and DEI trainings—and not just in blue states.
Shockingly enough, tax dollars aren’t the only revenue stream where DEI consultants are making a small fortune. Walmart funded a five-year equity plan for Fayetteville and Bentonville, Arkansas, schools. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the nation’s largest retailer is spending private funds to have a top-down transformation of public schools in its hometown. They hired a North Carolina–based firm known as the Racial Equity Institute to hold teacher training where educators learned that “perfectionism” is “white supremacy” and that “all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built.”
One parent sent the 1776 Project a hidden recording from her son’s class in which his English teacher explicitly told students about the benefits of critical race theory and how to dispel attacks on the theory. The teacher insisted that “CRT can be useful to help us become a better society” and has very little to do with Marxism, neither of which is true.
Professional trainings and equity audits aside, these for-profit “anti-racism” businesses are looking to fundamentally alter curriculum, including the hard sciences.
Rochelle Gutierrez has been working as an education professor at the College of Education within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne since 1996, helping educators understand how they can reimagine math education to include intersectionality, power dynamics, and social activism. She calls it “rehumanizing math.”
This may seem ridiculous, but Gutierrez has been celebrated in the education community, receiving the “Outstanding Mathematics Teacher Educator Award for Excellence in Scholarship” from the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators in 2011.
Born to an activist Chicano mother, she learned about political activism in her childhood and brought it to math education as an adult.
“Math is dehumanizing students because they ask students to leave their identity at the door and focus on the math process,” Gutierrez said in one speech, deriding the notion that being good at math is a proxy for intelligence. “Mathematics has an unearned privilege in society just like whiteness, a measure to which we judge others, and which becomes normal. Viewing being proficient in math cannot be decoupled from this white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society that we live in,” she continued.
Gutierrez’s decade-long vision is making its way into K-12 education when it was announced that the Pittsburgh Public Schools approved a $50,000 contract with Quetzal Education to provide educators with a new “anti-racist” approach to teaching math.
The recommendation came from Assistant Superintendent Shawn McNeil, who emphasized that “anti-racism” would improve the district’s 11.6 percent proficiency in math among black students.
Quetzal also has contracts with K-12 school districts in Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Hayward, New Haven, and San Mateo, as well as several universities.
There’s no evidence that “anti-racism” training will improve educational achievement among students or reduce racial inequities between Hispanic and black students compared to their white and Asian peers, but that’s not the ultimate goal. “Anti-racism” activists are using education to create a generation of social justice activists who hope to continue their efforts to strip capitalism, “colonization,” and merit from society—and to get wealthy in the process.
The post San Francisco: The Big Money Teaching Racism appeared first on The American Conservative.
The anti-Francis media—the very phrase, “anti-Francis,” should be a source of shame for them—proved utterly derelict in this regard. Their failure isn’t just one of secular journalistic norms, but one of faith and filiality.
In these days of war, riot, and pandemic, no news is truly good news. And the principle applies equally to the life of the Catholic Church: It’s good news indeed that, contrary to the hopes of Catholic liberals and the fears of traditionalists, Pope Francis’s “Synod of Synodality” concluded its work over the weekend, and the result was…no doctrinal changes on hot-button questions.
Call it an apostolic nothingburger.
The disappointment of ecclesial liberals and their allies in the secular media was summed up by a New York Times article on the conclusion of the Roman gabfest. “Progressives who once hoped that the synod would create momentum for things like reaching out to LGBTQ+ Catholics said the meeting had failed to move the institution,” ran the paper’s sub-headline. Proponents of allowing married priests, blessings for same-sex unions, and the like watched with dismay as their ideas “basically vanished” from the final document, as the Gray Lady reported.
Instead, the gathering of prelates, specially selected priests, and lay advocates and experts ratified a series of vague and unobjectionable action items. Women must urgently play a bigger role in the Roman church’s affairs, the document said, but it didn’t specify what that would entail—more Karens from the Parish Council?—let alone broach deaconesses. Meanwhile, rainbow-talk was “almost entirely expunged,” per the Times.
To be sure, the document contained not a small portion of the sort of human-resources and therapeutic vernacular that has sadly invaded the Church’s language. (“Our personal narratives will enrich this synthesis with the tone of lived experience….”) But I wonder whether appropriating the outward forms of the HR-therapeutic complex is precisely the Church’s way of repelling its substance. In the event, liberal would-be reformers got nothing substantive out of the Synod on Synodality.
Which brings us to the conservatives and traditionalists. For weeks and months leading up to the synod, mainly Anglophone opponents of Pope Francis had published a steady stream of overwrought commentary on how the gathering would doom Catholicism, making normative for the universal Church the aberrant liberal practices of some bishops in Western Europe, especially Germany.
“Ask Mary to Save Us From the Synod on Synodality” was a typically unsober headline on one such piece that appeared in Crisis Magazine. Another writer in the same outlet warned that “synodality” will become “a cover for implementing fundamental changes to Catholicism. Using terms like ‘journey together’ and ‘gather in assembly’ put a happy face on the radical deconstruction of the Catholic faith.”
But it wasn’t to be. No “fundamental changes to Catholicism” took place. Nor was the faith radically deconstructed. That should alert hardcore traditionalists that perhaps they’ve got Pope Francis all wrong; that by constantly questioning his fidelity to the deposit of faith and striking an opposition-from-the-get-go posture whenever he tries to teach, they not only act without due docility toward the Vicar of Christ on Earth, but betray the older models of papal authority they seek to restore.
In his opening meditation on the synod, the pope himself all but spelled out that liberals would be disappointed, while the trads would end up looking foolish for fanning hysteria. Previous gatherings, he noted, had been the subject of similar anticipations. The Synod on the Family, conservatives feared, would open the doctrinal way to the divorced and remarried being admitted to communion. The Synod on the Amazon was supposed to bring the ordination of the so-called viri probati (married men of strong faith). But none of it came to pass. “Now,” Francis added,
There is speculation about this Synod: ‘What are they going to do?,’ ‘Maybe ordain women….’ I don’t know, those are things they are saying out there. And it is often said that the bishops are afraid to talk about what is going on. For this reason, I ask you, members of the press, to do your work well, fairly, so that the Church and people of good will—other people will say what they will—can understand that also in the Church, listening has priority. Communicate this: It is so important.
The anti-Francis media—the very phrase, “anti-Francis,” should be a source of shame for them—proved utterly derelict in this regard. This is not merely a failure to uphold secular journalistic norms, but one of faith and filiality.
The post The Nothingburger Synod appeared first on The American Conservative.
As a war on drugs voter, I want to hear how a presidential candidate would use executive power to curb the flow of drugs into this country, because tackling demand alone will never be sufficient.
Vivek Ramaswamy is, without a doubt, charismatic and persuasive, and often hits all the right points. Yet coming out in favor of maintenance treatment and decriminalization of illegal substances is a deal-breaker for me.
Fox News reported that in June, Ramaswamy described his position on drug policy as “You don’t hear me talk about the war on drugs. I’m not a war on drugs person,” adding, “I think in the long run, and I’m talking about over a long run period of time, decriminalization, serially, is an important part of the long run solution here…That’s gotta be part of the solution[…]”
I happen to be raising my family in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the regions hardest hit by the fentanyl epidemic, and I am very much a war on drugs kind of voter.
That the United States fought the war on drugs and lost is an oft repeated falsehood. Setting aside the fact that the phrase “war of drugs” is just a figure of speech signifying robust law enforcement, the pattern with our nation is that we didn’t lose wars, but sabotaged them from within. In this case, we surrendered our mission to the hedonistic New Left.
The 1960s, anarchists adopted a program of cultural revolution in which mind-bending drugs were a key component. Domestic terrorist organization Weather Underground broke LSD guru Timothy Leary out of prison. Weather Underground alumni eventually settled in academic and nonprofit positions, training future activists and politicians. For a short while, the son of once-incarcerated domestic terrorists, Chesa Boudin, became the district attorney in San Francisco. He fit right in within the political culture that views addiction as a lifestyle choice which must be respected regardless of the consequences to society.
Since the 1960s, San Francisco—and California in general—has spiraled deep into the harm reduction model, limiting punishments for possession and public consumption of illicit substances, supplying users with paraphernalia, tents, and monthly cash stipends. For a few months in 2022, the city operated an unsanctioned “safe consumption” site where addicts were dealing and using drugs under the supervision of city employees, and in the plain view of everyone. According to harm reduction doctrine, these actions are necessary to keep the user alive until he chooses sobriety. It’s a daring idea. And if it seems counterintuitive, that’s because it is.
We locals often say that San Francisco is the place where junkies come to die—maintaining a habit here is convenient; quitting is hard work. So, they stick around for their short lifetimes. 2023 is on track to set a new record for deadly drug poisonings, with 121 suspected “overdose” emergency calls placed on Pride weekend alone. Eighteen users are reported to have died of suspected overdoses this past Wednesday, August 30.
Since drug addiction is not a victimless crime, the lenient approach has created entire neighborhoods littered in syringes and human excrement, made public transit unusable, and contributed to the “doom loop” of population and business outflow. The Union Square cable car terminal used to be a busy and noisy place where families lined up to take the scenic ride. It is now a void of boarded up storefronts. A few months ago, a frightened security guard shot a homeless shoplifter a block away from the former tourist spot.
San Francisco is not the only American city facing social and economic collapse: Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, and many others have their own no-go zombielands. With over one hundred thousand yearly drug poisonings taking American lives in their prime, the proliferation of hard drugs is one of the top problems facing the nation, and I expect a Republican presidential candidate to address it with a sense of urgency.
Ramaswamy doesn’t seem to have a vision for it. In an attempt to limit the fallout from the Fox expose, he explained himself: “More planted trash. I support decriminalizing ayahuasca & ketamine for veterans suffering from PTSD, to prevent the epidemic of fentanyl & suicide. It’s pathetic that Establishment candidates are using lies as a substitute for a message. When you strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.”
Ketamine is a Schedule III drug and already legal for medical use. Is Ramaswamy running for president to expand the prescription of ketamine to one additional diagnosis? I think not. The big picture he painted is different. He gave his audiences a blueprint for gradual legalization of all drugs, starting with a controversial treatment for veterans and moving on to addicts.
He appears to be endorsing maintenance treatments, or government-dispensed and/or administered drugs for those who already developed the habit. So-called “safe consumption sites” are a variation on this idea. Unlike abstinence, this approach creates lifetime pharma patients and, as libertarians should acknowledge, expands the role of government in private lives.
It’s worth mentioning that California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is very much running for the Democratic nomination, recently vetoed a bill that would legalize such joints. That puts Ramaswamy to the left of Newsom on the issue of addiction.
Lost amidst Ramaswamy’s self-congratulation for being the only Republican candidate in favor of decriminalization is the fact that decriminalization of hard drugs has failed everywhere it was tried. Portugal was the latest overhyped “success” story. Michael Shellenberger explained in his seminal work San Fransicko that the pro-opiate lobby misrepresents Portugal, as the Iberian country compels addicts to enter treatments under threat of a prison term—a far cry from decriminalization.
Even so, Portugal is now forced to rethink its decades-long policy. The traditionalist, homogenous Portugal has the same illegal drug issues as the U.S., albeit on a smaller scale: Rising use, rising crime, demoralized law enforcement, sprawling encampments—thankfully away from the tourist destinations.
Our own marijuana legalization, now enacted in many states as a step towards eventual legalization of all drugs, is no shining example of success. Americans were promised that pot is harmless and even medicinal, and that crime would decline. It turned out that highly concentrated cannabis sold at dispensaries is addictive and linked to psychosis, and that panic attacks are common, along with a myriad of other psychological and physiological side-effects. Out of hundreds of chemical ingredients found in a marijuana plant, only CBD has shown to be useful in medical practice. There is no need to legalize cannabis to manufacture CBD extract.
Decline in criminal activity stemming from the drug’s sale and distribution was another empty promise. Cartels continue dealing the drug—and grow it stateside. And while the proponents of legal cannabis argue that such pathologies proliferate because cannabis remains illegal on the federal level and that the state industry is overregulated, deregulating a weed that can be grown in any home next to a basil plant would drastically reduce the price and make the dangerous substance even more readily available. The consequences to our society would be tremendous, and, with deregulation and falling prices, states would miss out on hundreds of millions in tax revenue.
In his op-ed on foreign policy for The American Conservative, Ramaswamy explained that his goal is peace. Well, the streets of so many of our cities look like war zones full of defeated men. China, our number one geopolitical foe, is supplying components of the drug that is killing them, but it’s our domestic policies that make it easy for China to do so. Under decriminalization and harm reduction protocols, drugs became cheap and easy to procure, and social restraints are next to non-existent. It’s no wonder that use has skyrocketed.
Addressing the demand side is important. We need new and better treatments for the increasingly more addictive and deadly substances that now reach American markets. We also need to signal to potential users that their transgressions will not be tolerated, that there will be severe criminal penalties for the sociopathic behavior that is now destroying our great cities.
Above all, as a war on drugs voter, I want to hear how a presidential candidate would use executive power to curb the flow of drugs into this country, because tackling demand alone will never be sufficient. We will never curb drug addiction without going after the supply lines.
The post On Drugs, Vivek, War is Love appeared first on The American Conservative.
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