Academia Anthropology Politics

They Feed On The Young

February 5, 2024 by David 101 Comments

From the San Francisco Chronicle, one for the Everything It Touches pile:

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organisation called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

Now, now. We must resist the urge to pre-judge.

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement… has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent.

Though they ain’t making it easy.

English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English.

Take that, barriers to learning.

District officials defended the programme this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, 

Achieved, one assumes, by not bothering to suspend pupils who are seriously disruptive or habitually violent, a policy embraced by other progressive fiefdoms. And a new, improved rate of chronic absenteeism – 44% – isn’t entirely heartening.

[District Officials also said] that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level. 

Clearly, these are the people we should put in charge.

The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?” 

Apparently, San Francisco’s elementary-school children are expected to have, or at least regurgitate, strong opinions on the Israeli military.

Many young children are of course accustomed to being given a “word of the day,” though I would guess that such highlighted words don’t usually include “strike,” “ceasefire,” and “protest.” Nor, I suspect, would third-graders often be tasked with “disrupting whiteness,” which seems somewhat ambitious and just a tad question-begging, or with imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords.” Yet here we are.

Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them.

A shocking twist, I know,

Ms Gross, who claims to re-shape “big concepts for little people,” is pretty much the kind of creature you’d imagine, and her views on, for instance, Israel and the United States are similarly unsurprising. Specifically,

I believe Israel has no right to exist. 

And,

I believe the United States has no right to exist.

Ms Gross goes on to declare her “unwavering love and care and compassion for children.” Which would doubtless explain her indifference to whether those children can read or have mastered basic arithmetic. Instead, our loving and compassionate educator propagates racial animosity, by invoking the evils of “whiteness,” and rails against a small country in the Middle East, whose influence on the illiteracy of schoolchildren half a world away is, shall we say, somewhat unclear.

Referring to her critics, with a self-satisfied smirk, she adds:

Y’all are the villains. We’ve been trying to end y’all… And we are going to continue to do that. 

By undermining the life chances of other people’s children.

Again, a familiar pattern.

Update:

If you draw attention to our degeneracy, you will be suspended.

I paraphrase, of course. But not, I think, unfairly.




Subscribestar
Share: