Kenin M Spivak on the urge to level down:

During the last 18 months, supercharged by events after George Floyd’s death, the radical Left has… shifted its focus to the abolition of testing and standards, the evisceration of math curricula, and indoctrination in our K-12 schools. The following is a necessarily abridged summary of recent developments…

Under pressure from progressive assertions of test bias, over the last few years, many colleges decided that SAT and ACT testing would be optional. Then, to settle a lawsuit alleging racist disparities, in May 2021, the UC system announced it is ceasing the use of ACT and SAT scores. Other colleges promptly followed the UC’s lead. Without scores, there can be no disparities.

In April 2020, citing “equity” and its goal to restructure and dismantle “systems and institutions that create the dichotomy of beneficiaries and the oppressed and marginalised,” the Oregon Department of Education eliminated grades and proficiency in reading, writing, and math as requirements for graduation…

On September 9, 2020, Education Trust-West, an “advocate for educational justice,” announced its study and toolkit for K-12 math, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In Pathway, Trust-West characterised expecting the right answer, independent practice, teaching in a linear fashion, requiring procedural fluency, and requesting that students show their work, as “white supremacy.” Instead of offering a path for minority students to learn how to do math and come to the correct answer, Pathway instead advocates that schools use numbers to motivate anti-racist discussions of social justice.

On July 14, 2021, the California Department of Education issued a Mathematics Framework based on True-West’s Pathway. Chapter 1 of Framework rejects “natural gifts and talents” and calls for de-emphasising calculus and eliminating classes for gifted children in grades 6-12 to eliminate “inequity.” Chapter 1 specifies that “equity influences all aspects of this document.” The draft Framework directs teachers to use math for political discussions about “marginalised communities” and to move away from focusing on correct methods or answers.

At a time when, despite increases in school funding, almost 80% of black and Hispanic eighth graders have been deemed “not proficient” in maths or reading, it’s unclear how improvements might be made while simultaneously graduating high-school pupils regardless of their performance, or even their attendance, and while shying from the existence of such terribly oppressive things as correct answers.

My daughter’s father called her “princess” yesterday and I had to lecture him… again.

It’s a short video, but quite a lot is implied. Not all of it, I think, intentionally.

Update, via the comments, where Burnsie adds,

Watching that, I can certainly understand why her “daughter’s father” is not her daughter’s mother’s husband.

Well, quite. “We do not use that term in this house,” says our Queen of Indignation and Overreach. It’s a “harmful word,” we’re told. Though I’d imagine rather more harm is being done to said daughter by her having the kind of mother she apparently has.

Also, open thread. Have at it, me hearties.

If what I’ve been saying is true, then you could say, within the white cultural racist imaginary, black bodies are different, black bodies can suffer, black bodies should suffer.

I wonder if Dr Derek Hook, the agitated educator quoted above, the one mentioned here recently, needs to lower his dosage. Or up his dosage. Or to smoke some entirely different kind of bathroom cleaning product. Either way, “whiteness,” or “the white big other of the racist domain,” appears to be pressing on his nerves. When not suggesting, in a bizarrely circuitous and somewhat manic way, that white people, as some collective entity, secretly fantasise about harm befalling random black people, via “damage” and “mutilation,” Dr Hook apparently endorses the idea that “white people should commit suicide as an ethical act,” in order to “castrate whiteness.”

So, no concerning patterns of thought there, obviously.  

And in other educational news.

She’s “challenging a broken system,” you see.

Needless to say, if you poke through the archives, you’ll find countless examples of educators whose racial neuroticism and mental contortions, often with racially sadistic overtones, are quite remarkable. And again, it’s not just that the ideas on display – and very much in fashion – are obnoxious, or contorted, or morally deranged, or a blueprint for ruin; it’s that the kinds of people who find such things titillating or life-consuming, as Dr Hook and his peers evidently do, tend to be… psychologically marginal. Which is to say, the kinds of people you wouldn’t generally want anywhere near your children.

And yet.

We seem to be living in an age of extinction-level stupidity: 

There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.

So says Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union. A union representing 33,000 teachers and associated educational staff.

“Education is political,” says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism,” border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking.”

Needless to say, the UTLA is vehemently opposed to voucher systems that would allow parents to spare their children a stay in what are not so much schools as activism farms. Where Ms Myart-Cruz and her “babies” can prioritise “fighting for… social justice.”

“We’re re-envisioning what the future of public schools will look like,” says she. 

Via Darleen. 

Or, She Works With Children.

Whiteness…. is hostile, it is violent… it is annihilating… That is something we always need to be mindful of as white people.

A reminder that woke anti-white woo doesn’t have to be convincing or coherent, just signalled often, regardless.  

Note the implication that “whiteness,” being white, equals racism and is therefore by default a thing to be discussed in terms of pathology, a thing to be cured. “Colour-blindness” – i.e., not being weirdly fixated by race – is, it turns out, deeply problematic, and must give way to deconstructing “the whiteness=greatness fallacy in white psyches.” Which is what “white psyches” are all about, you see.

This self-confessed “white lady,” Natasha Stovall, is a child psychologist, a stater of pronouns, and an avowed “anti-racist,” which is to say, a seeker of woke status. And hence the racism, of course.

Dr Stovall “specialises in warmth and empathy.” Her rates are between $120-$250 per hour. In case you were tempted. 

Update, via the comments:

Dr Stovall tells us that she is terribly progressive and a child of progressive parents – presumably, the Less Bad White People – and is therefore “part of the solution.” Though one can’t help wondering if the phantom bigotries she invokes and then casually ascribes to others, seemingly based on their pigmentation, may have more to do with her own racial neuroticism – what with her being so terribly progressive and a child of progressive parents.

Commenter sH2 asks, “What the hell is ‘psychic energy’?” – a term, one of several, deployed as if self-evident. Alas, with all of the nebulous rambling and unfinished thoughts – all the y’knows, likes, and kind-ofs – it’s hard to be sure. Beyond the claim that this energy is a thing being “drained” by “whiteness,” a malevolent phenomenon, and which in turn is like a “ghost.” Or something.

Readers who watch Dr Stovall speak, in her area of alleged expertise, may not be given an impression of mental clarity, or of ideas that have been thought through and subjected to stress, even of a routine kind. It seems we must make do with a series of disjointed pronouncements surrounded by rhetorical gas. Such that, were Dr Stovall to sit there chanting “Bad Whitey” over and over again, the dogmatism and idiocy might be slightly more obvious, but the informational content would remain much the same.