Academics Suffer After Minnesota School System Adopts Social Justice Curriculum
“sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity”
Social justice activism is usually associated with higher education. We have documented the campus antics of social justice warriors countless times. But what would happen if you started training children from grades K to 12 to become SJWs? One school system in Minnesota is doing just that, and the results are not good.
Katherine Kersten reports at the Weekly Standard:
Inside a Public School Social Justice Factory
For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.
The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”
“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”
The training starts in Kindergarten but reaches its peak in high school. Kersten notes:
The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English course—required of all 10th-graders—that centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of “Colonization,” “Immigration” and “Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.”
One student characterized the course this way on the “Rate My Teachers” website: “This class should be renamed . . . ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’”
Kersten goes on to describe a father who pulled his child out of Edina schools because he escaped from Nicaragua when he was a child and came to America to be free from Marxist propaganda.
Kersten also points to statistics which show declining reading and math scores.
Read her entire report here.
The featured image of this post is from a real ABC book used in the schools titled “A is for Activist” which features pages like “F is for Feminism” and “T is for Trans.”
Last fall, a conservative think tank based in Minnesota called Center of the American Experiment began sounding the alarm about what was happening in Edina schools. Tom Mason wrote:
A Curriculum of Political Indoctrination in Edina’s Public Schools
An investigation by writer Katherine Kersten released today exposes systematic political indoctrination of students in Edina public schools, beginning as early as kindergarten, all while the district’s long time reputation for academic excellence experiences a notable decline…
American Experiment President John Hinderaker first exposed Edina’s left-wing classroom activism in a series of posts on the Center’s website earlier this year. He cited how 80 Edina High School teachers posted what amounted to a left-wing political manifesto following the election of Donald Trump as president. His initial post prompted an outpouring from parents, students and even some Edina teachers, who condemned other elements of extreme partisanship. They described how:
– A teacher tearfully told a classroom of 100 students that “the election was rigged.”
– Another teacher announced to a class that “Trump winning was worse than 9/11 and the Columbine shooting.”
– Students gathered in the high school commons on election day chanting “F*** Trump,” while teachers watched on, doing nothing.
A PDF version of the article can be read entirely here, starting on page 26.
This is a public school. People need to know this is happening because if nothing changes, in a decade or less, this will be the norm, not the exception at other public schools in America.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
“…declining reading and math scores.”
To the SJW/Marxist/Democrats, that indicates success. Their program of cultural destruction is working. Trump is kryptonite to an SJW so they use these students by teaching hate.
Property values for houses will fall in Edina as many people buy houses where the school districts are good. The Edina voted for this.
Sounds like what Californian’s do when they move to a new place.
Watch parents pull their kids from this school.
The only positive thing in four years is an increase of 0.9% for black students’ reading proficiency test scores.
The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. There’s been a single positive point of data: Black students’ reading scores—all ages, all grades—have slightly increased, from 45.5 percent proficiency in 2014 to 46.4 percent proficiency in 2017.
Less than half of them still can’t read proficiently.
But other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017.
There is so much wrong in Edina… Read the whole thing like Mike LaChance recommends.
Nobody can escape the insanity
The training session was entitled “Edina School DIstrict Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.
It’s time we started calling it by a better name. I vote for Sociopathic Justice.
In other places if the drivers didn’t do this .. they would be ordered to re-education camps.
And some people still wonder why I, and others, have given up on the entire American “education” system…
The slogan for Mn. is or was “Land of ten thousand Lakes”. Then it became “land of ten thousand social programs”. But this? Maybe “land of ten thousand Leninists”? Give them a child for 8 years and – well you know.
Still and again, anytime ‘justice’ is modified by an adjective, it always means ‘hate whitey and get revenge.’ Always.
The next stop is always sh!thole-ville. Always.
Witness Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles, et al.
Have my tax dollars been defunded from these diversiversity marxist indoctrination camps former known as ‘public schools?’
A friend of mine in marketing likes to joke that in advertising, any adjective means “not”.
Why not resist “public” education outright? Why did we let the socialization of our children’s eduction become a “problem” to be solved by the government.
We are to blame and we can fix the problem by stopping public education all together. No more public schools no more taxes to pay for those schools.
I’m down with this, we need to become more pro-active in taking our culture back.
“A teacher tearfully told a classroom of 100 students that ‘the election was rigged,’”
But despite that Trump won,
“Go woke, go broke” applies to schools too, it seems.
Who knew?
(A: All of us)
I can probably guess the answer to this, but where is the state Derpartment of Education in all of this and at what point do they get involved?
when they institute this statewide in order to insure no kid will be educated and teach the process doe applying for ebt cards.
https://mn.gov/dhs/people-we-serve/adults/economic-assistance/food-nutrition/programs-and-services/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program.jsp
didn’t Hilary join snapchat ?
before clicking link make sure you have an empty stomach or you will puke
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/10/hillary-clinton-millennial-voters-iowa-caucus#img-1
The Dept. of Eduction is THE problem. When people see a chance for power they consolidate it and then wield it. If we want this to stop then get all government dollars state and most importantly federal dollars OUT of education. We let this happen and we can stop it, by eradicating the mentality that education is SO important we need to the government to fund it.
That’s kind of my point. This is not just the school to blame, this change had to be approved by the state DOE.
As a society, we have this strange behavior of creating these government agencies, the Dept of Education, the Dept of Energy, the EPA, the alphabet soup to Solve Problems, and then we ignore them. This has baffled me forever, aren’t people the slightest bit interested in whether or not any of these agencies are effective?
We spent $68 Billion in on the Department of Education in 2016, and a like sum year, after year. Just what are we getting in return? Since its inception, our rankings in the developed world has dropped year after year.
I submit (without doing the math) that there is a negative correlation between the amount of money spent on the Department of Education, and the academic performance of our students in these government schools.
This needs to end now.
I read the original article yesterday AND spent some time reading the Edina Antifa twitter feed. Yikes.
Sadly, despite the “results” achieved, I think we’re actually going to get MORE of this. The teacher pipeline which is our universities’ schools of education is pumping out increasingly programmed young teachers. Anyone spent time with any young teachers lately? They are SOCIAL WORKERS, not teachers. And hard leftist social workers at that.
I think the only solution is school choice. Let the dollars follow the child. Parents who are committed to their students will find the best options for THEM. Only if they have to chase the dollars that fund their salaries will the public school bureaucrats ever change.
That still doesn’t solve the problem of training future insurrectionists. It takes far less then 10% of a total population to foment a successful rebellion. Look what just ONE Obama is capable of…
Actually, yes it does. Non-traditional education options attract different sorts of teachers, i.e., those who have gone the traditional path but want out and those whose path to the classroom does NOT go through a wingnut “school of education.”
For example, my daughter is homeschooled. Because she is now in high school, we use a combination of “at home” and online, outsourced options. Her math classes are taught by Ph.D.s who have spent very little to no time in traditional high school classrooms, her Latin teacher has a Masters in the Classics and has taught only in Classical schools, her Russian tutor has never taught in a brick-and-mortar school, and my background is as an attorney. That’s just the picture of one little homeschool, but if we give parents their tax dollars back, those dollars will help fuel the growth of these kind of options, and others.
You have done your children a great service by homeschooling.
my kids went to private school – which my wife and i had a hard time paying for – to avoid this kind of stuff.
at least the kids got taught the basics of how to learn and my kids are educated.
The solution is to remove government dollars from education … ALL government dollars. Let parents do what is best for their children as they see fit. Even one government dollar has a corrupting influence. Get government completely out of eduction … COMPLETELY.
While they have a good grasp on Universities and many of the students there, the SJWs are realizing the need to start their ideological programming exercises earlier to expand their base.
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Vladimir Lenin
Get them young, get them indoctrinated, get them to vote for progressive policies and they have achieved their goals – having the children be able to read, write and think is absolutely secondary to their quest for new progs ready to parrot the party line.
My wife graduated from Edina High back in 1970 (If I may brag, she graduated in the top 1%). It was great then and was great until just a few years ago. But the thing to remember is this: whenever the Left takes over an institution, they make it political. Progressive politics becomes the priority rather than the original mission, in this case education. And so they destroy the institution, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They are well on their way to destroying academia / education and entertainment and they have now started on science. It is not a pretty picture.
Everything the government touches becomes politicized … EVERYTHING. Do we really think that “education” that is available to all to matter their income status is really a good idea now.
I don’t and never will. God will provide … not the state.
“Ignorance is strength”
Orwell should have gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature….