Ramona Bessinger is the Providence, Rhode Island, middle school teacher who blew the whistle on July 13, 2021, in a post at Legal Insurrection on pernicious and destructive implementation of a new race-oriented curriculum, I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School:
This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before….
The Providence Teachers Union president, while disagreeing about CRT being taught, backed up Bessinger on the removal of great books from the classrooms, discarding Holocaust education. and the use of racially-segregated teacher affinity groups, Providence Teachers Union Confirms Affinity Group Segregation, Historical Books Destroyed, Holocaust Education Ended:
“So there’s people of color in one group and white folks in another group…. both the people of color and our teachers of color and our white teachers have said that they’re uncomfortable with it … some people feel like this is further segregationist and feel like it’s more divisive than helpful.”
Bessinger’s story has spread nationally and locally, including in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, FoxNews.com, Breitbart, The Jewish Voice, The John DePetro Show, The Matt Allen Show, In The Dugout, Fox and Friends, Fox News America’s Newsroom, Fox Business, and probably others I haven’t picked up on.
Add to the list the Outsiders show on Sky News Australia, hosted by Rowan Dean. (You may remember him from this 2019 post.)
Here is the Sky News write up, US education curriculum sees a ‘complete takeover’ by ‘very scary’ leftist narrative
US middle school English teacher Ramona Bessinger says the past year in education has seen a “complete takeover” of the curriculum’s literary canon by books promoting a “narrative of oppressed versus the oppressor”.“What I noticed first of all, what we all noticed was that … our vetted historical texts, our vetted literary texts, novels – all of the books that are in the literary canon were systematically, one classroom at a time, removed and put into recycling bins,” Ms Bessinger said.“That was the most alarming part of all this curriculum rollout.“Then all of a sudden boxloads of pamphlet-style books were brought into my classroom and my colleagues’ classroom.“As I read through the books and became more familiar with them, one after another had the same narrative and that was the narrative of the oppressed versus the oppressor.“It was always the same ‘white people as the villain’ and people of colour ‘victims of European descent’ – and this inaccurate picture of American history.“Twenty-two years I’ve been teaching a very comprehensive literary tradition, including African-American authors, the bad parts of American history and quite frankly all the wonderful parts of American history.“And now it was all gone and replaced with this narrative of oppressed versus oppressor – very sad, very scary.”
Here’s the full 10-minute segment, with this money quote:
I’m very concerned. And that is why I’m speaking out because to not speak out, the alternative scares me more. Because what I’m seeing and this may sound alarming, but what I’m seeing is that children are being weaponized, and weaponized against and in a divisive way. So children are being, they’re being led to believe, if you tell a child something in the classroom, they will believe it, it’s why we don’t teach our political preferences to students. It is important not to teach that sort of dogma, you know you present all points of view. And so my fear is that children are becoming sort of political weapons, political pawns that eventually left to this sort of narrative being told to them, taught to them year after year after year. Well, it’s going to feed the sort of anger and the racial division that is already coming to a boiling point and it’s going to make us all quite frankly, very unsafe.
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