Book Review: School of Woke by Kenny Xu
How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them
Legal Insurrection readers are likely to remember Kenny Xu, a true investigative journalist who has covered the Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard case since its inception.
We also reviewed his excellent book, An Inconvenient Minority : The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy, which was published in July, 2021.
Xu has just published a new work focused the current status in the battle against social justice activism contaminating the American education system: School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them.
I want minority kids to achieve. The reason they aren’t is not because of their innate intelligence, but because of the corrupt culture of mediocrity pervading our school system. CRT’s teaching of victimhood makes it worse.
SCHOOL OF WOKE is out today.https://t.co/mp4HmioqpN
— Kenny Xu (@kennymxu) August 1, 2023
School of Woke takes an engrossing and engaging look at how Critical Race Theory (CRT) is damaging the quality of education in public schools. Using his incisive mixture of personal experience and in-depth research, Xu offers a clear explanation of the origins of CRT back to elite graduate schools in the 1970s, demonstrating how the ideology was allowed to seep in and contaminate the education system through a combination of peer pressure, credentialing, and culling those who challenged the racialist policies.
Xu recounts in detail, and with great passion, the battles taking place in Loudoun and Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, Santa Barbara High School in California, as well as other institutions. He provides insight into the business model behind the diversity consulting industrial complex and helps quantify the staggering amount of money that is directed toward the diversity industry.
Consider this passage of School of Woke that describes the funding of a Santa Barbara nonprofit organization called AHA! (Attitudes, Harmony, and Achievement). AHA! was started by the social psychologist and astrologer Jennifer Freed. It employed more than twenty adult “peace builders” who foster “essential connections between social groups.”
Between the period of 2015 and 2019, SB Unified contributed $30,000 per year to AHA!’s Peace Builder program— which doesn’t seem like a lot, but what Laura Capps shockingly admitted in that June 11, 2019, board meeting was that the district’s $30,000 per year grant leveraged a further $350,000 per year private donation to AHA! for its services to the school district.
“This evaluation is taxpayer money, but be mindful of the fact that it does leverage private donations that AHA! does bring in, and I hopefully don’t want to lose that,” Capps said. This means that AHA!’s provision of services to SB Unified is the selling point to a particular private donor or series of donors who contributed more than than $300,000 to enable the organization to work within the school system.
What’s extraordinary is that Capps knew that and used that as a reason to go easy on AHA!, even as the school district was scheduled to pull $30,000 in funding based on a lack of evidence of its efficacy with children. This meant that she, a school board member, was openly mixing her role as a financial steward of SB Unified with her implied role as booster for AHA! and its founder, Jennifer Freed.
As with Xu’s previous book, School of Woke is powerfully and passionately written. I give it 5 stars out of 5 and strongly recommend all who have an interest in the success of the American education system read it and get involved on the local level.
I wish Xu tons of success in his new efforts to demolish DEI at the nation’s medical schools. I think I know what the next book topic will be and look forward to reading it.
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Comments
“I want minority kids to achieve. The reason they aren’t is not because of their innate intelligence, but because of the corrupt culture of mediocrity pervading our school system. CRT’s teaching of victimhood makes it worse.”
Victimhood is grasped at because they don’t do as well. It’s the explanation in place of a more accurate explanation.
There’s a huge IQ overlap, and nobody in ordinary life has any idea who’s smarter and who isn’t anyway. It’s not something you try to keep track of.
But if you give up because “the oppressors will hold you back” then you really don’t do well.
Keep average IQ difference in mind though. It’s not a small difference, and it means that the remedy is not only cleaning up the victimhood rhetoric, but in fostering what actually matters, namely good character. That requires no specific IQ at all, and everybody can do it. If you concentrate only on schools, you’ll miss the opportunity because it won’t fix the IQ difference. Good character does.
There are whites with lower IQs that blacks and those whites do fine or not depending on their character.
Forrest Gump wasn’t a movie about stupidity but a movie about good character. Watch it again.
“There’s a huge IQ overlap, and nobody in ordinary life has any idea who’s smarter and who isn’t”
I disagree.
https.://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.com/2012/04/sat-bell-curve.html
Assignment: Calculate how many centuries it will take to produce a black Einstein
Well, I definitely need to read this, living in Fairfax County. I assume he discusses the admission policy at TJ (Thomas Jefferson High for Science and Technology) which, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, was altered, substantially lowering the number of Asian American students admitted.
Overall Loudoun County, our neighbor to the north, has received more press, but Fairfax County’s liberal school board has been wreaking havoc on the schools for years, doubtlessly aided and abetted by ignorant voters like me who were clueless about the amount of damage they could inflict. Now, unfortunately, we must reap the consequences of their control. Average SAT scores in FCPS dropped 27 points from 2018 to 2022. Before you say “But, Covid…” during that same period the average Virginia SAT score INCREASED by 14 points.
Right now, with no children or grandchildren in school, I am knocking on doors, canvassing for our upcoming local and statewide elections this November. We’re trying so hard to get voices of sanity elected to the school board. It’s truly a struggle. Today I spoke to a resident who said he and his wife are FCPS teachers, have always voted Democratic, but this year are voting Republican because of schools.
I encourage all of you, get out there and volunteer. Local elections are so important. So many fewer voters participate in these elections. Voter turnout can make all the difference in the outcome.
Right now the entire school system in a multitude of states is poisoned and the children are poisoned as well.
How do/can these children unlearn what they’ve been taught by authorities for whom they must show greater respect than their parents?
I see no choice except to end our K-12 system.
The parents are the first teachers. And the most important ones. I don’t believe in indoctrination by anyone, parents or teachers. If we have raised our children well, they will choose which path to follow. I would rather have a child who chose liberalism than felt I had forced conservative philosophy on them.
But we must be sure children are choosing their ideological path based on their personal beliefs and not upon those imposed in the schools.
CRT is costly and makes everything worse, but what happens, when after its annihilation, the POC achievement gap remains huge? It will! I cannot agree with the author’s premise. He seems to be appealing to Caucasians’ fanciful dream of equal potential in order to gain their support to help his own race.. Very clever