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.
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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