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Nuts.
And if you say, "this is mainly a problem of the blue cities" -- well, I don't accept "just move to
the reservationthe suburb bro" as a cost-less mitigation. "Just give up on your ability to hold on to the central nodes and your ability to coordinate easily." The cities becoming less habitable for white, family-oriented, traditional families is a huge defeat.I'm not playing this game. Sure, you can trace the roots of any political or intellectual movement back hundreds of years or even further. But that's not what anyone is talking about when they mean "woke". I've been in enough online discussions to recognize that this is just an entree to claiming that Marbury v. Madison / The 14th Amendment / Women's Suffrage / The Progressive Era / The New Deal / The Civil Rights Act / any number of other things is the moment the true spirit of the founding was lost and America started to go to hell in a handbasket, but I'm not buying it, not least of which because most of the people complaining about wokeness aren't buying it either. Not least of which because a colorblind society a la Dr. King was anathama to a large enough segment of the population as to be a progressive idea for the time but is the essence of anti-woke ideology today.
I've been hearing complaints about the alleged intrusion of wokeness into the elementary school curriculum for years, but there's been a paucity of concrete evidence. It's never anything that anyone's kids are bringing home, but what they heard is going on at a school district that's close enough to seem familiar but not so close that there's a good chance of actually knowing anyone whose kids go there. I'd expect that in this era of cell phone cameras and social media that the people who are outraged over this would have no problem coming up with examples of worksheets, reading materials, etc. that is supposedly indoctrinating our children, but somehow the only things I've ever seen produced are copypasta obtained from Google Images.
As to why kids aren't reading the classics of American literature anymore, my cousin, an elementary school teacher, gave me the answer, and it's more boring than some communist plot to make every story about black people. Basically, the so-called "curriculum experts" who decide these things came to the conclusion that the reading material needed to be specially tailored so that conformed to the precise reading level that was expected of the children and contained all the necessary vocabulary words but not any that were too hard. The result was that none of the existing children's literature filled all of the specific requirements, so they essentially had to commission a lot of stuff that did.
Anyway, this isn't a new thing. I was in elementary school in the early 1990s, and while we read some of these books, it was always apart from the standard curriculum. In any event, most of the stuff (like Charlotte's Web, for instance) involved all animal characters, so I'm not sure what was supposed to have especially inspired me as a young white boy. the stuff we actually read from the provided textbooks had no shortage of multicultural influence, so I'm not going to chalk up the mere existence of stories that center around black characters and traditions to some woke mind-virus.
If you're going to jettison statistics in favor of vibes, you also have to consider how much the narrative contributes to those vibes. When I was writing the entry on the South Side for my Pittsburgh series, I discussed the increased perception that the South Side was unsafe, a perception that wasn't really supported by the statistics. At first, I thought that maybe the perception was being influenced by high-profile shootings that made the news. But I was surprised to find a similar number of high-profile shootings in 2014 as in 2022. The difference was that in 2014, there was no narrative about how the South Side was becoming increasingly unsafe in the wake of a post-pandemic crime wave. With the overall crime rate having gone down the previous few years, there was no reason to believe that anything was out of the ordinary, so the shootings were reported on, chalked up to bad dudes hanging around nuisance bars after-hours, and quickly forgotten about.
In 2021 and 2022, after a summer of protests, rising crime rates, and being told that police were at the end of their rope, a similar number of instances caused the widespread perception that the South Side was unsafe, at least late at night on weekends, and it accordingly prompted various police strike forces and visits from the mayor. Never mind that the crime rate in the neighborhood was roughly similar to 2014, including the number of shootings that made the news. Now it was dangerous when it wasn't before. Are people really responding to increased risk of crime victimization, or to a conservative narrative that says woke policies are sending our cities to hell in a handbasket?
Just out of curiosity, I checked the demographics of Harvard. The class of 2010 is roughly similar to the class of 2023. The biggest gains for blacks in university admissions overall seemed to happen in the 1980s. But this is also concurrent with the biggest gains made by Asians. Not only did this change happen in the pre-woke era, it happened at a time when blacks made huge gains in closing the high school graduation rate gap. It's no surprise that the percentage of blacks in a certain college will increase at a time when the college-eligible black population is also increasing.
Fundamentally? I can't speak to any changes that have happened since I was there in the early 2000s, but I'd bet they're nothing compared to the changes made in the 1960s, prior to which men couldn't even get into women's dorms and people had to sign in and out, or since the 1940s, when you add to that the fact that the overall college population was 75% male, and all-girl's schools were much more prominent than they are today, meaning that if you went to a big college like Ohio State or Notre Dame, you probably weren't dating any fellow students.
Hispanics were 5% of the US population in 1970, 6% in 1980, 8% in 1990, 12.5% in 2000, 16% in 2010, and 19% in 2020. The demographics seem to be changing at about the same clip as they have for decades. As an aside, this is why people who are anti-immigration are often accused of being racist. the official explanations range between worrying about them taking American jobs (if you assume they work), and leeching off of the welfare state (assuming they don't work), which at least are credible economic concerns. But here you make it sound like the real concern is demographic, which is as much as most Trump critics suspect.
If this really happened then Mr. Magire was a fool to not take the statement to an attorney. If Google was actually using minority hiring quotas then they would have settled for a pretty penny to avoid discovery and the attendant publicity. Even the all-in DEI grifter employment law firms around here are quick to warn that DEI is not affirmative action and that private companies need to focus their efforts on recruiting and "fostering an inclusive atmosphere" and steer clear of anything that could be construed as a Title VII violation. I'd be surprised if a company that can afford the kind of attorneys Google can would be this stupid about the whole thing. And who are these unqualified black senior executives I keep hearing so much about?
School systems encouraging this kind of trans-affirmation or whatever you want to call it isn't so much a symptom of woke ideology as it is of administrators who are spineless when it comes to discipline. I hear it from high school teachers and parents in several districts that administrators are loathe to discipline all but the most troublesome students, because the parents all think their own kids are angels and can't be inconvenienced by after-school detentions or suspension. The teachers are basically told to stand down; they can send the kid to the principal, but he just comes back without punishment. The result is that bullying is rampant, and the bullied kids end up going trans because it at least gives them leverage over the teacher that they didn't have before. And this isn't happening in highly-rated PMC school districts in the suburbs; it may be happening in urban areas, but the stories I'm hearing come from rural parts of the rust belt where the parents in question aren't voting for Kamala Harris.
I know you put a lot more effort into the rest of your post, but..
Reading this paragraph knowing that you have been here for awhile is something else! I have questions. What do you think of Critical Theory and do you believe it has impacted K-12 curriculum in a significant way?
Second question, what do you think of this toolkit for teachers and would you accept it as evidence for the kind of "woke" people are talking about? There is an FAQ page so you don't have to download the materials. The first 'stride' has 30 mentions of 'praxis' and 41 mentions of 'critical'.
If you are interested in seeing what kind of crack pot lunatics contributed to this, you can find them in this PDF. In case you don't want to check that, then it is meant to demonstrate that this was developed, propagated, and adopted by real educators-- in addition to goof balls.
Equitable Math is not applied in every school across the country. It is (or was) applied in deep blue urban cities such as Seattle. Critical Theory has impacted K-12 curriculums across the country in a major way. As you've identified, it enters other areas of K-12 like tracking or student discipline.
Parents hate it, teachers hate it, yet the trend toward more relaxed discipline just kept growing. I guess a policy like minimize suspensions at great cost could theoretically be implemented at the behest the 5% of parents with troublesome kids. They may have gained outsized influence on discipline policy at schools in the last 20 years. I'm not sure how. They didn't seem to have that large of an influence 20 years ago. Maybe such policies are justified with commonly accepted ideas like equity which are related to other ideas in education. I'm open to other theories.
Education has to be one of the most difficult positions to argue against the pervasiveness of woke. Educators are some of the bluest of the blue. Their counterparts in academia are sometimes so blue they're red. Your average teacher in South Carolina is a normal person who wants to learn kids and probably doesn't want to turn them gay. Still, much of school is indoctrination. The indoctrination many kids get today is more woke than it was in 1990. Usually not to excess, depending on tolerance, due to the normalness of average teachers. Directionally, without a doubt.
I'm not a fan of it personally, but I haven't seen evidence that it has affected the curriculum of the average school in any significant way. I've heard a lot of accusations that it has, but there's a difference between news reports and actual substance to the allegations. I don't doubt that critical theory is part of school curriculum somewhere, but I also don't doubt that there's some district or classroom that's teaching a far-right version of American History. The question is whether this is something the average student in the average suburban district is being taught, and while I've heard plenty of rumors, none of those have been substantiated with any evidence. Pulling something off the internet may be evidence that it exists, but it isn't evidence that it exists where people say it does, let alone that it's the dominant method of instruction.
Having downloaded some of the modules and looked at the FAQ, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It uses a lot of cringeworthy language to explain how math instruction is secretly racist, but when you drill down to the core of what it's saying and, more importantly, what it's actually recommending, there isn't really anything objectionable in it. The idea that different students may benefit from different instruction styles isn't exactly a new idea, and the changes they're proposing aren't even that substantive. It reminds me of the whole Ebonics debate from 30 years ago. The media made it sound like students were going to be instructed in jive talk and given English tests based on different grammar, when the reality was that they wanted to do additional instruction relating formal English concepts to the vernacular the kids were already speaking. If what the documents are recommending was quietly slipped into the curriculum without all the woke verbiage few people would even notice, let alone care.
For example, you don't consider this image to be A) objectionable to teach to children B) reasonably deduced to have derived from the Critical Theory framework? If those are the definitions of bad stuffs, because you made your teaching unit have to define 'white supremacy', welp, you probably shouldn't be sanctioned by the state.
The Oregon Department of Education distributed this to math teachers as an opt-in program to use. To my recollection.
Couched in language and vernaculur, and actual concepts, of a Critical Theory framework. You're really stuck on how the media reports on things. The media is dishonest all the time. I believe it would be possible to make teaching doctrines without teaching kids bad ideas, or ideas derived from bad ideas, such as those in the image.
I bet in 1990 the "give everyone extra attention" doctrine wouldn't be couched in such language or concepts. Thus, this is one piece of evidence, for one state, that teaching became more 'woke' in some (at least) marginal respect, no? Saying it's not as bad as it looks is not the same as saying it's not a real thing. We should limit the number of indoctrinations into, what I consider, goop.
To do so, I ask* the state not sanction such ideas be taught or be near the indoctrination pathways. At least not those funded by tax dollars. This is a reasonable position. It is not media hysterics. If you don't consider this inserting a certain political valence into education, then what does that look like to you? "Children must don their Ushankas and praise Stalin" on pg. 3?
*Again, apologies for derailing.
I would consider that both objectionable to teach to children and derived from a critical race theory framework. That's irrelevant, though, because what you linked to wasn't intended to be taught to children. Your screenshot was part of an explanatory note at the very beginning of the first module explaining that certain terms in the materials would be italicized in reference to concepts put forth in another publication. It wasn't even explained in detail, and it certainly wasn't intended as a handout or something to be taught to middle school kids as part of the curriculum.
Because this is how most people hear about this stuff. Very little of what is reported to me on this comes from an actual student, parent, or teacher. It comes from people with no connection to the education system responding to media reports and to a lesser extent, rumors based on media reports. Hence the inability to produce any classroom materials as evidence supporting their assertions. If there weren't any media coverage about CRT in schools it's unlikely that very many complaints would arise from people who discovered it organically, given how unobjectionable most of these proposals are once you strip away all the woke bullshit.
The entire point of my post is that, for all the discussion of various woke concepts, precious little of it has made it into actual policy. The fact that people are citing to documents that are long on bullshit and short on actual substance is only further evidence of that. If I really had to I could probably justify the entire Trump policy platform using woke CRT language, but it wouldn't really say anything about the underlying policies. All the use of this excess verbiage does is provide evidence of the thought-process of the people writing the documents, but I'm not arguing that there aren't important people who think this way; I'm arguing that this kind of thought hasn't been pervasive enough to result in objectionable policies.
No, it's not considered as a handout to children. It's a teacher's module created for teachers to learn to instruct on maths.
What am I missing here? White supremacy is a central focus of this introductory module. That's why it is defined and given ample space. Pages 4-7, 8-12, etc. It's mentioned 54 times. This is explicit in its aims.
Some of it is mild injection of ideas couched in the gobblygook. Which I may have accepted with an eye roll if it existed by itself. Other parts I find insidious. I will vehemently disagree that children (or educators) should be taught to model the world in such a manner. I don't think it's necessary or good. It's ideological.
I will be school shopping soon! But have not personally been in one in awhile. Kids, I know. Parents, I know. Teachers, I know. I have been friends with a liberal teacher in a city school for well over a decade until she left the profession in 2023. She is a kind and thoughtful person. She is a true blue believer. I could never envision her with intent to maliciously implant an ideology in children. I also can't imagine she was very careful around sharing ideas she feels are justified by: "reality has a liberal bias", "just being a good person", or that white people X. I can easily imagine her teaching Equitable Math's program in 2018.
My impression, rather than a denial, is that much of this is the flavor of public education propaganda. Celebrate Maya Angelou instead of George Washington. To escape that one needs to spend a lot of money on private school. In my city, at least. There are still good public schools. I know kids attending them. To the extent these schools have a Woke Mind Virus it's fairly mild. What's easier and less expensive is to choose to raise smart children that can identify bullshit. Not everyone is blessed enough to raise such children.
You make a judgment call that all the not-math noise and concepts in my chosen example is unimportant, but I think it's very important. If we replaced the "white supremacy" concepts and definitions with a white supremacy one-- the '14 words', 88, etc -- would you so readily wave off "excess verbiage"? I wouldn't!
A training module for teachers created and endorsed by a number of educators, partnered with numerous California systems, and distributed in Oregon. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive review that I can to the measure the impact of CRT and woke-adjacent concepts in public education. I briefly looked, but mostly found research looking at state-governments legislating away CRT stuff. Education is local, and your experience in NYC will be different than mine in Topeka.
I was hoping that picking, what I consider, an egregious example of teaching materials (err, instructor materials), in use in more than one place would help work out the details, but I think we fundamentally have different tolerance for this type of propaganda. The creators of this programming have very clear ideas of what a child's indoctrination should be.
The "excess verbiage" in our example could have been any number of concepts-- relevant to education or otherwise-- but it's not. It is what it is. Is it everywhere? No, thankfully. However, related ideas contained within it became fairly common in other aspects of life and industry. What am I to surmise?
I believe if you look with regards to education you'll find a number of objectionable curriculum and policy changes in major school districts. They may or may not have an effect on your state and local systems and curriculums. I'm of the mind that the years of 2010-2022 we saw major cultural changes in American society. It's why I'm here. Many cases of policy changes in industry, academia, and K-12 education have been brought to this very forums. I do not believe education was immune to the changes.
I think you're missing my point here. You can talk about the language used in the document, but I conceded in my initial post that people being forced to sit through bullshit training conducted by charlatans was one of the consequences of wokeness. What is missing is evidence that this nonsense results in any tangible differences to a significant number of ordinary people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't get the impression that you came across this publication because your 7th grader brought home math homework that you found highly suspect and were directed to the PDF by school administration. Which is why I brought up the fact that no one I know IRL who is complaining about this can produce any worksheets, or textbooks, or anything like that that would convince a reasonable person that this is a widespread phenomenon. Instead all I see are media reports, or rumors, or material discovered online by people who were actively looking for it.
Well, that's my point. If the change is as big as you suggest, I shouldn't have to look for it. It should be obvious. I know a lot of parents and quite a few teachers, but I've yet to hear any of them talk about any specific instruction in their schools. It's always happening somewhere else. I don't doubt that some teachers in some places are teaching woke material, but if this were widespread I should be able to throw a dart at the map and find plenty of examples locally. But it's always someplace else.
N=1
I pulled my kid out of school when the principal retired and they replaced him with an Equity Officer. My kid was assigned The Hate U Give as the sole reading assignment in sophomore English for the first semester and The Feminist Manifesto for second semester. They had a unit in P.E. on the gender pay gap on the weak hook of pay discrepancy for the WNBA. After we started homeschooling, they introduced a Kendi-approved Antiracism course for seniors.
Ultraviolet suburb of a blue city, so I don’t claim that this is typical, buy it is very real for folks in one-party strongholds.
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