Sunday, October 8, 2017

Political Indoctrination in Suburban Schools

Nestled in the calm suburban community of Edina, Minnesota, the Edina school system has been taken over by a band of cultural revolutionaries. They have set about to ensure that children learn nothing but politically correct racial diversity politics.

Katherine Kersten has the story. It has been going on for years. Why the silence of the parents whose children’s lives are being destroyed? Why the failure to have the school administrators fired?

We are especially interested in the price that this is exacting on the children. How can we measure such a manifest failure to educate children? Dare we call it systematic child abuse?

Kersten offers some statistics:

One in five Edina High School students can’t read at grade level and one in three can’t do grade-level math. These test results dropped EHS’s ranking among Minnesota high schools from 5th to 29th in reading proficiency, and from 10th to 40th in math proficiency between 2014 and 2017. Across the district, about 30 percent of kids are not “on track for success” in reading, and the same is true for math.

What is the program that the school administrators are imposing on children?

In place of academic excellence for all, the district’s primary mission is now to ensure that students think correctly on social and political issues — most importantly, on race and “white privilege.”

District leaders enshrined this new mission in EPS’s “All for All” strategic plan, adopted in 2013. The plan mandates that, going forward, the EPS must view “all teaching and learning experiences” through the “lens of racial equity.”

One suspects that this has something to do with our last president, a man who managed to divided the nation by race and to set the races against each other:

For example, it dictates that, from now on, the district will hire “racially conscious teachers and administrators.” It also declares that students must “acquire an awareness of their own cultural identity and value racial, cultural and ethnic diversities.”

Racial consciousness is a primary requirement for all new hires. If you were wondering why Johnny and Janey can no longer think, perhaps one reason is that school systems, and probably even universities, are hiring semi-literate fools whose primary qualification is having the right opinion about race:

Katie Mahoney, Highlands’ “racially conscious” principal, was hired in 2016. This fall, she announced that the school’s “challenges” for 2017-18 are to teach children “how to embrace ancestry, genetic code and melanin,” and to how “to be changemakers.”

Work on the first goal began last year with the “Melanin Project.” The school’s youngest students (K-2) traced their hands, colored them with their skin color, and made a poster reading “Stop thinking your skin color is better than everyone elses [sic]. Everyone is Special!”

Principal Mahoney is running an indoctrination mill, one that would be worthy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution:

But Mahoney’s political agenda seems much broader. For example, on the school’s “Wonder” blog, she has promoted an A-B-C book for young children entitled “A is for Activist.” The book features texts like the following: “Are you an Activist?” “C is for ... Creative Counter to Corporate vultures,” “F is for Feminist,” “T is for Trans,” and “X is” for “Malcolm X.”

The result:

Unfortunately, from 2015-17, the reading proficiency of Cornelia’s students who are black, Hispanic, and of two or more races dropped from 58 percent to 34 percent on the state’s MCA-III tests.

Things are no better in high school:

At Edina High School, racial identity politics are the leading edge of an agenda that includes an angry, male-bashing feminism and left-wing calls to activism in classrooms, school publications and school assemblies. On the “Rate My Professor” website, one disenchanted student said of the school’s required 10th-grade English course: “[This] class should be renamed ... ‘Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are.’

Today, Edina students are being deprived of their right to a solid education by teachers and administrators who substitute indoctrination and intimidation for effective instruction. It’s time for Edina’s citizens to demand that changes.

It is well past time for parents to demand changes. One cannot understand how parents allowed this to happen to their children. Do they believe that this is normal? Are they afraid to stand up to the despots who are now in the process of destroying their children’s minds?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if Edina’s “All for All” is explained to students, parents, teachers and administrators in a little red book.

Opening sentence: “Our diversity is our strength, but some are more diverse and therefore stronger than others.”

Embracing an idea like “ancestry, genetic code and melanin” is taking the American experiment backwards, to the lesser demons of our nature. Any fool can recognize and value these things, because they are inherited. You can’t grow out of, or run away from, your heritage, genes and skin color... they just ARE. Again, there seems to be a hopelessness and doom to all this social experimentation, and it’s visited in children.

You can’t be a “changemaker” if you are a self-evident dolt. Edina sounds like an Antifa collective re-education district.

Our school systems are producing b colorful parrots. But at least every parrot is special. Yuh can hang your hat on that.

Best for Edina parents to relocate to another town. With tenured teachers unions and legalistic administrators, it will take a generation of hard work by citizens to turn back this rot. Parents can demand all they want, but it’s easier to move away and move on in today’s society than it is to take on thei sort of despotism. I’m sure Katie Mahoney has full backup at the Board of aeducation level. After all, the fish rots from the head.

IAC

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Moving away would be a great idea... but I suspect that as soon as the news is out, property values in Edina will decline significantly. Other possibilities are private school or home schooling. If we knew how the schools were funded, we could offer some other possibilities. If citizens vote for the school budget or for the property taxes that fund it... they might find a way to starve the beast.

Anonymous said...

Good points, Stuart.

We must examine ways to tame this “beast,” because it is everywhere. Trump’s election was a push back, but the pixelated shaming goes on more than ever.

My point is it’s easier to quietly move on than deal with all that shaming, particularly when it happens to your kids 7 hours a day in school. And, if the property values are gonna fall, better to cash out sooner rather than later. The price of private school would be factored into any loss on the home, and the price of homeschooling is expensive considering that a couple would have to sacrifice one income to make it work.

It’s really sad that we’re going backwards. It’s no longer about history, it’s grievance studies. It’s no longer about equal opportunity, it’s about disparate impact. It’s no longer about learning, it’s about indoctrination. Everything is about looking backwards. Any fool can do that. What about a better future? What are we going to belong to in the future?

IAC

Ares Olympus said...

Katherine Kersten: One in five Edina High School students can’t read at grade level and one in three can’t do grade-level math. These test results dropped EHS’s ranking among Minnesota high schools from 5th to 29th in reading proficiency, and from 10th to 40th in math proficiency between 2014 and 2017.

Statistically it would make sense that SOME fraction of kids at a given school can't read at their grade level, and 20% sounds ordinary, while 33% might be more concerning. And dropping from 5th to 29th or 10 to 40 suggests a need for concern, while they're still apparently a far above average school.

I can't guess if identity politics has anything to do with the drops, and you also have to look at the kids, including the possibility that kids-per-household have been dropping since the 1960s, and more richer parents will send kids to private schools, and perhaps Edina has been filling the gap with more bused inner city kids who have more challenges that the traditional white middle class from their past. At least that seems important to consider, among other possible explanations.

But Katherine Kersten isn't interested in causes. She's interested in resisting a misplaced cultural war against whites, and as Rush Limbaugh taught me "Never trust facts of people with causes." Certainly parents should be paying attention, whether or not this is lowering their children's demonstrable skills.