Feel free to shoot the messenger, but according to Rufo, in this earlier quoted article/blog:
Rufo makes the following claim:
Buffalo Public Schools diversity czar Fatima Morrell, architect of the district’s pedagogical revolution, summarizes these dense phrases in a single word: “woke.” Last year, in her role as director of the Office of Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, Morrell created a new curriculum promoting Black Lives Matter in the classroom and an “antiracist” training program for teachers. According to one veteran teacher, who requested anonymity, Morrell’s training programs have pushed “radical politics” and, in practice, become a series of “scoldings, guilt-trips, and demands to demean oneself simply to make another feel ‘empowered.’”
Morrell designed a curriculum requiring schools to teach the “Black Lives Matter principles,” including “dismantling cisgender privilege,” creating “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists,” and accelerating “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” The lesson plans, which I have obtained from the district, are even more divisive. In kindergarten, teachers ask students to compare their skin color with an arrangement of crayons and watch a video that dramatizes dead black children speaking to them from beyond the grave about the dangers of being killed by “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.” By fifth grade, students are taught that America has created a “school-to-grave pipeline” for black children and that, as adults, “one million Black people are locked in cages.”
In middle and high school, schools must teach about “systemic racism,” instructing students that American society was designed for the “impoverishment of people of color and enrichment of white people,” that the United States “created a social system that had racist economic inequality built into its foundation,” and that “the [current] wealth gap is the result of black slavery, which created unjust wealth for white people,” who are “unfairly rich.” Students then learn that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism” and that “often unconsciously, white elites work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media.”
In later grades, the curriculum proposes a solution to these problems. In a lesson on “confronting whiteness in our classrooms,” teachers ask white students to atone for their “white privilege” and to “use their voices” for the cause of antiracism. In another lesson, students learn the putative difference between white European and traditional African systems of justice. According to the lesson plans, whites have created a “retributive,” “merit-based” justice system, which relies on harsh punishment and creates inequalities; traditional Africans, on the other hand, relied on a “restorative,” “needs-based” justice system focused on healing, giving to each according to his need, and prioritizing “collective value” over individual rights.
Now, these are Rufo’s claims and unless they can be shown to be outright lies it provides at least one example of an allegedly existing curriculum. The highlights are mine and are the ones I image would jump out as potentially problematic. Much of the other examples don’t seem very controversial in the least. Although it is clear that in the article Rufo is catering to a specific audience and using all the hot button labels to trigger that audience.
