Would you want to send your kid to a "Public School Social Justice Factory"?

Great Debates
1

The above headline is from Drudge and itlinks to an article about the Edina Minnesota Public School system. Well its pretty charged and basically states:

"The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”

“Equity” in this context does not mean “equality” or “fairness.” It means racial identity politics—an ideology that blames minority students’ academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.’s color-blind ideal,** and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.**”

Furthermore: " that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.”

Sounds pretty strong.

One teacher put on her course description for goals for a required 10 grade english lit class

"By the end of the year, you will have:

• Become a deeper, smarter reader of literature and all texts

• Learned how to apply marxist, feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, reader response, and aesthetic lenses to literature"

The abovearticle and the backlash from conservative groups has been brought up for the recent districts school board race and bond issue.

The article also states that staff have to submit to “racial equity re-education”

For example, bus drivers had a training session called “Edina School DIstrict Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.”

In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.”** Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideolog**y."

Sounds pretty wild and many parents are starting to complain. check outreviews on the Great Schoolswebsite. Including one parent who wrote: “This used to be a great school. Unfortunately the leftist agenda of the school administration is ruining this school. Do not let your child attend this school if they are conservative. It is not a safe environment for them due to biased school officials.”

Unfortunately this is having the reverse goal while test scores are still good, are starting to go down.

So what do you all think? Would you want your 10th grader to read books and apply “feminist & marxist” thoughts to it?

Teachers: Would you as a teacher submit to “racial equality re-education” and “confess your white guilt”?

2

No, it sounds awful.

Edit: To clarify, I studied English at university and I had to read a bunch of great books through Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Queer theory and Post-modernist lenses. All it did was bore me and ruin the books. 95% of such analysis is just fatuous intellectual masturbation.

3

:eek::rolleyes:

4

It’s from Drudge, so do consider the source. :rolleyes:

If this is true, I have a pretty good idea what’s behind it.

5

I’d send my kids there. Hell yeah. They seem to be trying at least.

6

Oh for fuck’s sake.

I wouldn’t want to send my children to an all-white charter school. I wouldn’t want to send my kids to a public school that either had all the money, because it was a rich community, or no money, because it was a poor community. I wouldn’t want to send my kids to a Christian private school, or any private school for that matter. I wouldn’t want my public school system to ignore racial inequity. I wouldn’t want my kids to have teachers so afraid of conservative mobs that they wouldn’t experiment with ways to reduce inequalities in the classroom. I would want my kindergartener to recognize their own skin tone as something good but not superior to others. I would want my kids to be involved in civic activism from a young age (my own students write letters to city council every year about whatever issues are important to them).

Is everything this school is doing perfect? I mean, find me an article that’s not so freakin’ absurdly biased, and maybe we can evaluate that. But this garbage article doesn’t really give us much basis.

Of all the issues in public education, a school where people are trying to fix things and maybe some teachers are going overboard is like number one million on the list of priorities.

7

Wow, that’s not far away and I’ve heard exactly ZERO about this in any of the local media!

I wonder how Drudge comes up with this stuff. :rolleyes:

Oh no, wait. There it is. An opinion piece in the local paper, grabbed up by conservative media as “news”.

Well congratulations. I just supplied 27 mwh of electricity to our local grid because I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes so I had to harness them to a generator.

8

For the record, I don’t have kids, and probably never will.

I’m personally not opposed to liberalism, but I’m not exactly gung-ho about it. I’m white and feel no ‘white guilt’. So to me the real question is, how good of an education will the kids get? Is real education being omitted to make room for this social justice business? I don’t really mind if they try to indoctrinate my kid a little; in the event things go a little too far I can just, you know, be a parent, and re-brainwash them to my specific preferences myself. But if the don’t get around to teaching algebra because they’re too busy talking about women’s suffrage that’s a problem. (I don’t really expect that to happen, but who knows.)

In any case it would be better than sending them to a conservative equivalent (like letting some truther homeschool them for me). The school may be heavy-handed with it’s skew away from white privilege, but at least they wouldn’t me making up all their facts whole cloth.

9

Would you like to share?

Right now, I suspect that you think it’s that the black kids can’t keep up because of genes or “culture” or inherent criminality and that the school is engaged in shenanigans to try to obscure this basic fact because there’s no way to actually close the achievement gap when you are dealing with “kids like that”.

That’s often the conservative subtext to these things. If you find that appalling, feel free to distance yourself. But be aware that when you play coy with your reasons, that’s the obvious stuff to fill in the blanks with.
In terms of the OP, I teach a pretty hippy-dippy class myself. But I’m in a real city and I teach a genuinely diverse population, and it seems to be what works.

10

While working in a Social Justice Factory may seem like a good job at the moment, I question the long-term stability of the position. A few years from now, the Social Justices may all be made by robots.

11

Well as I mentioned above: Would you as a teacher submit to “racial equality re-education” and “confess your white guilt”?

What is “hippy-dippy”?

12

I didn’t click on your links, but recognizing white privledge is not the same as confessing white guilt.

13

Well that is the thing about Drudge. It picks up articles from odd sources, most not covered by the MSM. And like it or not Drudge is actually the #7 place read news outlet.

Please notice I put in links to 2 news outlets and the Great Schools site.

Look to see more of this come out.

14

Let’s be real clear on the question: would I as a teacher submit to what some right-wing joker at Weekly Standard considers “racial equality re-education”? Fuck yes I would. Would I be willing to do what that same yahoo considers “confessing my white guilt”? Hells to the yes.

15

Well, We read Darwin and Marx and Stanton and Wollstonecraft. Of course, we also read Adam Smith and Horace Mann, if that gets me any credit on the other side. We read King, and talk about how the rhetoric of “outside agitators” and the problem of “white moderates” still persist. We take white privilege for granted and talk about its effects.

I suspect I’d be happy to **teach **a professional development Drudge would describe as “racial equality re-education” and that some of the conversations I’d encourage would sound like “confessing white guilt” to someone who is looking to be offended and frantically trying to protect a fragile sense of self.

I mean, I stood in front of the class today and talked about how the stereotypes of people of African descent as hyper-sexual were used by WHITE slave apologists both to warn that abolition would lead to rape of white women and to suggest that all the mixed race slaves were the product of Black temptresses looking for an advantage, not rape. Is that “confessing white guilt”?

16

Edina Minnesota is a wealthy suburb. Always has been known as such, at least in my lifetime.

In the early 20th century it was a Sunset town, which prohibited blacks from owning land via deed restrictions and covenants.

Now;

The racial makeup of the city was 88.1% White, 3.0% African American, 0.2% Native American, 6.1% Asian, 0.7% from other races, and 1.8% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.3% of the population.

Edina has only one high school, Edina High School. As of 2015 it is listed as U.S. News and World Report’s highest ranked school in Minnesota and #197 nationally. Newsweek’s list of America’s Best High Schools also ranked Edina highest in the state, #121 nationally. According to Newsweek, the graduate rate is 99% and 96% go on to attend college.

So, wealthy WHITE suburb with only 3% black population and the best high school in the state.

Quite a different place than painted by the articles given.

17

Since you have studied books, what do you think of this recommended book “A is for Activist”?

18

Oh, and in Minnesota, it is pronounced E - die - nuh.

19

Actually it was #1 about 4 years ago. Now it has slipped to #4.

As I said this only started a few years ago. Probably why only now has it made the news.

20

Sounds good to me. Teach kids that they can get involved in public issues.