2024 has been one heck of a year so far, and we’re only halfway through it.
New Jersey teachers teaching that Hamas is a “peaceful resistance movement”, obviously ignoring you know, the rape, murder and torture of innocent people. Who has the time to let that affect their ideologies? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Anti-Defamation League says that teachers in Berkley Unified School District in the Republic of California are “indoctrinating students with antisemitic tropes and biased, one-sided anti-Israel propaganda disguised as education.“
And countless protests across out universities are seeing more and more young people protesting ON BEHALF OF terrorist organizations, calling for intifada (or widespread violence against Jewish people), and in most cases not even understanding what they are protesting.
This is Ezola Foster.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 28, 2023
She was born in Louisiana in 1938 and was a public school teacher for 33 years.
In the 1980s & '90s she began sounding the alarm about troubling trends in our schools:
-Anti-White racism
-LGBTQ+ indoctrination
-Anti-American revisionism
-The risks of… pic.twitter.com/N2MZE7mFbA
Meanwhile, home of the director of the Brooklyn Museum (who happens to be Jewish) was vandalized with antisemitic tropes and graffiti, causing the entire neighborhood to be on edge, all in the name of alleged inclusion, peaceful resistance, and whatever other nonsensical garbage our youngest generation is trying to foist upon us.
Why does this keep happening? How can public schools be both centers of radicalism and “woke” indoctrination, yet produce students so poorly informed about the causes they support?
Yesterday, protesters at Berkeley “claimed responsibility” for throwing a firebomb at a university building in retaliation to how their school is handling Free Palestine protests.
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 14, 2024
The arson report was claimed by a student writing under the name “Student Intifada,” who wrote:… pic.twitter.com/yrerjR1mMS
The answer lies in one of American education’s dirty little secrets: on any given school day, nearly every public school in the country presents curriculum materials to children that lack official oversight or approval. While schools may have state- or district-adopted curriculums, it doesn’t mean these curriculums are being taught. Teachers, who often enjoy a high degree of autonomy, frequently create or select their own lesson plans. A 2017 RAND Corporation survey revealed that 99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary teachers use “materials I developed and/or selected myself” for teaching English language arts. Similar trends are observed in math.
Rogue Teachers with No Oversight are Indoctrinating Your Children....
— Family Vision Media (@FamVisionMedia) June 14, 2024
".....on any given school day in nearly every public school in the country, curriculum materials are put in front of children that have no official oversight or approval...."~Thefphttps://t.co/uX0IkkNWka
This autonomy allows various interest groups to target teachers and students, seeing an opportunity to push their products and ideologies. This lack of regulation is the root of many high-profile curriculum controversies.
Earlier this year, Francesca Block from The Free Press reported that PS 321 in Brooklyn, New York, sent children home with an “activity book” promoting the Black Lives Matter movement’s tenets, including “queer affirming,” “transgender affirming,” and “restorative justice” . This book was not authorized for classroom use by the NYC Department of Education or Brooklyn’s Community School District 15. It likely came from the “Share My Lesson” website run by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which hosts over 420,000 resources downloaded more than 16 million times .
The advocacy group Parents Defending Education has documented over a thousand incidents of schools teaching lessons on race, gender, or other controversial issues that parents found inappropriate. These lessons are rarely traceable to officially adopted school curriculums. Websites like Teachers Pay Teachers offer numerous lesson plans on topics such as “privilege walks” and “preferred pronouns” .
And you may think that showing up to a school board meeting is all we need to do to combat that, however it’s been revealed recently by PDE that the Biden Administration has, in fact, been targeting parents who speak out at those meetings, which directly contracdicted Merrick Garland’s sworn testimony.
BREAKING: It appears that the Biden Administration did in fact mobilize FBI counterterrorism resources to investigate parents for expressing protected political speech at school board meetings.
— Parents Defending Education (@DefendingEd) May 12, 2022
This directly contradicts AG Merrick Garland's sworn testimony. pic.twitter.com/h5EMeyu61L
Prior to the legislative efforts to ban critical race theory, only three school districts explicitly authorized using the New York Times 1619 Project in lessons: Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to create 1619 Project classroom materials, claimed to have connected the curriculum to around 4,500 classrooms, highlighting the gap between officially adopted curriculums and what is actually taught .
The problem extends beyond controversial content. A 2019 Fordham Institute study found most materials on Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers to be “mediocre” or “probably not worth using”. Another report from The New Teacher Project noted that students spent over 500 hours per year on inappropriate assignments, equivalent to six months of wasted class time per core subject. Disadvantaged students were the hardest hit, suffering from gaps and repetition in their education due to inconsistent lesson planning .
For parents and policymakers who believe “curriculum transparency” can solve classroom controversies, this should be a wake-up call. Knowing the officially adopted curriculum offers a limited view. Without regulations requiring teachers to post all lesson plans and materials online daily, including those they create or find online, it is nearly impossible to know what happens in public school classrooms.
Teacher: I don’t use district approved curriculum. I create my own.
— Beanie (@Beanie0597) July 24, 2023
Me: do you post it for parents to see?
Teacher: Parents can email if they want to know.
Me: why not post it?
Teacher: my admin knows & approves what I teach? If parents want to know they can ask.
Parents, ask.
Coloradans have more opportunity to choose the schools we drop our kids off to than most other states, and we need to ensure that we are exercising that right. Stop by your child’s classroom on your next opportunity. Go through their homework with them. Ask questions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone rail against some of the things that I said above; as if to say that I am some sort of evil liar, but the proof is supplied in this post. Look for yourself and make your own judgment call, that’s what our republic is all about. But DO NOT simply expect that your child’s teacher has their best interest at heart, as in my personal experience, there are “anti-colonizer”, “1619 intersectional experts”, and straight up Hamas sympathizers in just about every public school I’ve had the privilege to tour.
Get involved with organizations across the Denver metro, like Parents Defending Education, JeffCo Kids First, and ChalkBeat, where you can keep track of the legislation that is being foisted onto Denverites. We are at an all-time low in the trust we have for the people who have taken it on themselves to educate our children. And that means that we as parents need to get involved and stay involved.
Charter and private schools abound in Denver. Choose them, and get involved. For the public school system was dead a decade ago, and in this man’s opinion that is apparent in the quality of “thinkers” we see at Ivy League schools nationwide. Don’t believe me? Just listen to it straight from one of the public school acolyte’s mouth:
