Katherine Kersten on “social justice” education and its pernicious, all-pervasive racial dogmatism:
Like students, the district’s faculty and staff must submit to racial equity re-education. One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative… The training session was entitled “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” ideology.
The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint… Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 31 percent proficiency in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2017. In reading, scores for black students in 10th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 51.7 percent proficiency in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017.
And what parents want, obviously, is for their children to be taught how to become racially fixated leftwing activists, albeit illiterate ones who struggle with basic arithmetic, but who’ve learned the important things, such as how to confess or denounce “white privilege,” and “how to embrace ancestry, genetic code and melanin.” At some point, perhaps quite soon, the words foolish and dogmatic will seem an inadequate response, and the description that comes to mind may be something like evil.