A social justice curriculum that benefited no one
A few years ago a town in Minnesota decided the time had come to institute some changes in its public school system:
…[I]n 2013…Edina [Minnesota] 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…and focuses on uprooting “white privilege.”
The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated 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.”
Racial consciousness/equity was not the only goal. For example, the principal of the school ran a blog on which:
…she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flags””along with a picture of protesters holding a banner proclaiming “Gay Marriage Is Our Right.” On a more age-appropriate post, she recommended an A-B-C book for small children entitled A is for Activist. (Peruse the book and you find all sorts of solid-gold: “F is for Feminist,” “C is for”¦Creative Counter to Corporate Vultures,” and “T is for Trans.”)
The outcome was not as hoped, but it was as might have been predicted. A fair number of parents pulled their students out of the public system. It’s not clear how many, it’s not clear how many of them were black, it’s not clear how many of them were the higher-achieving black students, and it’s not clear how those unknowns may have affected the results for black students. But this is what happened:
Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. There’s been a single positive point of data: Black students’ reading scores””all ages, all grades””have slightly increased, from 45.5 percent proficiency in 2014 to 46.4 percent proficiency in 2017.
But other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017.
The drop was most notable at the high school level. 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.
In addition, the school’s conservative students have filed a lawsuit challenging the plan.
I have been following this on PowerLine for several months, and the linked article at Weekly Standard is a good summation.
What most interests me is how FAST the decline became measurable: only four years (one HS generation). There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, but not very much in a school.
Very likely they are building on prior indoctrination, and abandonment of education, in earlier grades.
This observation by one of the fleeing parents is meaningful, in that it encapsulates both the danger of extremism even in pursuit of virtue (true equity is indeed a virtue, and one now sorely lacking because it has been replaced by the false kind), and the danger of side-tracking an institution from its core purpose (in this case, substituting indoctrination for education).
“Flores believes that “Race and racism should be discussed” at school. But “relentlessly obsessing about race–pretending it’s the only thing that matters–is counterproductive and harmful to everyone,” he says.”
PS a similar route to educational destruction is the move to tie rates of discipline/suspension to racial proportionality instead of to actual behavior, as found in many schools, but (perhaps not surprisingly) this one (because if you reduce discipline for black students, you reduce it for everyone).
I suspect this is not news to many of you.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/02/19/school-shooting-was-outcome-of-broward-county-school-board-policy-now-local-and-national-politicians-weaponize-kids-for-ideological-intents/
Re the declining scores. The declining scores just prove that reading, writing and arithmetic are racist. Competency in those subjects is acting white and that will not be tolerated.
You might be amused by the recent scandals in the Washington DC and Prince George county (MD) Schools. DC and PG county are mainly black. They have been graduating high school students that really were not qualified to graduate. The schools were taking some affirmative action on the students grades to make the pass rates look better. I suppose that’s an example of racial equity. Something like 1/3 of the students should not have graduated.
Kind of surprising that Edina would try something like this, when its high school is usually considered one of the best public high schools not only in Minnesota, but the country. Why change?
This is what being ‘progressive’ gets you, and Edina is certainly a suburb that leans heavy left. Edina is rather well-to-do, so perhaps there’s a lot of the so-called Affluenza going around — wealthy folks feeling a little bad because they have money while others don’t, so hey, why not try out some nifty nonsensical ideas in the school!
Black Lives Matter was co-founded by Alex Garza who has worked many years for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The latter is a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist org. What could go wrong bringing that into public schools?
Not a single proficiency measurement above 50% (of the ones listed), if that means what I think it does it indicates truly abysmal performance by the school. Why aren’t the teachers and their leadership in the administration held accountable for such poor results? Why are they allowed to blame some conceptual boogeyman (white privilege)?
Taking your kid out of that system is the only responsible thing to do. Your child gets only one chance to go through high school and shouldn’t waste it on fancy new education experiments.
Both Powerline and The Weekly Standard have noted that this happened in Edina, a wealthy Minneapolis suburb that used to have some of the best public schools in the country. These schools typically graduated students with very high scores on the SAT, ACT, and National Merit exams.
True to their Scandinavian and German ancestry, Minnesotans take education very seriously, and Edina schools attracted wealthy parents, who bid up property values, which led to high tax revenues to support good schools. If the schools are ruined, this cycle could well reverse itself. To the Left, feature or bug?
Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Yeah but c’mon…they’ve created the next generation of welfare plantation D voters. That’s gotta count for something.
Ryan Says:
February 21st, 2018 at 3:34 pm
… wealthy folks feeling a little bad because they have money while others don’t, so hey, why not try out some nifty nonsensical ideas in the school!
* * *
Possibly some guilt tripping going on, but more likely it’s of a piece with the disconnect between the wealthy and the world: just like some people forget (or don’t know!) that there are farmers between the dairy cow and the dairy case, I suspect that the more progressive parents really don’t understand how hard, and time consuming, it is to educate children in the foundations of reading, writing, and arithmetic — that it somehow just magically happens in you put kids and adults in a building together for a certain number of hours.
Since all that educatin’ is going to happen anyway (being organically grown, one might say), then “adding” all the progressive indoctrination shouldn’t have any negative effect — but of course it does, for reasons amply evidenced by the parents who bailed.
And, of course, as happens in Blue States after conservatives and scared-enough liberals leave for Redder pastures, the situation just gets worse.
After awhile, the only ones left running the asylum are the inmates.
What happened in Edina may sound like a crazy local news story peculiar to those Progressive weirdos in Minneapolis, but this is just the beginning of another infamous long march through the institutions. The universities have been largely taken over. The K-12 schools are next.
For the masochists who want to know more about what’s coming to a school near you, here’s a bit more about what happened in Edina. Maybe forewarned is forearmed.
On October 9, 2017, John Hinderaker gave a talk, to a crowd of Minnesota Republicans, on political indoctrination in Edina public schools. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vaXzeNwtC0) The recording is less than half an hour. Worth a look, I think.
Hinderaker is a retired Minneapolis attorney who now serves as President of the “Center of the American Experiment.” In 2017, he wrote a series of posts on the politicization of Edina schools. The posts were published at both the Center’s website and at the Powerline blog.
About a week before the talk that was published on YouTube, the Center published a long report by Katherine Kersten: “Whose Values? Educational excellence threatened by ideology in Edina schools.” (https://www.scribd.com/document/360579574/TM-Fall2017-Edina-1#from_embed)
Kersten’s report documents, in detail, both the indoctrination and the academic failure of Edina’s schools. The cost to Edina’s taxpayers is a crime. The cost to Edina’s children a tragedy.
I’ve underestimated what’s going on in the high schools because I figured the kids would be like me when I was a high school kid — reflexively skeptical of any agenda the teachers were pushing.
At my Catholic high school only one-quarter of the class took Holy Communion at the official graduation mass. This was a big deal since it meant the rest of the class had either lost their faith or couldn’t be bothered to go to confession so they could receive the sacrament.
The faculty and administration had a serious meeting afterward to figure out what went wrong with our class.
Catholic schools provide a great education but Job #1, at least back then, was to form the students to live Christian lives under Christian values. My school had failed spectacularly. I noticed that more Catholic kids who didn’t go to parochial school remained Catholic after high school.
I’m not sure what’s changed.
@neo: Whoever writes your headline made a mistake:
A social justice curriculum that benefited no one
Plenty of people are benefiting from it, turns out. A pipeline has two ends; when the universities turn out thousands of students with Grievance Studies degrees, they will end up employed somewhere.
Edina as “a town in Minnesota” is funny to anyone who has lived near Minneapolis, like describing Beverly Hills as “town in California”.
In refusing to look in the mirror, blacks who embrace imagined victimization have formed the chains of their own mental enslavement.
The common reaction of contemptuous dismissal by the majority of blacks to those few blacks who point out that actions have consequences, reveals that those in denial of reality deserve their fate because they have imposed that fate upon themselves.
I have little sympathy for a person who, either through action or inaction… makes a mess of their life and then blames me.
Liberals are saying black children have difficulties learning math because of racism, can anyone explain to me the correlation?
There’s an article in the Minnesota newspaper Star Tribune about this, “Charge of ‘political indoctrination’ heats up Edina school board race”, that’s worth a read.
The same thing is terribly widespread in academia. Here is an extremely well thoughtout explanation and analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqUtgFBWezE&t=1111s
The answer is easier tests and cheating by teachers. That seems to be what happens.
You can put a shoe in the oven, but that doesn’t make it a biscuit. You can put a kid in the classroom, but that doesn’t make him a student.
As the Wizard of Oz said to Scarecrow, I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.
The irony about the social justice spiel is that often whites preach it more than blacks. I recall subbing at a primarily white middle school where the administration handed out some “social justice de jour” – this was years ago- spiel to the subs. I noticed they had gotten rid of the social justice spiel the next year.
I subbed and taught at a middle school that was majority minority- maybe 2% white. The (black) principal had some success in turning the school around before being promoted to a central office job. Discipline and test scores improved.
The principal’s emphasis was discipline and curriculum. She didn’t waste one second on “social justice.” Regarding black versus white teachers, her comment was that it was the content of the vessel that was important, not the color of the vessel.
Similarly, I never heard a black administrator claim that that racism was the reason for black students having more office referrals or the like. They could see with their own eyes, just as any teacher could, that poor behavior was the reason for those office referrals or in-school suspensions.
Over a number of years, the school improved the pass rate on the school proficiency test from about 20% to about 65%- math included. No social justice used.
The school went downhill after the principal’s promotion to central office, as subsequent principals were not as competent.While the first new principal did improve test scores, the school district did not extend her initial 4 year contract, for good reason.
Black problems would revolve itself if white liberals can start doing one thing that they have never done before…. start treating blacks as they are white people. Asians in America are thriving so much liberals actually have to make policies to hinder them in blue states so they won’t be beating everyone else except Jews by too much.
The School of Education at the University of Minnesota wanted, a few years ago, to adopt a mission statement that explicitly stated that the goal of their students would be social justice. There was an outcry, and the department backed off.
They didn’t change the goal. They just stopped talking about it in public.
Social Work is another department that has such explicit Marxist claptrap in nearly every university.
A few miles down the road from Edina is Burnsville, where the folks in charge of schools have decided to follow Edina into the SJW educational abyss. It will be interesting to watch Burnsville High School grades plummet accordingly. The most visible change at BHS so far is weekly police visits to break up riot-level battles between Somali blacks and American blacks, resulting in multi-hour lockdowns. It reaches into the middle schools as well, where white kids are instructed repeatedly to check their privilege.
Well, what did it do for white children? If those dropped even faster, reducing the performance gap between whites and blacks, the district can still claim they were successful in narrowing the gap, thus proving that their “racial equity” program was an overwhelming success.
After all, if everyone is a failure, there’s no more “unfair advantage” for those who succeeded “because of their skin colour”.
I’ve lived in Edina for 28 years and had two kids go through those schools, including the elementary school that now has the wacky principal. Her predecessor was a gem of a guy and the school was outstanding. Liberal guilt is driving much of the move to these bizarre policies. Same underlying factor that contributed to Obama getting two terms.
There is one elementary school in town in which over 30 languages are spoken and over half the kids are on free/reduced price lunches.
Can’t wait to sell my overpriced home and leave.
As the Instapundit is wont to say, “Get woke, go broke”.
LeavingEdina:
Better sell before people realize how bad the schools are becoming!
Ray mentions the Prince George county (MD) Schools. When I was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, my seven-year-old daughter was assigned to an off-base elementary school in a neighborhood that I was afraid to drive through. Talking with other parents, I heard nothing but condemnation for the poor quality of the education offered by Prince George’s County Public Schools. Other parents related many incidents of their students being verbally and physically bullied by students AND staff. My wife and I elected to home-school our daughter during our assignment at Andrews.
Pingback:Duh | EX CATHEDRA 2.0
I suspect the Edina school administrators, and the liberal parents, won’t be so worried that their kids can’t read or write or compute, as long as the kids are convinced their failure was caused by racist white people.
LeavingEdina:
Better sell before people realize how bad the schools are becoming!
According to the Star Tribune article I linked to above: “… overall the district remains consistently above the statewide average in testing. Both math and reading scores are about 20 percentage points higher in Edina than in the rest of the state.”
Ann:
According to the Star Tribune article I linked to above: “… overall the district remains consistently above the statewide average in testing. Both math and reading scores are about 20 percentage points higher in Edina than in the rest of the state.”
Ann, I thank you for linking to the STRIB article. It definitely contributes valuable information to the discussion. However, you were rather selective in what you quoted from the article.
Ann, why did you neglect to inform us the STRIB article also points out that Edina has seen falling test scores in recent years? The main point of Neo’s posting was the issue of falling test scores in Edina. Inquiring minds want to know.
Both of the articles that you and Neo linked to showed falling test scores in Edina. However, in one sense your selective quoting DOES add to the discussion. When coupled with falling test scores, your selective quote shows that SJW ideology applied to an exemplary school system will harm that school system- even if some people may not want to acknowledge that.
Ann, to what do you attribute the falling test scores in the affluent suburb of Edina? Were deplorables moving in? 🙂