Absurd "racial equity" policies are hurting students who need help the most, writes a self-described left-wing teacher on Wesley Yang's Substack.
He's teaching in a Kafka-designed summer program that enrolls children, six to 12, whose teachers think they need academic help. Most parents agreed -- it's free -- but attendance is very low.
By the end of the first week, the teacher had one student attending consistently, one withdrawal and eight children who'd never shown up. He knew there was a waitlist filled with students with lower need and more motivated parents. But he was told the eight no-shows could not be replaced with wait-listers.
District policy is that requiring attendance "unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year," he writes.
As an extra dose of insanity, we can’t even request that the parents of a non-attending student remove their child from the program; doing so, I was told, could “make them feel disrespected” and “communicate to them that their children are not welcome.”
Today, as I write this, more than a dozen children whose families have actively sought out our help are still sitting at home, unable to attend “full classrooms” of four or five students - who are themselves struggling without peers to work with!
The teacher "unironically use phrases like 'systems of oppression'," he writes. He is deeply committed to "racial justice in education." But this isn't it.
He adds more examples:
A senior teacher argued that "trying to register more children of color for AP classes is inherently racist and that putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy." The other teachers said nothing
At another meeting on changing the weekly schedule, he pointed out that some curriculum topics would not be taught. "A colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state."
Eddie Murphy had a stand-up routine on horror movie characters who stay in haunted houses after demonic voices tell them to leave, writes Matthew Ladner on reimaginED. Teachers need to follow Murphy's advice, he writes. Get out of the haunted house (or school), writes Ladner. You can do better on your own.
His site has lots of profiles on teacher- created pods, microschools and other options, most made possible by Florida's scholarships for families.
A family of public-school teachers and school nurses founded a school for special-needs students called Gold Star Private Academy. The founding sisters used to oppose school choice, and one led the local teachers' union. Then some of their children and grandchildren had needs the public schools couldn't meet.
Jaime Manfra, who started homeschooling her son and a few others now runs Service Learning Micro-school.
I was a public school teacher who now runs One World Education Centre, an iteration of One World School, a proposed charter school that was turned down by four school districts in California: we don't receive state money, as we would in Florida, but our Asian-American parents are willing to pay for AP and other instruction without concerns about "white supremacy", as their families have been using exam performance to get ahead for over two thousand years, long before any "white people" had any idea of written exams, and those families are willing to increase achievement gaps with other "people of color" if necessary to close any gaps between their children and their relatives in Asia (and their peers elsewhere…