Black students are "disastrously behind" in math, reading and attendance in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), writes Heather Mac Donald in City Journal. The district's social-justice bureaucrats plan to celebrate "blackness" in a district-wide Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
The district's toolkit for teachers prescribes daily messages, writes Mac Donald. "Monday is for restorative justice, Tuesday for diversity and globalism, and Wednesday for . . . how to be 'queer affirming' and 'transgender affirming'." Elementary teachers are urged to "dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk.”
On Thursday, students may stage a march to “disrupt Western nuclear family dynamics," she writes. Friday is devoted to "Black Women." Black fathers go unmentioned. "Boys, black or otherwise, get no recognition during the week of action, unless they happen to be 'nonmasculine'.”
The week is sartorially challenging, writes Mac Donald. Students are supposed to wear black on Monday, not a color in every elementary student's wardrobe. Tuesday, they're told to dress like a black person who inspires them. "How exactly did that roster of allegedly famous black scientists, inventors, and statesmen distinctively dress?" Later in the week, they must "dress for success."
Students are expected to take “solidarity pledges” to oppose racism and injustice, she writes.
Revolutionary iconography is seeded throughout the teacher prep materials—a coloring book with images of raised fists; a photo of female preschoolers (three black and one white) holding Black Lives Matter signs and wearing T-shirts with a clenched fist inside the female biological icon. Three older black students are photographed throwing gang signs and jutting their chins out to the camera, eyes half closed, in classic ghetto attitude.
"The LAUSD has no mandate to adopt one side of a complicated debate" or "to enroll children in an activist crusade," Mac Donald concludes. "The LAUSD exists to make sure that students are sufficiently literate and numerate to hold down a job and to raise a family. It exists to pass on knowledge of U.S. and world history, told with as little political spin as possible; to fill students’ ears and eyes with the beauty of artistic creation; and to expose them to the wonders of science."
Only 7 percent of district students are black, while 74 percent are Hispanic, 9.6 percent white and 5 percent Asian/Filipino.