Posted on 02/01/2018 12:05:20 PM PST by Altura Ct.
The city of Edina has changed the way it approaches public education, putting social justice above learning. The results will shock you.
For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the states school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.
The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the All for All strategic plana sweeping initiative that reordered the districts mission from academic excellence for all students to racial equity.
Equity in this context does not mean equality or fairness. It means racial identity politicsan ideology that blames minority students academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King, Jr.s color-blind ideal, and focuses on uprooting white privilege.
The Edina school districts 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 Edinas racial achievement gap, which they attributed to barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.
As a result, the school systems obsession with white privilege now begins in kindergarten. At Edinas Highlands Elementary School, for example, K-2 students participate in the Melanin Project. The children trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cut-outs on a poster reading, Stop thinking your skin color is better than anyone elses!-[sic] Everyone is special!
Highlands Elementarys new racially conscious elementary school principal runs a blog for the schools community. On it, she approvingly posted pictures of Black Lives Matter propaganda and rainbow gay-pride flagsalong 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.)
At Edina High School, the equity agenda is the leading edge of a full-scale ideological reeducation campaign. A course description of an 11th-grade U.S. Literature and Composition course puts it this way: By the end of the year, you will have . . . learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytical . . .lenses to literature.
The primary vehicle in the indoctrination effort is a year-long English courserequired of all 10th-gradersthat centers, not on reading literature and enhancing writing skills, but on the politicized themes of Colonization, Immigration and Social Constructions of Race, Class and Gender.
One student characterized the course this way on the Rate My Teachers website: This class should be renamed . . . Why white males are bad, and how oppressive they are. (The negative review has since been deleted from Edina Highs Rate My Teachers page; but this is a screenshot from before it was memory-holed.)
Increasingly, families who are serious about education are leaving the Edina schools. For example, Orlando Flores and his wife pulled their sonan academic superstarout of Edina High School in his senior year to escape its hyper-political environment.
Flores, who fled a Marxist regime in Nicaragua as a child, had this to say: Years ago, we fled Communism to escape indoctrination, absolutist thinking and restrictions on our freedom of speech. If we see these traits in our schools in America, we must speak out and oppose it.
Flores says that when his son was at Edina High, teachers routinely pushed politicians and political positions they favored, shamed and browbeat students with dissenting views, and forced them to defend themselves against baseless allegations of racism. According to his son, he says, classroom discussions were often one-sided indoctrination sessions, and students feared their grades would be penalized if they spoke out.
The final straw for the Flores family occurred when an English teacher subjected their son and a classmate to a lengthy, humiliating and ideologically charged grillingunlike that faced by other studentsafter the boys made a presentation with which she disagreed following racially-charged incidents in Ferguson, Missouri.
When Flores son requested an apology, school authorities indignantly took the teachers side, says Flores. Fearing retaliation, the boy asked to transfer to another English class. There, a student teacher informed the class they would not be reading classic books because dead white men are boring, according to Flores.
Flores believes that Race and racism should be discussed at school. But relentlessly obsessing about racepretending its the only thing that mattersis counterproductive and harmful to everyone, he says.
Like Edina students, the districts faculty and staff must submit to racial equity re-education.
One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative. The widow of a bus driver who had been required to attend the training sent the entire 25-page instructional curriculum to Center of the American Experiment, where I am a senior policy fellow.
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 districts equity ideology.
The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools equity crusade, black students test scores continue to disappoint. Theres been a single positive point of data: Black students reading scoresall ages, all gradeshave 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.
* * * Recently, conservative students at Edina High School filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the district has violated its members rights of free speech and association.
The suit grew out of events following a Veterans Day assembly in the high school gym on November 9, 2017. There, a group of veterans spoke about their military service, and the school band played the National Anthem and Taps. During the music, some black students protested by refusing to stand, slouching by the bleachers, talking loudly, and blaring music on their cell phones.
Members of the schools unofficial Young Conservatives Club (YCC) responded by criticizing the protesters behavior, at school and on social media. In response, the protesters and their allies harassed the conservative students, with groups as large as 30 students . . . daily surrounding club members and threatening to injure them if they did not change their political views, according to the lawsuit complaint. In addition, a group styling itself the Edina High School Anti-Fascists (you have to see the groups Twitter feed to believe it) posted a threatening YouTube video aimed at the YCC, which declared, [W]e will not stop until every tentacle of your evil monstrosity is sliced off at the nerve.
When the conservative students complained, the schools principal responded to their security concerns by saying that [they had] brought it upon themselves by criticizing the protests at the Veterans Day program, according to the complaint.
The principal disbanded the YCC after pressuring its president to show him texts its members had sent one another about these incidents on the clubs private GroupMe. Yet school authorities apparently took no disciplinary action against the protesters and other students who had threatened and harassed YCC members.
The Edina Public Schools policies suggest that all are welcome here, the complaint asserts, but what EPS really means is that all are welcome except conservatives.
* * * The Edina school district is just one example of the ideological hijacking of legitimate academic instruction in the name of racial equity. Theres more to come. Last October, the Star Tribune ran an op-ed that praised the Edina schools racial equity crusade, and condemned what the author described as Americas vicious history of violence and oppressionevidenced today by Eurocentric curricula, hypersegregated schools, and biased standardized tests. Our nations racist practices, she wrote, are what allowed this country to expand geographically and to amass its great fortune. White students, she asserted, must become racially conscious to learn how their own worldviews are limited by whiteness.
The writer was Dr. Annie Mogush Mason, program director of elementary teacher education at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where the next generation of Minnesotas teachers are being formed.
The results do not shock us.
Leftist madrasses.
Time to storm the School Board with pitchforks and torches...and rope.
Every “education” department at every university must be abolished. All degrees in “education” must be declared void, and no more issued.
LIEberal insanity!
There needs to be some significant jail time “awarded” these dumbass LIEberals!
If I were a parent of one of these kids, I’ fer shure, fer shure file suit - surely what they are doing is illegal!
And, if it is not, it should be!
Cultural Marxism makes its way down from the universities
All of the children so indoctrinated will end up being unemployable except by the State
I honestly believe most social justice a-holes could not define what social justice is or what the ultimate goal is besides talking point gibberish with Trump hate mixed in.
FTA: “The Edina school districts 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.”
The rot starts at the very top. And it is systemic since it is taught at the U of MN to all of the upcoming elementary school teachers . Very sad. Leftists push their religion of hate onto our children at our expense.
This article brings up a very, very important change in our public school systems...otherwise called “Indoctrination centers”. We have lost control over the years and the common citizen has no say in the operation of the “so-called” educational system from preschool to college. One drip at a time the ever encroaching of unaccountable paid teachers and administrators from the public trough has made them the “kings and queens” of every local government...uncontrolled by common sense....only by the dictatorial power they hold over the ones who write their checks. Schools are no longer teaching the basics so that the students have the tools and abilities to enhance their own futures and advancement. Failure of the student is not an option...it is blamed upon the dollars wasted to have teachers who could not survive outside of the communistic local/state/federal government supported world.
Unless things have changed since I lived in the Twin Cities, Edina High is about 95% white. Few things are more annoying than upper middle class liberals. Upscale suburbs are filled with them now.
Exactly. The results are expected.
Maybe the author was being sarcastic about, “The results will shock you.”
Maybe the author was being sarcastic about, “The results will shock you.”
Not just that— these idiots need to be hit where it hurts — the wallet.
This is sickening. It’s a legal way to beat down whites and conservatives until they disappear or walk around with their tails between their legs.
People with children who live in that town need to move. Now.
Gooodabye!
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