This is absolutely unbelievable, but I suppose if you realize that the “Woke Kindergarten” program was implemented in the Bay Area of California, you can sort of believe it. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (article archived here), this is real, because the Chronicle story links to the woke website below.
“Woke Kindergarten” is just what it sounds like: a “progressive” program (hired by the school) that politically indoctrinates elementary-school students into dismantling nearly everything about America (in this way it comports with Douglas Murray’s thesis in his recent and recommended book, The War on the West.). The program was implemented because the students, 80% of which are Hispanic, were performing below par in math and English. But not only did this teacher training program not improve math and English scores, but they also dropped even more. The school officials, however, claim that it’s a success because attendance rose and suspension rates dropped marginally. But what good is that if student performance dropped?
But read the article below (the headline links to the archived site), and then go to the Woke Kindergarten site and have a look around. Unless you’re Bernie Sanders or Rashida Tlaib, you’ll be absolutely appalled:
First, a summary from the Chronicle.
A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is paying $250,000 for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.
The Woke Kindergarten sessions train teachers on concepts and curriculum that’s available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary’s 474 students. The sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement.
But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.
English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.
Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.
District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.
Click below to go to the site and browse. I’ll interpolate some of the “woke wonderings” and “teach palestine” (yes, it’s political!) in the Chronicle text, which I’ve indented.
Here are the links (don’t click below); just go to the site and browse:
Woke Wonderings from the program (pictures) with excerpts from the Chronicle interpolated:
Some anti-Israeli propaganda:
Defund the police!
From the paper:
The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program, aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn’t working for many disadvantaged children.
The solution, these advocates say, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported. As such anti-racism programs have spread, several more conservative state legislatures have moved to restrict or ban them.
At the same time, some education experts say struggling schools need research-based literacy and math interventions that ensure all students have the basic skills to succeed. Examples of success include San Francisco’s John Muir Elementary, which has piloted a math intervention program that has led to a more than 50% proficiency rate, up from 15% prior to adopting the coaching and student-led coursework.
That, of course, is the way to go: educationally rather than politically. As for which education programs actually work, well, that’s above my pay grade.
It is surprising that proficiency and math didn’t improve? The students are too busy being politically indoctrinated. From the paper:
Woke Kindergarten, aimed at elementary-age students, is founded on the relatively new concept of abolitionist education, which advocates for abolition, or “a kind of starting over,” said Zeus Leonardo, UC Berkeley education professor. The idea is that certain things can’t be reformed, tweaked or shifted, because they are inherently problematic or oppressive. It’s not about indoctrinating or imposing politics, “but making politics part of the framework of teaching,” Leonardo said.
But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.
This tension is reflective of the nation’s ongoing culture wars, where the right and the left battle to influence what happens in classrooms.
The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school — and that the sessions were “not a place to express white guilt.” He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.
On to Woke Words of the Day:
You know what this next one is about:
From the paper:
Hayward Superintendent Jason Reimann said the decision to hire Woke Kindergarten, which was approved by the school board, was made by the school community, including parents and teachers, as part of a federal improvement plan to boost student achievement by improving attendance.
The school community, including parents, teachers and staff, identified a provider to help them do that, Reimann said. He noted a subsequent improvement in student attendance, with 44% of students considered chronically absent last year, down from 61% the year prior. A similar improvement was seen districtwide.
Well, they boosted attendance a bit, but “student achievement” dropped. Is that a surprise? And there are books in the curriculum, like the one below! (Never mind if it teaches the kids to dislike Jews). I’d like to see this one:
A video to introduce children to pronouns. Presumably the teacher explains this. Remember, these children are five years old and up (I gather this is for elementary schools, not just kindergartens.)
From the paper:
The superintendent said Woke Kindergarten wasn’t hired to improve literacy and math scores, but that “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement.” He added, “I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”
Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them and describes themselves as “an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”
Here is Gross, the sole identified person under the “who we are” link:
And the Chronicle‘s money quote:
Julie Marsh, a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, cautioned that it can be “problematic when teaching strays too far into the political ideology realm. It’s just a big distraction from some of the bigger purposes of education and what we should be focusing on.”
Well, the school and Ms. Gross have obviously decided that what we should be focusing on instead is progressive ideology, including pro-Palestinian politics as well as abolition of the police, landlords, money and the military. Truly, the purpose of this program is to inculcate kids with a mindset to destroy much of America as it is and replace it with. . . . what? Perhaps the “Capitol Hill Occupied Zone” (CHAZ) of Seattle, an area taken over by the woke in 2020 after the death of George Floyd? It adopted many of the precepts of Woke Kindergarten. Since cops were prohibited, crime rose and there were several shootings. CHAZ lasted a month.
Woke Kindergarten shouldn’t last more than it’s already lasted. It’s a travesty and an embarrassment for Hayward, California.
All power to the little people!
Of course…. this parody of school is on the side of Palestine. The company you keep. Strange how the dumbest, most violent, evil or just plain bad parties are always on the side of Palestine.
Start with individuals (no names, but think for a moment), scale up to groups (the worst of the unions, purple haired taliban genderwang fanatics, etc) all the way up to countries: Iran, Russia, North Korea. Always with Palestine.
“Know them by the company they keep” is a good maxim, and the topic of my next column (keep watching here! 🙂
D.A.
NYC https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
“Woke Kindergarten was founded by former teacher Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them” As I read this sentence, the first thought to enter my mind was “I wonder if ‘they’ have purple hair.” Then I scrolled down, and saw “their” picture. Yep !
I wonder if “they” realizes that LGBTQ people persecuted and even killed under Hamas. And many seek asylum in Israel !
Interesting that the project calls itself Woke Kindergarten. I thought the Left claims that “woke” is just a smear word used by the Right to condemn anything they don’t like, but that the Left doesn’t actually use.
Leslie, lets give them a little credit for correctly labeling themselves.
The program’s title initially confused me because I thought it was for kindergarten alone, as opposed to all the elementary level grades. Wondered about the preoccupation with math and English test scores (though I know that kindergartens today don’t just focus on creative play, nap time, and learning to look both ways when crossing the street.)
30% of my son’s kindergarten class (at a very highly regarded public school system in Minnesota — upper middle-class suburb) entered kindergarten being able to read. (To me, this was insane.)
He was ready to read by then and was reading well by the end of kindergarten.
But I reject the idea that a child’s schooling needs to be a race to get as far along as humanly possible. Let them be kids. They have their entire adult lives to run the rat race.
And it’s a terrible, terrible, website. The book a consultation scheduling calendar doesn’t work, and there is little actual content. Somebody just enjoys making posters.
Yeah, but $250,000 contracts? That’s some nice dosh if one can ride the guilt wave before it breaks on the shore.
Couldn’t even find real hands to photograph on all those posters. AI hands where all the fingers look like middle fingers, lol.
Unbelievable!
So no thanks to the ludicrous and expensive Woke Kindergarten, then.
How can kids in KINDERGARTEN be chronically absent? WTF are the parents playing at?
This looks for all the world like a parody organization (not least for the reason Leslie states above), though I’m sure the money they’ve taken is real enough. I wonder if it’s possible to find evidence online that Akiea Gross is a real person, and not the cynical creation of a scam artist, like that fake feminist website discussed here a few years ago?
“They” are on LinkedIn. I suspect it’s a real person. There’s more photos and a Daily Mail article that show up on a quick Google search.
I would be even more suspicious if the financial officer of the organization was “Chuck U. Farley.”
(Reference to the movie, Pump Up the Volume.)
Or could be”kinell” also quite suitable.
The hoax website I referred to above was https://medusamagazine.com/, which we discussed in 2017 (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/06/23/white-women-should-get-abortions-to-end-white-supremacy/). If you go to that site now, it’s been repurposed as a set of general self-help articles about financial planning etc., and none of the links to its crazy articles that were discussed in that post are available there any more, so clearly the trolls who owned it in 2017 have moved on and the domain is now owned by someone else. Perhaps they’re now providing educational services in the Bay Area?
Humor always leads the way:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170713193126/https://medusamagazine.com/
Yes, “Are Canker Sores Sexist?” is a real classic.
I read the article you cite above and noodled around at the Woke Kindergarten web site. Their approach to education seems to be modeled after the methodology Hamas uses to teach the children of Gaza how to hate Jews, hate America, and hate the west. And it’s not just the methodology. The substance seems to have many of the same elements as well.
That’s worryingly true, Norman.
This is where I agree with people like Chris Rufo and disagree with people like Yascha Mounk: we need legislators to flat-out ban things like this, both in K-12 and at college level.
Coel (Comment # 7), one problem here is that, in the US, many education school faculty members are left-wing extremists. [Where is commenter ThyroidPlanet to regale us with some Paulo Freire quotes? Freire (1921-1997), a Brazilian educator and philosopher, is to US ed school faculty what Charles Darwin is to biologists all around the world.]
Take, for instance, this bit of text from the SF Chronicle article (bolding added):
Does the claim by UC Berkeley education professor Zeus Leonardo that this program “[is] not about indoctrinating or imposing politics,” “but about making politics part of the framework of teaching”, does this claim make sense? No, it is an obvious lie since the curriculum provided by Woke Kindergarten (WK) is all about woke political ideas, it’s not also introducing pupils to, say, conservative or liberal political thought. So, of course, Zeus is lying – WK is about political indoctrination. But he’s an ed school prof at UC Berkeley (the flagship university of California’s public university system)!
The consequence of the infestation of US education schools with wokery (or left-wing extremism, if you will) is that the school board would have to keep very close tabs on what goes on in schools, in order to keep stuff like WK out of schools. Does it do this? I doubt it.
I appreciate that – I think we’re on the same page.
Too depressed – vide infra – thanks for picking up the ball.
BTW I actually bought Pedagogy of the Oppressed just recently because it comes up so much. The Politics of Education – probably soon.
I feel like I am not being fair to the pedagogy all the time, like I must be missing something.
TP, I recommend:
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories. Harvard Education Press, 2016
Take a look at it here, if you are interested (you can also read the book for free in toto, its the Internet Archive, a library):
https://archive.org/details/whyknowledgematt0000hirs/page/n3/mode/2up
+1
ThyroidP you are a sucker for punishment!
cheers,
D.A.
NYC
I agree. It seems that all parts of US education are too populated by woke activists to expect a reversion to normality to occur organically.
That’s why we need action at legislature level, where legislators are more responsive to the electorate. It is happening in Republican-voting states. I am reminded that, even in California, the electorate rejected “affirmative action” in a ballot (prefering colour-blind policies), whereas I’d guess that 9-out-of-10 Californian educators would support affirmative action.
I agree, Coel. And action at the legislative level is actually happening in some places in the US:
‘Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment. New York Times, April 2023
Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results?
https://archive.is/Q2UAR
Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education. New York Times, May 2023
https://archive.is/TqN3i
New York Is Forcing Schools to Change How They Teach Children to Read. New York Times, May 2023
Half of children in grades three to eight fail reading tests. The city’s schools chancellor, who has faulted the current approach, will begin rolling out new curriculums next year.
https://archive.is/zuOk5
Somebody authorizes and enables the payment of $250k wtf ?
Worst episode of Portlandia ever.
:o)
Regarding the question in the woke curriculum “If we abolished money, how could people get the most important things they need?”
Jerry’s answer: Barter.
I think Jerry is wrong. Correct answer, to my mind: We help each other with producing the things we need and then pay each other in hugs.
Nah. “Theft and violence” gets my vote.
If we abolish money, how do we pay reparations?
Leslie, production and distribution are intertwined. If people expect theft and violence they will not produce the things we need (and life will be, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”) That’s why I predict that we will eventually abolish money and pay each other in hugs.
The USSR sort of tried abolishing money in about 1922-ish (There’s an episode about it on the asianometry podcast – excellent podcast btw).
The Khmer Rouge actually DID it, blowing up the central bank, riels bills blowing about an abandoned/emptied downtown Phnom Pehn like autumn leaves.
The Chinese printed a whole bunch of new money for “Democratic Kampuchea” (which you can buy, I have some) they never used.
The rest is history…
The whole story of Democratic Kampuchea/Pol Pot (1975-79) is fascinating. Insane countries are a hobby of mine. I spend a lot of time reading about places like North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Lebanon etc.
My original degree is in Middle East Politics and psychology so crazy countries are abnormal psychiatry at scale for me.
D.A.
NYC
Definitely mine too.
My view, as well.
If the main goal is to increase attendance and cut down on misbehavior, it would probably be both cheaper and more effective to just let them watch cartoons and play video games all day.
I get the feeling that the school administrators are being pragmatic on this one. They figure that the scores are going to stay low and the students will eventually end up living lives of poverty, so they’re helpfully preparing them with ingrained habits of resentment and blame which will be directed towards the privileged, the police, the United States, the Jews, and Western Civilization itself — and not towards the school administrators.
“restorative practices”
Code word bolded. Helpful to parse the literature.
Missed edit deadline:
Similar to :
culturally responsive
Commenter JezGrove (comment # 4) spotted something in the SF Chronicle article that Jerry seems to have missed: The attendance improvement at the school using the Woke Kindergarten program was also observed at similar schools that didn’t use the program. So the program did not improve attendance, and is likely to have worsened student achievement in math and English and to have marginally decreased suspension rates.
The program seems to predominantly have “served” low-income Hispanic households. These people are not at all interested in wokery (Latinx, etc.). They would be happy if the school just kept their kids safe during the schoolday and taught them reading, writing and math.
And then this bit (bolding added):
This is Onion-level material (as in The Onion, a satirical US paper. I guess nowadays it’s just a website.)
Yes, they claim that “the decision to hire Woke Kindergarten… was made by the school community, including parents and teachers”, but I suspect that someone just preyed on the children of these poor parents to advance his personal woke agenda.
In St. Paul Schools, they put in a program to lessen the suspensions.
If you are not closely familiar with the workings of public schools, you wouldn’t know about how suspensions work/happen. Suspensions are not given out willy-nilly. It’s the last-ditch response, mainly to protect the safety of other students and staff.
Anyway, the program had the following features:
Action: Enforce fewer suspensions (by various means, including reassigning the offending student to an isolation classroom with a teacher to supervise one student.)
Measurement of success: Fewer suspensions occur
In other words, their acceptance criterion was same as the action for the program.
And this was advanced as a serious measure.
Surely you jest. (Stop calling me Shirley!)
My thanks to our host for referring to CHAZ, Seattle’s short-lived woke utopia. A word about its demands. Its activists realized that demand for complete abolition of police (in the manner of Woke Kindergarten) would be asinine, so they demanded just a 50% reduction in police funding. [This half-asinine demand was first accepted by the Seattle City Council, but it then backtracked.] Another of its 3 principal demands was: ensure that protesters would not be charged with crimes. The utopian accomplishments of CHAZ, in its 3-week-and-3-day lifetime, include: a “Decolonization Conversations Café”; a block-long Black Lives Matter street mural; and (according to the Mayor’s office) a 525% increase in the frequency of assorted criminal incidents.
I almost couldn’t bear to comment – at a loss as to where to start, and, frankly, sadness – but this thought occurred :
The scores from testing are low, as I gather.
The new development to watch for, then – as the general program needs obvious improvement (nobody will dispute this) – would be anything with “critical” in front of it, perhaps as :
critical grading
critical percentages
critical merit
critical evaluation
critical testing
… etc. possibly with special competencies factored into scores. “Competencies” are a feature not a bug of the overarching pedagogy – the literature will bear that out. Spoiler : it’s not exactly what first comes to mind.
I knew, TP, you would not let us hanging (see my comment # 8). By the way, from which education school in the US did you get your degree in Critical _ _ _? No doubt your relentless focus on improving student achievement by mean of critical grading / percentages / merit / evaluation / testing will pay off !
I think you mean James “Conspiracy Theorist” Lindsay’s New Discourses, that’d be where – I don’t try to hide that, and I’m not affiliated – I assume it’s easy to find.
… BTW I know lots of teachers are really committed to kids, and they do great work. Things are not so amenable to blanket-statements on this. It’s a giant mix, always changing.
Of course, you are right in saying that “lots of teachers are really committed to kids, and they do great work.” Here we need to keep in mind a point that Steven Pinker has made eloquently, as usual, many times: the news does not serve a random sample of stories, and it also focuses too much on discrete events and not trends, and it is too negative (if you took it at face value, you could easily sink into depression).
This having been said, the influnce of Paulo Freire and his acolytes, let’s just say it’s not what most parents send their kids to school for. They want the kids to be safe while they (the parents) are at work and they want them to be learning to read, write and do math, etc.
This recent story from the Washington Post about a teacher in South Carolina using Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir “Between the World and Me” in her class on racism is about one of those truly committed to kids. Here’s the archived, non-paywall link:
Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.
https://archive.is/BgREi
Oh geez….
Thank you Jerry for this reality-check…
Did not see this anywhere else.
This Woke Kindergarten nonsense is ripe for satire, but the satirists are strangely quiet.
Anyway, on to CHAZ/CHOP. I remember Ophelia Benson defending CHAZ, claiming that the people there were just “giving speeches and providing food”. The number of people believing it just a bunch of protestors singing “Kumbaya”, even when people were getting stabbed, was quite bizarre to see. Some of it can be explained by the fact Trump would frequently mouth off about CHAZ. So, some pat-on-the-back social kudos points could be gained by simply defending CHAZ, on that basis.
I suspect, given the alignment of CHAZ types and TRA types, Ofie’s position today would not be as amenable to a new CHAZ type experiment. And of course, she would not be as amenable if it was set up nearer to her pretty house.
You have to be really dim to be swayed by this cheap sloganeering. This school got scammed big time. The sad thing is that there are evidence-based educational programs that work, like Direct Instruction. The City Journal ran a lot of great pieces on educational reforms that work, so if anyone wants to know more about it, I suggest looking there.
I wonder…
How can we land back to before ingenious people concocted woke ideology, making everyone feel stolen from?
80% of the students are Hispanic. So they mentioned returning the land that we “stole” from Native Americans, but no mention of returning California and Texas to Mexico. Curious.
Abolitionist?
Is anyone (outside of the Muslim world) in favor of slavery?
OK, I think I get it. She wants to abolish everything in society.
And replace it with ….
I’m sure she has a detailed plan for the day after. (Mostly) peaceful protests, I predict.
Aside from the fact that the USA can’t “defund” the Israeli military, we know exactly what Hamas would do with any money they receive. They’ve done it for almost 20 years in Gaza:
Buy missiles and fire them into Israel
Buy other weapons to use against Israel
Build tunnels for military posts under civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals
Continue to fund their brutal authoritarian regime over the people of Gaza
(But I’m sure the Woke Kindergarten program says: Kittens! Puppies! Flowers!)
… but evaluating the outcome of this program is racist! 🙂
All the “I Wonder” questions are so abstract, even for this middle-age guy in WA. I think back to Kindergarten, remember tid-bits of alphabet and numbers, recess, social interactions which were new. Every question asked would have been so abstract to my understanding of the world at age 5. Money? no clue. Ceasefire, Abolish, defunding Israel…WTF? Can’t children be children FFS? This is beyond absurd. It’s an experiment and the sooner the money runs out, the better. Sorry, kids
Mark, this reminds me of religious instruction. Telling small children (too small to undersand this stuff) about god, heaven, hell, that we are all sinners, etc. It is indoctrination. Ridiculous. If you want to understand this, I suppose reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) would be helpful. Per Wikipedia, it is “generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
Thanks for the recommendation, Peter. Looks interesting and insightful.
Back in the 80s about 8% of US adults were functionally illiterate. Now it’s about 22%. Some people try to blame this on immigration, but it’s clear from the data from Baltimore and other large cities that the cause of rising illiteracy in the US is our public education system.
I used to be an IT vendor for the Washington DC school system and was shocked whenever I met a teacher (usually with an advanced degree in Educ) who could not read and follow simple directions, even with hands-on assistance. Occasionally contracts required that teachers be trained in classroom technology; vendors would need to take the training on behalf of some teachers.
Just seen a few videos of this grifter.
She’s pro-genocide, and a massive antisemite.
Question: Does anybody know of a single self-proclaimed “woke” individual who was NOT antisemitic? No? Me, neither.
here she is: https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1754084511443538062?s=20
Here’s the incoherency of the “stolen lands” trope. Systems of property rights and ownership are Western ideas. Property was not a native, or indigenous institution, nor was ownership an operational idea. How does one “steal” property from someone who does not have a conception of owning property, property rights, etc?
This is not to suggest Europeans were just in displacing indigenous peoples. It is only to point out that ownership of property is a Western idea. To defend native rights to land on this basis is to accept the very precepts they think they’re attempting to abolish.