Is it too soon to congratulate Virginia??

Congratulations Virginia! You only have chlamydia, not herpes; there is a cure!

What I'm seeing is people are objecting to this type of thing happening in schools and the workplace:

Amazing parent testimony on Critical Race Theory in our schools.
link  A video tweet.


And this letter from a teacher:

Dear Joe (copies to Head of School, Board Trustees, & English Department Colleagues), I became a teacher at Dwight-Englewood because, as a parent, I loved how the school both nurtured and challenged my own children. Today, I am resigning from a job I love because D-E has changed in ways that undermine its mission and prevent me from holding true to my conscience as an educator. I believe that D-E is failing our students.

Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students’ intellectual and emotional growth and destroying any chance at creating a true community among our diverse population. I reject the hostile culture of conformity and fear that has taken hold of our school. The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood. They must locate themselves within the oppressor or oppressed group, or some intersectional middle where they must reckon with being part-oppressor and part-victim. This theory of power hierarchies is only one way of seeing the world, and yet it pervades D-E as the singular way of seeing the world. As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed. Men are oppressors, women are oppressed, and so on. This is the dominant and divisive ideology that is guiding our adolescent students.

In my classroom, I see up close how this orthodoxy hinders students’ ability to read, write, and think. I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor. I teach students who see inequities in texts that have nothing to do with power. Students have internalized the message that this is the way we read and think about the world, and as a result, they fixate on power and group identity. This fixation has stunted their ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature.

In my professional opinion, the school is failing to encourage healthy habits of mind, essential for growth, such as intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, reason, and the capacity to question ideas and consider multiple perspectives. In our school, the opportunity to hear competing ideas is practically non-existent. How can students, who accept a single ideology as fact, learn to practice intellectual curiosity or humility or consider a competing idea they’ve never encountered? How can students develop higher order thinking if they are limited to seeing the world only through the lens of group identity and power?

Sadly, the school is leading many to become true believers and outspoken purveyors of a regressive and illiberal orthodoxy. Understandably, these students have found comfort in their moral certainty, and so they have become rigid and closed-minded, unable or unwilling to consider alternative perspectives. These young students have no idea that the school has placed ideological blinders on them.

Of course, not all students are true believers. Many pretend to agree because of pressure to conform. I’ve heard from students who want to ask a question but stop for fear of offending someone. I have heard from students who don’t participate in discussions for fear of being ostracized. One student did not want to develop her personal essay — about an experience she had in another country — for fear that it might mean that she was, without even realizing it, racist. In her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. This is the very definition of self-censorship.

I care deeply about our students and our school, and so over the years, I have tried to introduce positive and constructive alternative views. My efforts have fallen on deaf ears. In 2019, I shared with you my negative experiences among hostile and doctrinaire colleagues. You expressed dismay, but I did not hear any follow up from you or other administrators.

Since then, the stifling conformity has only intensified. Last fall, two administrators informed faculty that certain viewpoints simply would not be tolerated during our new “race explicit” conversations with our new “anti-racist” work. They said that no one would be allowed to question the orthodoxy regarding “systemic racism.” The message was clear, and the faculty went silent in response.

The reality is that fear pervades the faculty. On at least two separate occasions in 2017 and 2018, our Head of School, standing at the front of Hajjar Auditorium, told the entire faculty that he would fire us all if he could so that he could replace us all with people of color. This year, administrators continue to assert D-E’s policy that we are hiring “for diversity.” D-E has become a workplace that is hostile toward educators based solely on their immutable traits. During a recent faculty meeting, teachers were segregated by skin color. Teachers who had light skin were placed into a “white caucus” group and asked to “remember” that we are “White” and “to take responsibility for [our] power and privilege.” D-E’s racial segregation of educators, aimed at leading us to rethink of ourselves as oppressors, was regressive and demeaning to us as individuals with our own moral compass and human agency. Will the school force racial segregation on our students next?

I reject D-E’s essentialist, racialist thinking about myself, my colleagues, and my students. As a humanist educator, I strive to create an inclusive classroom by embracing the dignity and unique personality of each and every student; I want to empower all students with the skills and habits of mind that they need to fulfill their potential as learners and human beings. Neither the color of my skin nor the “group identity” assigned to me by D-E dictates my humanist beliefs or my work as an educator. Being told that it does is offensive and wrong, and it violates my dignity as a human being. My conscience does not have a color.

D-E claims that we teach students how to think, not what to think. But sadly, that is just no longer true. I hope administrators and board members awaken in time to prevent this misguided and absolutist ideology from hollowing out D-E, as it has already hollowed out so many other institutions.

I wouldn’t be ok with what this person states, either. But I have doubts about its truth, and that is surely not what has been happening in my district that people are complaining about. It doesn’t sound like what is being reported in other districts, either (and in looking at the laws and complaints coming out of Texas and other places).

Of all the things that never happened, that never happened the most.

How many hours was the search on for the video and letter? It was time wasted,!

The really scary thing about education in my opinion is the level of distrust between teachers and parents. It seems to be at an all time high. I think that's really driving the ability for the CRT rhetoric to take hold. I'm not really sure there's an easy answer on fixing it, but I'm genuinely concerned about the near term future of public education. We had a "keep CRT out of our schools" candidate for our school board and while they lost, they garnered 45% of the votes, and I live in a pretty liberal area - although this is the more rural section of the district that trends more conservative in general.

What do you think we can do to increase trust that doesn't involve micromanaging teachers?

Maybe it has something to do with this:



I don't agree with banning books either but what books are being talked about here?

www.kvue.com/article/news/education/leander-isd-book-inappropriate-in-the-dream-house-board-meeting/269-63852d91-f8f7-40f7-8de8-6438c9ca757f

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGnMA92oygQ

sanzi.substack.com/p/the-book-includes-sexually-explicit

defendinged.org/incidents/concern-raised-over-sexually-explicit-book-in-olathekansas-seventh-grade-classroom/

I feel that no random parent should dictate curriculum. it should be approved by a school board/state with the INPUT of parents. not veto power.

there are teachers who need to be called out on their stuff. with three kids all through public school, I only really complained. with a written letter three times.. once, 7th grade teacher showed "a man called horse" in english class. what the objective was.. couldn't tell.. but that was an r rated movie and not appropriate in that setting and that age. no notice. 2nd, when a high school english teacher wanted the kids to write 4 paragraphs stating their personal religious beliefs. my daughter was really upset and I found it was against the state education code. then my daughter was really upset with being assigned "the unbearable lightness of being".. they had to watch the movie and read the book. I felt that material belonged in the library and maybe the teacher should have notified parents, and given alternative novel. that is far more sexual graphic than bluest eye. but I went through the system and for the most part, teachers were just fine as was the curriculum. I taught my kids at home extras.. what I knew.. like the pilgrims did not come to let all people to practice religion freely-- they came to show the world the "right way" to live.

screaming at school boards and teachers is not the way.. and people should educate themselves before they scream. I feel my kids learned about history from school, but also from me. we have to tackle the tough subjects of race and history.

Do you think individual parents with no qualifications should be able to decide what your kid is taught or what books are available to them? I guess I'm not seeing where McAuliffe's position is problematic. 

The books currently being questioned in Texas deal with race issues, not graphic sex. Parents are objecting to books that might indicate a white person anywhere ever did anything that might have hurt a person of color because it will supposedly make white kids feel bad about themselves.

I amended my post above to say that the books being questioned in Texas currently are to do with racial issues, not sexual ones. I agree that sexually explicit material should not be in a middle school classroom. I think there can be a time and place for high school students to have the *choice* to read something more graphic, particularly in the context of a book club. I read quickly through the links you posted and did not see evidence that any child was *required* to read one of those books, but I may have missed it.

But the fine people here in my state are mad at books that teach accurate history or current issues because they don't always portray white people in a positive light. I do not think that another parent should be able to have those books removed from school libraries. Parents who want high schools to stop teaching books that tackle painful issues, like Beloved, are not qualified to determine our curriculum.

ETA: if you want to dictate what your child learns, please homeschool them. No one here has time to tailor our lessons to your personal beliefs.

This is the list of books that Texas librarians are being asked to check for and submit reports to the state about how many they have and what they cost. You'll notice that many/most are about race issues. Some present LGBTQ issues in a positive or neutral way, or discuss the history of abortion politics. Note that no one knows where this list came from or that any of those books currently reside in our school libraries - it's a "scare list" for parents inclined to think the schools are indoctrinating their kids.

static.texastribune.org/media/files/94fee7ff93eff9609f141433e41f8ae1/krausebooklist.pdf?_ga=2.11573559.2091958781.1635513476-272773625.1635513476

Librarians are also being asked to identify any books in their schools that cover "human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law, or contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously."

Personally, I think our state would do better to make sure every school has a librarian and a well-stocked library. There are several schools in my district that have neither. Instead, we're asking the librarians we do have to go on a witch hunt for books that may never have seen the inside of a school.

As a parent the biggest problem I have with our school curriculum is the lack of transparency into what is being taught.  For example, during "COVID school" (aka remote learning) I learned in my teen's World History class that the content stopped at World War I.  There was ZERO discussion about World War I, World War II, why they started, how they were stopped, or anything past that.  That to me that is very concerning because we are not teaching kids about the big mistakes humanity as a whole made and think about how to prevent them from happening again.

Parents as a whole are not involved in the happenings of their school districts and don't take the time to learn and understand why something may be done a certain way or a certain subject taught in a certain manner.  Yes, there have been things taught at school that my husband and I do not agree with in the curriculum.  Instead of storming a school board meeting or sending scathing emails to teachers we use it as an opportunity to say and demonstrate "you don't have to think that way because there are other options and those options are....".  We NEED our kids to be free thinkers.  Critical thinkers.  They can't do that when one person/agency is in charge so parents being involved and let's face it, parents don't or won't own it.  Regardless if your kid is a bookworm, artist, athlete, musician, you have to be able to think that means being able to see things from different perspectives.  

I also think public education professionals (not just teachers but many across various operations) need to be a bit more flexible.  Regardless of the career position you are, you can and will get "too deep in the weeds" and be too rigid to routine to see and reflect on different perspectives on how to accomplish something.  Using education as an example I see it all the time in the three different school district volunteer committees I am on.  I even have our superintendent now saying to his staff "don't get so deep in the weeds you can't see the water moving, the fish swimming, and the sun shining".

The "it's my way or the highway" mentality is going to be the downfall of us all regardless of the political side you walk with.