I remember how it was -- JR
AP Teacher’s Guide Proves DeSantis Right in African-American Studies Clash
Last week’s rejection by Florida governor Ron DeSantis of the College Board’s pilot AP African-American Studies (APAAS) course has kicked up a controversy. Last Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely accused DeSantis of trying to “block . . . the study of black Americans.”
In reality, DeSantis barred only this specific and very biased APAAS course plan — while inviting the College Board to revise it. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act actually mandates the teaching of a series of topics in the history of black Americans, from slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination, to the overcoming of these injustices, and more.
So there is no question here of “blocking the study of black Americans.” The issue is what specific sort of curriculum a given state should favor.
The debate over APAAS has been complicated by the College Board’s secrecy. The College Board has steadfastly refused to release the APAAS curriculum framework or associated materials. Nonetheless, I obtained a copy of the APAAS curriculum and wrote about it in September, laying out its socialist agenda and its promotion of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Unfortunately, no one could judge the accuracy of my characterization because the curriculum remained secret. I confined myself at the time to a “fair use” discussion of the framework, declining to publish the full curriculum out of respect for the College Board’s insistence that it was a “trade secret.” In the wake of the controversy, however, the Florida Standard newspaper has obtained a copy of the pilot APAAS curriculum and made it public.
In another new development, I have now obtained a copy of a second document, the “APAAS Pilot Course Guide,” a manual designed for use by teachers. Taken together, the curriculum framework and the teacher’s guide expand our understanding of the course in a way that confirms the wisdom of DeSantis’s decision.
The most serious problems in APAAS are in the final quarter of the class (“Unit 4: Movements and Debates”). This is where the course grapples with contemporary political and cultural controversies. Overwhelmingly, APAAS’s approach is from the socialist Left, with very little in the way of even conventional liberal perspectives represented, not to mention conservative views. Most of the topics in the final quarter present controversial leftist authors as if their views were authoritative, with no critical or contrasting perspectives supplied. The scarcely disguised goal is to recruit students to various leftist political causes. Now let’s get down to cases.
The fourth quarter of the course features a topic on “The Movement for Black Lives.” The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) was started by the Marxist organizers who founded Black Lives Matter. Yet M4BL extends far beyond BLM, encompassing “over 170 Black-led organizations.” M4BL is organized around an extensive policy platform, the “Vision for Black Lives.” That platform is radical, to say the least. As you might expect, it includes planks such as defunding the police. M4BL’s platform goes further, however, by calling for the abolition of all money bail, and even all pretrial detention. To this end, the “Vision for Black Lives” endorses federal legislation by “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of M4BL’s extensive policy menu as a mere attempt to influence the platform of the Democratic Party. As explained by Marxist activist Robin D. G. Kelley (whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic), the real purpose of M4BL’s platform is to serve as a “blueprint for social transformation,” radically changing the structure of American society by shifting us away from market principles and toward “’collective ownership’ of certain economic institutions” and a universal basic income.
Kelley also highlights the expansive nature of what he calls M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, the concept of reparations goes far beyond massive monetary awards and includes even “mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.” According to Kelley, M4BL wants these changes so schools can undermine “the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education.” In other words, M4BL (and Kelley) want schools to inculcate the basic premises of Critical Race Theory.
The APAAS teacher’s guide presents M4BL’s agenda in a way that is entirely free of criticism or alternative viewpoints. All the recommended topic readings support Black Lives Matter, and the “possible focus areas” provided for teachers uncritically summarize M4BL’s policy platform.
One of two recommended books for this topic is From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Taylor is a socialist, and in no way shy about it. Her book argues that BLM is a step toward what ought to be a revolutionary socialist transformation of the United States. While Taylor rejects Stalin’s authoritarianism, she remains quite fond of Marx and Lenin. Taylor sees capitalism as synonymous with racism, and she argues that any successful struggle against racism must ultimately replace capitalism as well. Taylor also dismisses “colorblindness” as a ploy to disguise the racism inherent in the capitalist system. (This view of colorblindness is excluded from Florida’s curriculum by law.)
Far from BLM fulfilling American ideals, as Taylor sees it, “when the Black movement goes into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States,” exposing “the foundational lie of the United States as a free and democratic society.” Taylor ends her book with a quote from the Marxist intellectual and “revolutionary,” C. L. R. James: “The hatred of bourgeois society and the readiness to destroy it when the opportunity should present itself, rests among [Blacks] to a degree greater than in any other section of the population in the United States.”
Virtually all APAAS authors in the final quarter of the course are part of the same tight group of far-left activists. Taylor’s book carries an enthusiastic blurb from Barbara Ransby, the author of the other book assigned for this topic; another blurb from Robin D. G. Kelley, the Marxist radical whose work is the subject of the very next APAAS topic; and a blurb from Michelle Alexander, whose work is the subject of a previous APAAS topic. In general, readings by authors assigned in the final quarter of APAAS endorse, are endorsed by, and overlap with, other APAAS readings. When it comes to APAAS’s treatment of contemporary policy debates, conventional American liberals and conservatives need not apply.
The APAAS topic immediately prior to the topic on “The Movement for Black Lives” covers “The Reparations Movement.” We’ve just seen that the most controversial demand of M4BL is reparations, expansively defined to include even mandated school curricula. So why does APAAS include yet another topic on reparations? It may not add up as an educational strategy, but it is an effective political recruiting tool.
The three suggested items for study in the reparations topic are Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations,” a button that the teacher’s guide says serves to “promote” reparations for the Tulsa race massacre, and the copy of H.R. 40, a federal bill that sets up a commission to develop proposals for reparations. It’s clear from these assignments that APAAS itself is promoting reparations. No article criticizing this highly controversial policy is assigned. In effect, APAAS is pushing students to lobby for legislation. And by the way, M4BL also endorses H.R. 40, so students will find the same de facto call to legislative lobbying waiting for them in two successive topics.
The teacher’s guide purports to outline “debates” over reparations, yet the so-called debates don’t actually involve arguments against reparations. By “debates,” the guide simply means practical disagreements about who exactly should pay for reparations, who exactly should benefit, and the precise mixture of monetary compensation and public apology to be demanded. There is no disagreement about reparations as such. This is political advocacy, pure and simple.
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Chinese Communist Party Targets American Kids by Infiltrating K-12 Schools
Congressional Republicans and Asia policy experts are sounding the alarm over the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on K-12 education as well as colleges in America through what are called Confucius Classrooms and Confucius Institutes.
“Confucius Institutes and Classrooms allow the Chinese Communist Party to wield influence throughout the American education system, projecting the CCP’s preferred message in the United States,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chairman of a new House select committee on China, told The Daily Signal in an email.
The full name of the panel created Jan. 10 by Republican leadership is the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
“The Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will fight back against the malign influence of the CCP wherever it impacts American interests and national security, whether that be in the private sector or in the classroom,” Gallagher said.
Confucius Institutes, founded in 2004, are China-funded “cultural” centers that operate on college campuses. In the past few years, these centers have come under increased scrutiny as operations of Chinese state influence.
“For years, the Chinese Communist Party has been using Confucius Institutes as a Trojan horse to push their propaganda and revisionist history in American universities. Their goal is to control what we see, hear, and think about China,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn, who introduced related legislation called the Transparency for Confucius Institutes Act in 2021, told The Daily Signal in an email.
“No foreign government should have the ability to influence American education—especially a rogue regime that commits egregious human rights violations and consistently undermines our democracy. Confucius Institutes, in any form, must be erased from U.S. society immediately,” Blackburn said.
An estimated 500 K-12 schools in the U.S. have had Confucius Classrooms, according to a National Association of Scholars report, “After Confucius Institutes: China’s Enduring Influence on American Higher Education.”
“Confucius Classrooms are essentially the K-12 parallel to Confucius Institutes, but they’re a lot less well documented. In many cases, they have survived even when the Confucius Institutes they were attached to have closed, which is particularly interesting,” John Metz, president of the Athenai Institute, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
The Athenai Institute describes itself as a nonpartisan, student-founded organization focused on removing the influence of the Chinese Communist Party from American college campuses.
“A number of them were established alongside or sort of in conjunction with the Asia Society,” Metz said of Confucius Classrooms. “But in January 2022, they announced that they were discontinuing their formal affiliation with Hanban.”
Hanban, also known as Confucius Institute Headquarters, changed its name in July 2020 to the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, Fox News reported. The center is part of the Chinese Ministry of Education.
“But a lot of those Confucius Classrooms remain, and in a nutshell, we see Confucius Classrooms as yet another way that the CCP tries to exercise control over, really, the way Americans think about China,” Metz told The Daily Signal.
Metz continued:
I think a lot of people might think that because Confucius Classrooms don’t necessarily provide access to cutting-edge research and because K-12 schools don’t necessarily, in a lot of people’s minds, play the same role in sort of shaping a generation of leaders, that therefore they’re not as important. But there are hundreds of [Confucius Classrooms] around the country.
At least 500 American school districts, K–12 school districts, have established … Confucius Classrooms at one time or another. And a lot of them provide the same kind of opportunity to shape discussion, not just of the Chinese language, but also of sensitive subjects like Chinese history in a way that’s favorable to the CCP.
Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms are “just one other example of how the CCP manipulates the interests of U.S. educational institutions for its gain,” said Michael Cunningham, a research fellow in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“So, they fund programs in the U.S., and they are able to staff them with their own teacher, their own instructors. They’re able to prescribe the curriculum that’s used and really create the curriculum,” Cunningham told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Ian Oxnevad, program research associate at the National Association of Scholars and co-author of the report “After Confucius Institutes: China’s Enduring Influence on American Higher Education,” warned of the potential threats and dangers associated with Confucius Classrooms, which he said “are largely the same” as Confucius Institutes.
“You still have foreign influence, obviously, shaping of the views of China of American kids, and that’s going to affect future public sentiment toward China,” Oxnevad told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “China’s not a benign regime, so … the influence operation matters.”
Oxnevad continued:
But on top of that, the fact that it’s just a matter of educational sovereignty. This is not something that really gets talked about. But if you have sovereignty as a concept, it should be applied to education as well. You shouldn’t be inviting a foreign power in to teach your children.
What country in their right mind would do that? Neocolonial powers do that. Colonial powers back in the day did that in developing countries. That’s not a healthy thing that a country should do.
Oxnevad also outlined what he thinks should be done about Confucius Classrooms.
“Make them illegal and shut them down,” Oxnevad said. “There’s no Catch-22 here. You wouldn’t let the Soviet Union come in and teach Russian to children, nor would you let Nazi Germany do the same with German. Why would you want China doing this? Especially when there’s plenty of resources here to teach Chinese as it is.”
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Parents Seethe Over Schools’ ‘Social-Emotional Learning’ Exercises
Activists and parents are protesting what they see as increasing pressure on children to divulge personal information in school activities in an effort to build empathy in social-emotional learning exercises.
The latest example comes from the coast of Long Island, New York, where Shelter Island parents stormed a local school board earlier this month after an activity that crossed the line for many parents.
The activity, “Cross the Line,” asked students to respond to various prompts about their identity. Students situated themselves on either side of a line in response to the prompt, hence the name. Middle-school students were asked questions about their identity — political affiliations, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender identity, and personal traumas.
According to the Shelter Island Reporter, some were even asked whether they had been victims of sexual assault or had suicidal ideations. The Reporter says the activity’s goal was “to make students aware of differences and similarities and … to develop empathy.”
Apparently, however, empathy was not increased universally after the activity, and students were bullied based on their responses. Parents demanded resignations and asked that the “Cross the Line” exercise never be conducted again.
The district superintendent, Brian Doelger, apologized and admitted to the Reporter that there was flawed execution in the program.
“Cross the Line” is just one activity related to social-emotional learning goals, which aim to work on students’ soft skills — self-awareness, empathy, decision-making, and more.
It’s also a fast-growing industry of curriculum sales and facilitated workshops, a market valued at about $1 billion annually, with public school districts shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars collectively for resources on SEL.
While social-emotional learning has not generated as much opposition as critical race and gender ideology, they are viewed as part and parcel by some school administrators — including the New York education department.
The state education department sees “equity” as an important part of its social-emotional learning mandate, particularly understanding the root causes and manifestations of so-called implicit bias, or judging others based on stereotypes.
“Implicit bias stands as a major obstacle to achieving equity in education, but increasing SEL competencies can help us to manage it,” a primer from the state on social-emotional learning reads. “Equity, implicit bias, CRT, and SEL are inextricably intertwined.”
One of the major parental rights activist groups, Parents Defending Education, has dedicated resources for learning about SEL and fighting what they call “transformative SEL” programs in schools.
“‘Transformative SEL’ is basically race and gender ideology embedded into what had previously been neutral student competencies,” the Parents Defending Education guide reads.
The organization’s vice president, Asra Nomani, has called SEL a “Trojan horse” used to funnel more controversial ideas about race and gender into classrooms. It’s another flashpoint in the ongoing battle between parent activists and teachers.
The largest teachers union in the country, the National Education Association, says SEL programs “increase student achievement” and help them develop lifelong skills.
The conflict between parents and schools on the issue will be headed to court in a new lawsuit. On Wednesday, America First Legal announced a lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district for refusing to grant religious exemptions to SEL instruction.
The plaintiffs in the case believe the school’s SEL curriculum “conflicts with their Christian beliefs.” The school administration refused to grant the request for an exemption because the parents did not identify “specific instruction within the curriculum” that was antithetical to Christianity.
Elsewhere, the issue is being addressed by statewide policy makers. In Louisiana, the state board of education is revisiting its SEL curriculum and standards after receiving hundreds of comments opposing it, according to NOLA.com.
Critics allege that the current iteration would encourage conversations about gender identity in students as young as 5 years old.
In Arizona, the recently elected superintendent of public instruction has planted a firm flag in the anti-SEL camp. The superintendent, Tom Horne, canceled all seminars on social-emotional learning at a statewide teachers conference this week. He also canceled sessions on diversity and race.
https://www.nysun.com/article/parents-seethe-over-schools-social-emotional-learning-exercises
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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