If you want to feel depressed, read this.
An elementary school in Cupertino, California—a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million—recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
California wants ethnic studies to be a required case for every public school student. The curriculum for this course is being designed by adherents of Critical Race Theory (is there anyone under 40 in the field of education who is not an adherent of CRT?). Jews objected to the way that Jews are depicted in the curriculum. Some cosmetic changes are being made, but CRT remains embedded in the curriculum and, more importantly, in the minds of the teachers who will be delivering it.
If you want to feel better, I recommend watching Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.
You forgot to mention that parents complained and shut the program down. The way you write it makes it seem like it is unopposed. This is a dirty trick common in political writing these days: cherry pick an example and make it seem common and unopposed.
I don’t see anything as Arnold implying that anything was unopposed. The sad event actually happened and California does seem intent on ensuring the ridiculous critical theory is actually taught in all schools, filling time which could go towards more important activities, such as math or recess.
I’m glad parents opposed the program, but that’s a bit more of a dog bites man story. The problem is, we all know that the school will likely keep trying until it succeeds.
Here on the Accella corridor they’ve been gutting all the “too Asian” magnet schools and doing all sorts of other nonsense (districting based on race, etc). CRT specialist are drawing up the curriculum.
I think the fact that the school was 88% Asian, and probably more heavily East Asian, probably helped a lot. Hard to see white people pulling such resistance off.
You forgot to mention that the events described *actually* occurred.
Third graders being subjected to racist/Marxist nonsense. Is it no longer acceptable to be outraged by that?
If you want to feel even better, also read this paragraph (which is from the linked essay):
>—“The lesson caused an immediate uproar among Meyerholz Elementary parents. “We were shocked,” said one parent, who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity. “They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old.” This parent, who is Asian-American, rallied a group of a half dozen families to protest the school’s intersectionality curriculum. The group met with the school principal and demanded an end to the racially divisive instruction. After a tense meeting, the administration agreed to suspend the program. (When reached for comment, Jenn Lashier, the principal of Meyerholz Elementary, said that the training was not part of the “formal curricula, but the process of daily learning facilitated by a certified teacher.”)
>—“California wants ethnic studies to be a required case for every public school student”
This makes me nostalgic for the days when libertarians would object to such claims about the collective will. In any event, the the Californians described in our our linked MLK Day essay overwhelmingly rejected Critical Theory. As it turns out, the more the public actually knows about the contents of Critical Theory, the more unpopular it gets.
Indeed, I felt somewhat better after reading this.
I’m not surprised to learn that a private school teacher in a rich California neighborhood is a closet communist that wants to indoctrinate the youth. But I’m pleasantly surprised to see that the Asian community at the school wasn’t having any of the nonsense.
Though it is sickening if not unfortunately altogether surprising that this kind of thing could occur in the first place.
You misspelled “public school”.
Here’s another example from our school district.
They take a three-pronged approach:
1) market the program as anti-racism and inclusive, even though it’s completely racist and divisive
2) call anyone that opposes it a racist and then selectively quote those folks out of context
3) enlist celebrities to further marginalize anyone that disagrees
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2021/01/11/demi-lovato-praises-southlake-carrolls-effort-to-combat-racism-in-viral-instagram-post/
Wait a minute Hans. I had been led to believe that, after fleeing California, you had found a blissful oasis free from this kind of thing.
Does this mean you will want to secede from North Texas now?
Good one, thanks :).
This is a recent development and (channeling my inner EB-ch), we will beat back these barbarians.
Our first grader has been learning about MLK over the past few weeks in school. All is good so far…content of character, not color of skin, which is exactly what we teach her at home.
And yes, North Texas is 50x better than the SF Bay Area. But, utopia will never be an option.
Interesting story…the school in question is 94 per cent nonwhite, in one of the richest communities in the USA. (almost all Asian-Americans).
Only in California, I guess.
The word “cisgender” is apparently the opposite of transgender. I can now go about my day as a cisgender person.
Cupertino (in the heart of Silicon Valley) is compromised primarily of Apple money as their HQ is located there. It has a completely ugly topography, but a short commute.
Oddly enough, I self-identify as cisgender too. I thought I was the only one left :).
From wikipedia:
“The prefixes “cis” and “trans” are from Latin: “this side of” and “the other side of”, respectively. In the context of chemistry, cis indicates that the functional groups are on the same side of the carbon chain[1] while trans conveys that functional groups are on opposing sides of the carbon chain.”
Most natural fats have cis-fatty acids. A lot of unnatural (“hydrogenated”) fats have trans-fatty acids and are considered rather unhealthy. They are the bad “trans-fats” you hear about.
remember reading “atlas shrugged” and thinking that the society being described is an exaggerated caricature of leftist thought ?
+1. Thank you. I had a very similar thought recently.
From the instructor of a corporate antiracist seminar:
“All white people are racist. So, I put this up because I really want any white person in the room to know, up front, that this is what we’re dealing with. The it’s not going to be this coddling of white tears and what that looks like. We’re not going to discuss, ‘Oh, maybe some of us have worked it out.’ No, you’re always going to be racist, actually. So, even when you’re on your path to trying to figure out how to be a better human being – because I believe that white people are born into not being human. Like that, actually, instead of people of color and black folks being dehumanized, that, actually, everyone is dehumanized within white supremacy. That y’all are born into a life to not be human, and that’s what y’all are taught to do, to be demons. So, in this particular way, white people are all racist, so I just want y’all to know that up front.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5keqoXCIrq0&feature=emb_title
I’d like to know which corporations have hired her so I can boycott them.
If there even are any.
The emails I get from my chief diversity officer don’t sound all that different. Hiring and business decisions have to incorporate what are in effect racial quotas.
Calling all white people inhuman demons sounds different to me from trying for more diversity in hiring. But, as always, you are as much a victim of your racial grievances as any Critical Theories proponent.
Start with the Huffington Post, she’s a contributor there. Her writing on race in her various blogs and websites appear to be every bit as Hitlerian as her video (I was curious, and now I regret it).
OK I did start there Mark. I found one post she wrote for them on the oppression of the fat and non-binary. Then I Googled her and read through the first dozen hits.
I found a lot of idiocy there. What I didn’t find was the slightest evidence that any corporation had ever hired her to be “the instructor of a corporate anti-racist seminar.”
This appears to be yet another example of finding the dumbest thing anybody on the other side has said on the internet and offering it up as typical as what the other side should be understood to think.
True, there is no reason to waste intellectual effort on her. She’s not quite a nobody though. I guess of take note of it because of arguments one heard against supposed false equivalence or whatever, that one doesn’t necessarily even need to go to fringe websites to find the left analog to Ron Unz etc., sometimes they live in pretty mainstream places.
I suppose I should be pleased the reporter mentioned that the school is 94% nonwhite and, more importantly, about 81% Chinese, even if Arnold missed that critical fact. Some readers got that far.
But the reporting on this is just ludicrous.
1) Cupertino is 63% Asian. The only reason whites are still mostly running the political scene is because it’s 31% white and each Asian demographic is 25% or under–and a lot of that is immigrants, who can’t yet vote. But from a financial power perspective, Chinese have a lot of power.
2) Asians aren’t woke. They are absolutely *more* racist than whites, particularly Chinese, particularly immigrants.
3) Asians are almost completely immune to shame or cancellation, again, particularly immigrants, particularly when they live in cocoons such as Cupertino.
Thus, the real question is not “are schools imposing critical race theory” but “why on earth would this Cupertino elementary school be stupid enough to think they could impose critical race theory on an Asian school?” Whites in progressive areas have something to lose by protesting. Asians don’t. School staff, which are generally majority white, usually know this about Asians. So the question is what idiot dictated the indoctrination to an Asian school?
If I were a reporter, the obvious thing to do is check the demographics of all the Cupertino elementary schools (high schools are almost all 50-80% Asian), and see if enough of them were majority white that a critical race policy imposed on white students, whose white Cupertino parents would risk a great deal by protesting, then someone could have come up with the plan. Hilariously, the same pressures that stop whties from protesting would stop white staff from saying “Uh, we can’t roll this out on Asian schools, right?” because a) they can’t admit that Asian parents aren’t woke and b) they can’t admit that they are doing it as a power play, but really righteous education of the ignorant.
Because if there aren’t enough majority white elementary schools in Cupertino, this was an insanely stupid move.
But because the reporter and almost all the conservatives talkinga bout this are utterly ignorant of diverse area politics, because they “think white”, they have no idea what makes this weird. They are SYMPATHETIC to the Asian parents. They’re utterly ignorant of the fact that cocooned Asian parents generally actually *hate* black and Hispanics and tell their kids to avoid friendships with white kids because white kids know their parents actually can’t kill them if they don’t get As.
It’s just ridiculous how completely ineffective conservatives are in these handwringings. One things for sure–they sure as hell aren’t helping white parents with these takes. And Asian parents in these communities not only don’t need support, but would reject the kids of these conservatives as inadequate.
I suspect it takes an overwhelming Asian presence. Asians couldn’t save magnet schools in NYC, Fairfax, etc despite being most of the attendees and a decent size of the population for Asians.
Your point about East Asians and especially Chinese is well taken. Other “Asian” groups are a lot more OK with quotas and wokeness (Indians for instance).
Actually, the magnet schools are mostly white and that’s going toc create problems. In 2002, Michael Bloomberg made NYC all choice, and whites used this as a way to get away from the absurdities of the test schools. They created their own comfortably diverse, high achieving schools with simple requirements like “basic or proficient test scores”. As a result, white interest in the specialized high schools plummeted–Asians and whites have roughly the same numbers in NYC but twice as many Asians as whites try for the specialized high school, with roughly the same acceptance rate (Asians a couple points higher). Safe bet most of the whites trying to get in are also immigrants.
Asians have no pull in NYC because whites are done supporting them. Whites don’t want AA, but they’re no longer believing that “merit” means what it used to.
In any event, closing the magnet middle schools may lead to closing magnet high schools, and that will piss off whites a lot more than Asians. But diBLasio has more control over that than the specialized high schools.
By magnet schools I mean Stuyvesant, etc which is 74% Asian.
If you can close a school for being too Asian, it ain’t exactly a stretch to close it for being too white.
Stuyvesant isn’t a magnet school, and it is unaffected by the diBlasio directive. Any change to the specialized high schools has to be done at the state level.
“If you can close a school for being too Asian, it ain’t exactly a stretch to close it for being too white.”
Not my point. Asians are, as you point out, a minority, and they have always relied on white’s reflexive opposition to affirmative action. However, Asians themselves routinely sue to get diversity percentages removed, and the people *they* are removing tend to be white (cf Lowell High School case back in the 90s). And suburban whites find the obsessive cult around grades, particularly combined with relatively little interest in underlying knowledge, unattractive. So whites are no longer in favor of keeping the test based schools.
But that’s besides the point because, as I said, diBlasio’s attack was against white majority schools. The specialized high schools weren’t involved. He is trying to get rid of those, and there will be little opposition from whites–although again, since he’s stupid enough to attack the magnet schools first, who knows?
I suspect, though, that it will jsut result in white flight.
Maybe we have a different definition of magnet school. To me the word means “school you have to test to get into with a very high bar for admittance”. Stuyvesant’s average SAT score would indicate on average those people are in the top 1%.
This differs from regular charter schools that don’t test to get in (or use anywhere near as high a standard).
At least that’s what the words meant back in the stone ages when I was in high school.
Last I heard they were going to let in people who couldn’t get the same test scores to places like Stuy for racial balance reasons. Maybe that changed. Down here the two Stuyvesant like places got that shoved down their throats.
While you don’t have to convince me that Asians often grind too much for their own good, I’m not convinced lazy UMC white kids complaining that Asians study too hard is really a crisis that requires overturning the meritocracy. I was one of very few white kids in an Asian magnet school and I liked it a lot better then my mediocre white high school. If a shooting war ever breaks out in the South China Sea, I hope that the people designing and firing the missiles on my side studied hard enough rather than complained.
You don’t misunderstand the definition. You merely misunderstand that diBlasio isn’t changing the enrollment for those schools. Which I’ve said three times.
“Obsessive cult around grades” != “study too hard”.
“Asians aren’t woke. They are absolutely *more* racist than whites, particularly Chinese, particularly immigrants.”
It would be helpful if you defined the term racist and then provide some evidence or anecdotes of what you mean.
My reason for asking: in my bubble, the Asian folks aren’t particularly racist and nor are the whites. But, discrimination based on class…absolutely. No one wants to see his/her daughter marry down regardless of the skin tone of the suitor.
” the Asian folks aren’t particularly racist and nor are the whites.”
Then you don’t live around huge numbers of Asian immigrants and I”m not saying whites are racist.
And you’re wrong. Even highly integrated Asians don’t want to see their kids marry rich, college-educated blacks or Hispanics.
The problem with going back to the MLK well is that he embraced something like CRT himself within a short time of civil rights legislation, and probably would have run even further with it had he not been killed. He was even starting to get more friendly with the concept of violence. I think it’s just a natural thing to gravitate to when you believe in equality but have disparate impact.
As to Glenn’s talk, the big problem is that any realistic discussion would inevitably have to acknowledge the truth that a lot of black people are going to be at the bottom of whatever we come up with as a society. Even if we made all the right decisions. Even if we put the entire Bell Curve suite of prescriptions into effect. And I think for a lot of people they’d rather live the lie than face the truth. For some because the lie has led to a better outcome for them personally. For others because the truth doesn’t offer much more than the lie.
LKY said in a speech once that he couldn’t solve everyones problems. That they shouldn’t even vote for him if they thought he could. That if he did his job really well, maybe he could make their life 10-15% better and that is about it. What’s 10-15% better then what’s going on in the ghetto right now? Still shit.
Even the biggest possible improvements, such as improving marriage rates in the lower class, aren’t strictly racial issues, and it’s not clear that an honest conversation about race would solve those problems on their own. If we had an honest conversation about race tomorrow, that still wouldn’t fix Fishtown or its black equiviliant. And an honest conversation about genetics in general seems even farther away than an honest conversation about race.
I wish Glenn the best. He’s right that its a bluff and that if it ever got called it would be like a raging damn breaking with all the pent up cognitive dissonance. Charles said as much in the Bell Curve.
“ (is there anyone under 40 in the field of education who is not an adherent of CRT?)”
So is it time to tighten up the null hypothesis? Maybe it should be “The education system of the United States is garbage.” Is there any persuasive evidence with which to reject this null hypothesis? One is hard pressed to think of anything that would soggest it does less harm than good.
Tons of evidence, not least of which is the fact that people identified as intelligent do better than people who aren’t. Brains matter more than parental SES on average.
“The majority of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement reveal a positive effect for the homeschooled students compared to institutional schooled students, while a few studies show mixed or negative results. Regarding social and emotional development, a large majority of studies show clearly positive outcomes for the homeschooled compared to those in conventional schools.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582159.2017.1395638
Better results outside the union schools, no public subsidy.
In fairness, the home school population self selects for people extraordinarily concerned about raising and educating their children very well.
Don’t fuss him with reality, Justin. Edgar thinks any mom living on welfare with 4 kids and a drug addiction could pull her kids out of public schools and educate them just fine.
It’d be nice if we could extend the logic of separation of church and state to cover politics as well, at least in some circumstances. People sympathetic to this ideology should be made to see this as akin to teaching public school children Catholic apologetics, and they’d expect even Catholics to see why that’s unfair. They tend to believe political neutrality is undesirable or impossible, but if true then so it religious neutrality. Anyone who honestly expects religious people to reject theocracy (or atheists to not try to use the state to quash religion) should also see the value in having a neutrality heuristic with respect to politics when it comes to things like schools and government agencies.
Arnold, the barbarians didn’t find resistance in universities populated by young people eager to break with their parents. They started long ago their push for controlling them and to a large extent, they have succeeded. It’s time to fight back by defunding universities (as well as the big research programs on behavioral and social sciences and the new humanities that have been used to produce activists).
Not surprisingly the barbarians have found resistance at the school level because to some degree parents still watch what their children are getting. Also, I’m not surprised that in comments to your post, the little puppets of the rotten and corrupt democrats are trying to limit the consequences of the barbarians’ attempts to control education at all ages.
I hope you focus on strengthening the resistance. Good luck.
Don’t think this is just some public school problem.
I read any essay by Jonathan Haidt about speaking to an expensive private high school in Silicon Valley. He found the same kind of putrid ideology.
It is “in the air.”
The irony is that the parents who are rebelling against the abuse of their children may well have voted for the political party that is happy to abuse them. And will keep doing so.
Arnold, if you want to feel depressed, you should know who will be working for the barbarians:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/01/18/a-severely-compromised-senator-mark-warner-is-about-to-become-chairman-of-the-senate-intelligence-committee/
And don’t forget Hunter Biden and his father.
On Aff. Action, I now believe it has been more negative for the Black communities. A Brain Drain of the best Blacks OUT of the mostly Black local communities into more integrated, more white communities. Leaving a lack of many of the best Blacks for the other Blacks to look up to.
There’s a similar argument about an Africa Brain Drain to the US – where the most promising Blacks get educated, often with US aid (and/or USAID), and then leave their own country for the USA. With much better opportunity.
[maybe reduce it by targeting more aid to married Black folks with jobs who stay in school districts with a high proportion of students not from married families. Incentives work. Including the bad one of rewarding girls having babies unmarried to fathers.]
Good words and good ideas are good based on the words, and the ideas.
NOT ‘the identity” of the person saying them, or doing them.
Even bad, evil people can say good things – and the good things said are still good.
More importantly, even sinners can discuss and believe in ideals that they fail to achieve in their own lives.
I read that MLK had more than 40 affairs with other women – based on FBI “secret” tapes & J. Edgar Hoover obsessive spying on him.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7071713/FBI-tapes-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-40-affairs-laughed-friend-raped-parishioner.html
I don’t like Trump’s cheating on all of his 3 wives; don’t like Clinton cheating on his wife; don’t like MLK cheating on his wife.
The good words, and especially the good ideals, are just as “good” despite the flaws of the speaker – tho the ability of normal people to achieve the ideals should be more questioned.
The US Black problem is far more systemic promiscuity, than systemic racism.
Every system will have kids of married parents do better, on avg, than kids of unmarried parents.