Woke Ed Is Making Our Kids Illiterate. The Scholar Activists Must Be Stopped | Opinion

The politicization of education is one of the greatest failures of our time. Instead of focusing on how to help kids, adults are using students as pawns in a political and ideological war. A recent scandal illustrated this principle well: Administrators in the Hayward Unified School District in northern California threw a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars to bring in someone to train teachers to "disrupt whiteness." The money for this "Woke Kindergarten" program came from federal funds "meant to help the country's lowest-performing schools boost student achievement." Yet the program led to a 4 percent drop in proficiency in both math and English.

This case is no aberration. The recipe for helping students succeed in reading and math is one of the worst kept secrets in the history of schooling; academic rigor and increased instruction time are the most effective methods to improve student learning.

Unfortunately, the educational activist industry has become so lucrative that the tried-and-true methods of teaching are all but ignored. Rather than providing resources to underserved communities, standards are lowered, and in some cases even erased altogether. Instead of allowing students to have access to challenging classes, districts are eliminating gifted, honors, and AP programs. It should be no surprise that the students who are most negatively impacted by these decisions are those who live on the margins.

What is also not surprising is that those who are pushing to eliminate achievement benchmarks are elite scholar-activists, who also benefit the most from the degradation of learning—like the activist Akiea Gross behind the Woke Kindergarten, who later posted an anti-America, anti-Israel rant on social media.

Over the past few years scholar-activists have dismissed parents, students, and anyone else who is not on board with their agenda to transform school and society. Many are enacting this transformation through DEI programs, which declare their intention to make schools anti-racist. Others maintain social justice credentials by using "restorative justice" policies that allow districts to ignore behavioral issues.

These aren't just futile exercises in vanity. They are hurting Black children most of all.

From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era, there were two main tracks of education for Black Americans: One focused on building access to classical education for a population that had for centuries been denied the most basic education, while the other set out to develop skilled labor as a means to independence. But nneither of these tracks is widely in use today. Instead, we have activists pushing education policies and programs that maintain a permanent victim-class.

Critical DEI programs are a billions-of-dollars per year bureaucracy, while commonplace in K-12 schools, have little-to-nothing to show for the time and resources spent. From 2020 to 2021, 16 California K-12 districts reported spending an estimated $35 million dollars on DEI programs and resources. No wonder we are experiencing a decline in student learning.

Elite scholar-activists have hijacked the school system in order to push their woke bureaucracy that replaced scholarship with activism, at a financial cost to taxpayers and social cost to students. Students who depend on public schools for education are left behind, while activism is preferred over hard work by those whose guilt encourages them to virtue signal and disrupt "systems of oppression."

The center of elitist educational policies, San Francisco, has been labeled California's "worst county for Black student achievement" with a pitiful 19 percent Black student pass rate on the state reading examination. In 2010, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Board approved ethnic studies, making it a required class in the 2015-16 school year. Like many activist-centered educational policies, ethnic studies is the latest trend to catch hold and claim that it will solve the achievement gap. The California Department of Education allocated $50 million to fund the recent high school ethnic studies requirement. But what is rarely discussed is the cost of such experiments in educational malpractice.

There are many dedicated, hard working educators who do not get the credit they deserve. They face what seem to be insurmountable challenges, and overcome them with the barest of resources. It's past time that they are encouraged and supported.

Activists are convincing administrators to latch on to quick-fix gimmicks that do nothing to improve educational outcomes for students. We need a learning-first educational agenda, where access to excellence is available to all.

As Dumisani Washington once said, education is the civil rights issue of our time. In order to stand on the right side of history, we must stand against the elites who are using children as the rope in their ideological tug-of-war.

Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky is Director of Education and Community Engagement with the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.