https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/...Qlw?li=BBnbfcL
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has embraced
racial essentialism, pledging that her organization is preparing litigation and a legal defense fund to fight state bills barring taxpayer dollars from being used to teach critical race theory.
© Provided by Washington Examiner At the same time, she asserts that CRT isn't actually being taught in K-12 schools — so why is she defending it?
"#CriticalRaceTheory is not taught in K-12 schools,"
wrote Weingarten on Twitter. "The right’s culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as such to try to make it toxic. They’re bullying teachers to try and keep them from teaching the truth."
In some sort of
Schrodinger's contortion of reality, the president of the nation's top teachers union would have us believe that critical race theory is both nonexistent in our public schools and so essential to K-12 curriculums that one of the largest public sector unions in the country has dedicated an entire legal fund to protect its right to teach it. It's a sort of "have your cake and eat it too" mentality, not just because Weingarten and her ilk are so deluded that they think the CRT is a political winner but rather because it distracts from the even more existential crises threatening the entire contemporary public school scam.
The school shutdowns illustrated the worst excesses of the nation's teachers unions but not their greatest failures. To be sure, parents will never buy into the coronavirus canard again as an excuse to shut down the schools. Still, the economic ramifications — more than half of mothers with school-aged children
were out of work in April 2020, with their employment still down by 6.4% by January 2021 — and the educational loss of more than a year will continue to be felt for years after the pandemic is over. But the permanent problem caused by the unions was exposed: that is, the abominable quality of your children's education, not just as it pertains to woke posturing and bad history but basic reading, mathematics, and science.
In 2017, the United States
spent more dollars per student than any nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development other than Luxembourg, Austria, and Norway and 37% more than the entire OECD average. Yet,
according to the 2017 international PISA exam, American 15-year-olds performed not even 1% better than the OECD average in science and in reading. In math, our students performed 4%
worse. Overall, we rank 30th out of the 35 OECD countries in math and 19th in science. Students in the United Kingdom, Estonia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Slovenia, just to name a few, handily bested ours in all three subjects.
And that was before unions like the AFT sent kids home for a year to "learn" from an iPad. With numbers like these, it makes sense why Weingarten would lean into the CRT debate. Teaching
1619 revisionism is obviously evil as a principle, but if these teachers can't even get our kids to beat Russia (!) in math, do we honestly expect they'll be much better at brainwashing them with woke nonsense?
None of this is to downplay the importance of beating the CRT agenda in state legislatures. The public schools must be beholden to the taxpayers funding them, and fighting anti-American propaganda should be a slam dunk for all parents. But equally important is all the warped ways schools have learned to use "anti-racism" as a mechanism to degrade the quality of teaching basic math and science.
Consider the national push to
eliminate standardized testing and gifted programs in the name of "racial equity." On some level, yes, Weingarten and her crew must genuinely look into gifted classrooms and cringe with disgust if they see too many Asian and white students for their liking. But on a much less ideological level, if you're the sort of union that took a virus that doesn't even use children as a significant vector of transmission and used it as an excuse to force taxpayers to pay for a yearlong vacation, why wouldn't you use "anti-racism" as an excuse to teach easier curricula? Train parents to expect all of their children's classmates to score poorly on exams, et voila! You can just claim you've finally achieved racial equity! As with Soviets starving in the gulags, the unions could make students of all races score equally if they commit to intellectually stunted curricula.
"Oh, Tiana, six prep schools in Park Slope banning testing doesn't mean anything!" you may say.
But don't take my word for it —
that is exactly what Weingarten herself wants to do.
A real anti-racist would point out that believing that non-Asian and nonwhite students are incapable of thriving in gifted and advanced programs is actually a vilely racist assumption and that the real focus ought to be on securing better teachers and better curricula for the least privileged students. But that would require work.
CRT is a losing issue for the Left, but it's ever so slightly less catastrophic than parents realizing that an entire generation cannot perform the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic required to survive adult life. For now, it's a distraction that only one as incompetent as Weingarten could consider a relief.
Tags: Opinion,
Beltway Confidential,
Critical Race Theory,
Randi Weingarten,
Education,
Teachers,
Racism
Original Author: Tiana Lowe
Original Location: Teachers unions embrace racial essentialism to distract from their real crisis: Collapsing test scores
typical fascist DPST's - first "No - crt does not exist
Second'We spend millions to teach crt"
as is pointed out - TU's crt issue is a deflection of incompetence in teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic required to survive adult life.
Classic Doublespeak and Groupthink by the fascist DPST's!
Teachers unions embrace racial essentialism to distract from their real crisis: Collapsing test scores
