Critical Race Theory Comes for NJ Schools
The NJEA is preparing to train its members for the fully woke curriculum they wish to foist upon New Jersey children
ONE WOULD BE FORGIVEN if they thought the New Jersey Education Association would spend its time preparing its members for a full-time return to the classroom this fall. Instead, the union is following the lead of its national counterpart and taking the summer to ready its critical race theory and protest curriculum.
This would be shocking enough in a normal year. But the NJEA is preparing to wade into a battle that has received significant pushback in school districts around the country at a time when it has very little political capital following its destructive handling of education during the coronavirus pandemic.
In embracing critical race theory — a belief in which an individual is defined by their race, and American institutions are historically racist for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy — the NJEA is following in the footsteps of its parent union, the National Education Association (NEA) and their comrades at the American Federation of Teachers.
Last week, the NEA held its annual meeting, during which it encouraged its members to lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic (Native people, Asian, Black, Latin (o/a/x), Middle Eastern, North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.”
In addition, The Wall Street Journal reports, union delegates voted to approve a study criticizing “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
Following the same adverse reactions that many local school boards have received for sponsoring these regressive views, the union scrubbed its call for critical race theory from its website.
This is merely a battle victory, though. The war continues as the common tactic of changing CRT’s name will likely be instituted, and like a phoenix we never wanted, it will rise from the ashes.
The New Jersey chapter of the teacher union seems to have not gotten the message. And, in a fantastic “hold my beer” moment, it appears to be pushing forward with its Radical Imagination Summit for Educators (RISE) next week.
Instead of providing resources to teachers that deal directly with their mandate to offer a well-rounded basic level of education to K-12 students, the NJEA’s RISE is a workshop in protest and grievance studies.
The opening keynote address is titled “how can educators help disrupt the school-to-prison / deportation-pipeline?”
If you think that keeping kids engaged in school and out of gangs is within the purview of the public education system, you would be correct, and this would be an appropriate address. That is not what this keynote is, though. According to the description, “this deeply intersectional keynote panel will explore and unpack the complexities of the prison-industrial-complex and the impact on our students, families and school system.”
Ah, yes, the “prison-industrial-complex.” Where does deportation factor in, and how will your local high school change immigration laws? Nobody knows for sure yet.
After that question is answered, teachers will attend a lunch break/dance party with DJ Omé (They/Them), where all teachers must remain on a vigilant lookout for any teacher that may appropriate another culture by dancing to music that does not represent their heritage.
After the regimented dancing is complete, teachers will be given the opportunity to think like “conscious global citizens,” with the seminar “Think Global, Act Local.” Of course, there is no such thing as a global citizen — it was a nonsensical turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan belief that remains popular today among the gentry left.
Regardless, this bougie seminar seeks to “share reflections that help frame our thinking around the movement for racial justice and equity paralleling the lessons of post-Apartheid South Africa.”
If seizing personal property such as farmland for distribution by the government is the reflection, this ought to fit perfectly with the radical left-wing view of New Jersey’s teachers’ union.
From there on, the summit takes on a real choose-your-own-adventure theme. Teachers will have the ability to select which smash-the-fash, Marxist theory lesson they want. And, boy, is there plenty to choose from.
One of the most appealing options is the Parcon Resilience workshop. Parcon Resilience, for those that don’t know — and how dare you not — appears to be a slow bump-and-grind mixture of parkour and Tai Chi that “centers movement as a way to co-create anti-racist culture” and “center our bodies in our anti-oppressive praxis.”
If the idea of a bunch of teachers aligning their chakras by slowly touching each other so they can “teach history,” makes you think of the George Orwell quote that, “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them; no ordinary man could be such a fool,” you would not be mistaken.
Another viable seminar involves bringing STEM teachers — that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics — together to use their “content areas to contribute to the broader movement for Black Lives.”
For an idea of what anti-racist math looks like, we turn to California. The Golden State is looking to teach math using a curriculum based on the document “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.”
The guide posits that focusing on the correct answer in mathematics is a trait of white supremacy. That “upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.” Well then, Pythagoras, be damned, math is no longer an objective reality!
Of course, if you just want the quiet part said out loud — or, you thought that teachers were just trying to defend their ability to teach history and had no ideological dog in this fight — you can attend “Teacher Unions & Social Justice with Bob Peterson,” which teaches you “the how-tos of social justice unionism” so you may “forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.”
However, one does not need to attend a seminar to hear the quiet part said out loud. The whole ideology behind critical race theory is already on full display.
CRT is not, as its defenders say, a curriculum dedicated to teaching the horrors of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow — amongst other things — in the United States. To believe such a defense is also to believe that, until the year of our lord 2021, the public school system has never educated young minds about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.
For evidence that CRT is pure ideology, one need only to look at the scorn being cast upon states that have passed anti-CRT bills. As Rich Lowry has detailed at National Review, these anti-CRT bills in no way attempt to whitewash history as their opponents say.
Florida’s anti-CRT bill, for example, explicitly forbids the suppression of “significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and the contributions of women, African American’s and Hispanic people to our country.”
In addition, the Florida bill mandates that students learn the history of African people, the North Atlantic Passage and the horrors of the enslavement period, as well as abolition and the contributions of African American’s to society.
Texas’ bill includes much of the same, according to Lowry, and adds — explicitly — that students be taught “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”
There is no evidence of whitewashing history to be found.
So, why are these states being portrayed this way? Good question. One reason may be what the bills prevent educators from teaching.
Florida’s bill prevents schools from teaching The New York Times’ “1619 project,” which is premised that the United States was not founded in 1776, but instead was founded when the first slave reached the country’s shores and that the American’s fought for independence for the sole purpose of upholding slavery. It also prohibits teaching “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal system in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
It is worth noting that this is what sticks in the craw of CRT proponents and provides the indisputable truth that critical race theory is not about teaching history but about teaching race essentialism so that the belief that the American system of government must be torn down built anew can be propagated.
As residents fight to make sure this toxic ideology stays out of their children’s education, its proponents will perform many crafty maneuvers such as changing the name of critical race theory and denying that they are teaching it while they actively do so inside the confines of a classroom.
New Jersey’s only hope at banishing this racist curriculum is to elect leaders that will fight to craft laws similar to Florida’s. So far, the Republican candidate in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race this November, Jack Ciattarelli, has been soft on the NJEA.
If Ciattarelli wants to juice his campaign, he ought to take a page of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ book and combat critical race theory. The battle for future political power will not be won with tax rebates but will consist of taking back our public institutions.
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