Public schools across the United States increasingly are spending taxpayer money on programs that push quasi-Marxist ideology on their students.
School districts have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on programs such as Deep Equity, Youth Equity Stewardship (YES), and others that claim to help minority students do better at school, but have an ideological agenda mixed in.
Deep Equity and YES are provided by California-based for-profit educational company Corwin. On their face, the programs seek to expose teachers and students to different cultures to help them better understand students of different backgrounds. But piggybacked on that notion is the introduction of more far-left, progressive political theories such as “intersectionality” and “white privilege.”
New Marxism
According to Michael Rectenwald, a former liberal studies professor at New York University and author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and “Springtime for Snowflakes: ‘Social Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage,” the intersectional theory replaced Marxism among contemporary leftists, but bears many similarities to Marxism.Instead of focusing solely on “class struggle,” the theory applies the Marxist concept of “struggle” broadly to relationships between races, genders, ethnicities, religions, and a plethora of other “identity groups.”
“In the case of Marxism, the solution is revolution and overthrow of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. In the case of intersectionality, the solution is to eradicate the ‘privilege’ of the oppressor identity group,” Rechtenwald told The Epoch Times in an email.
Through the lens of intersectional theory, human history is largely reduced to white Christian men being the “oppressors,” and everybody else being “intersected” by one or more layers of this “oppression.”
Similarly, the Deep Equity training manual blames different average educational outcomes between different groups of students on such “systems of oppression.”
The manual, a copy of which was reviewed by The Epoch Times, states, “We go deeply into those historical and contemporary dynamics that have created and sustained systems of oppression, marginalization, and inequity for far too many of our students and their families.”
While the common meaning of oppression usually refers to cruel treatment and subjugation by tyrannical authority, advocates of intersectionality have the term encompass “implicit” (meaning unintentional) actions in day-to-day life.
Equity
“Equity” as portrayed by advocates of “intersectionality” means a demand for students from “identity groups” they deem “oppressed” to receive more resources.Even though “equity” advocates often claim they want to ensure success for everyone, ELI makes clear that “equity” is about taking from some in order to give to others.
YES
The YES guidebook, reviewed by The Epoch Times, promotes much of the same ideology as Deep Equity but in a less obvious manner, such as through art assignments and lyrics of songs taught to the students.“Essentially, students and teachers are being taught anti-white, anti-Christian hate,“ said a parent of a child in the Chandler, Arizona, Unified School District (CUSD), which includes over 45,000 students in the southeastern part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. ”Students are taught to lecture adults about their biases. They are being taught to be social justice activists.”
District officials have defended the programs, saying YES is voluntary for students and that with Deep Equity, the district only used some parts and left out the material parents mainly objected to.
Yet some parents questioned why the district spent money on the programs in the first place, instead of investing in proven measures such as reducing the number of students in each class.
Moreover, YES instructs its participants to proselytize its ideas among students, parents, and school staff.
“It was this training that was specifically activist training and does include more social justice concepts, including oppression and privilege,” the parent, who asked to remain anonymous, said in an email to The Epoch Times.
The district officials themselves, it appears, have subscribed to the theories underpinning the programs.
A questionnaire for applicants to the district’s “Equity Advisory Board” asks, “What experience do you have personally or professionally that helps you to understand issues related to educational equity, diversity and or the intersectionality of race, gender, class, religion and sexual orientation, language, special education, etc.?”
It’s not clear how many school districts have adopted Deep Equity or YES. Social media posts indicate that at least some districts across Arizona, Kansas, and Virginia have done so.
What Is ELI?
ELI is a North Carolina-based for-profit, offering “equity assessment,” workshops, and “strategic planning” to schools. It provides on its website materials such as “Ideological Adjustments for Well-Meaning White Educators” and advocating principles such as “prioritize equity over peace.”It’s not clear in how many states ELI is currently active.
Seed the Way
Another of the Vermont grants went to a project partnering with Seed the Way, a for-profit education consultancy led by Rebecca Haslam, who was awarded Vermont’s State Teacher of the Year in 2015 and is an assistant professor at St. Michael’s College.The “Standards” were produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as “age-appropriate learning outcomes divided into four domains—identity, diversity, justice, and action.”
Haslam didn’t respond to emailed questions.
The Vermont Agency of Education “considers data and legislation to inform policy and practice, including how to prioritize grant opportunities,” Ted Fisher, the agency’s director of Communications and Legislative Affairs, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“These can and often do validate intersectional theory (as it is understood to explicate that individuals can experience marginalization when belonging to many ‘groups’—e.g., economic disadvantage and female; Latinx and LGBTQ; etc.).”
State Roll-Out
Intersectionality doesn’t always enter schools through consultants. Sometimes, states roll it out themselves.Such students should “act as agents of social change to redress historical and contemporary oppression,” the document says.
By Force of Law
It was legal mandates that prompted Eubanks a decade ago to start researching the changing landscape of education, after she noticed legislation that, in her view, opened the door to detrimental changes in education.She’s predicted that the only way to reach the goals of the “equity” advocates would be to change the nature of education itself, moving away from traditional academics and focusing instead on emotions and “experience.”
Eubanks dreaded that vision, pointing out that this way of teaching has known neural effects—it “rewires the brain.” In her view, the schools are increasingly focusing on manufacturing experiences for children, to mold their reactions and worldviews to have them become advocates for a prescribed vision of the world.
“The purpose of equity mandate is consistently to shift the nature of what goes on in education and to do it to us, to make it mandatory,” she said.