AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
As the mainstream media continues to slander and intentionally misrepresent conservative efforts to get wokeness out of school curriculum, California is proving precisely why those efforts are urgently needed.
While California schools have been a testing ground for the latest trends in far-left ideology for years, new curriculum standards adopted by the state board of education last month – which effectively destroy accelerated math at every public school in the name of “equity” – have become the latest example of the left’s war on merit in the American education system.
According to Fox News, the term “social justice” appears over 200 times in the new math standards. The authors of the standards also assert that the goal of the curriculum is to make mathematics more “equitable.”
The curriculum has received widespread condemnation from academics and mathematicians. Brian Conrad, a math professor at Stanford, found “many misrepresentations” in the research used to justify the standards, saying that a “major overhaul” is necessary. The LA Times also reported that “a majority of Black faculty members in UC science, math, technology, and engineering fields” said the new standards would “harm students of color by steering them away from math and science fields.”
The change that has drawn the most controversy is an emphasis on “de-tracking” – a term that essentially means all students will be forced to take the same math class at the same time, regardless of skill level.
But instead of encouraging students to take on added challenges, the new curriculum effectively prevents high-achieving students from taking accelerated courses by instructing schools to recommend that “all students take the same rich mathematics courses in kindergarten through grade eight.” The framework goes on to list “teaching toward social justice” as one of the main components of these new “rich mathematics courses.”
As a result of the change, high-achieving students will no longer have a chance to take Algebra I in 8th grade, and will continue along the same track as their peers regardless of the fact that they are ready for more advanced material. As various college professors and STEM professionals have pointed out, not allowing students to take Algebra until 9th grade could have a calamitous effect on their potential to earn jobs in high-demand, high-paying fields like engineering and computer science.
Yet despite the fact that California is actively sacrificing future opportunities for students on the altar of “equity,” the mainstream media has instead chosen to demonize Republican leaders for working to ensure schools in their own states are focused on academic excellence and not woke ideology.
In Florida, for instance, the media has engaged in a relentless weeks-long campaign blasting new history standards introduced by Governor Ron DeSantis’s board of education. With Democrats and even some Republicans piling on, the media has claimed that, as The Washington Post put it, the standards teach that “blacks benefited from slavery.”
At first glance, that claim sounds rather absurd – and it is. The media’s attack on DeSantis’s history curriculum was so dishonest, in fact, that even The New York Times ran an opinion piece from Columbia University linguist John McWhorter coming to DeSantis’s defense.
While McWhorter conceded that some sentences in the curriculum were “ungainly,” he argues that the majority of the curriculum is historically sound, asserting the outcry over the curriculum is about subverting “constructive engagement for the theater of politics.”
As McWhorter points out, the sentence in question that sent the left into a conniption (a direction for teachers to provide instruction on how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”) “was but one passage amid hundreds of others, which constitute an almost exhaustive coverage of the gruesomeness of slavery in the United States.”
“Taken together,” McWhorter continues, “they are such an informed recitation of our racist past that it is almost surprising DeSantis would approve them.”
Just up the coast in Virginia, the media threw a similar tantrum over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies governing transgender issues in schools.
Under the guidelines, public schools in Virginia are now explicitly prohibited from keeping information about a student’s “gender identity” secret from parents, and are required to only use names and pronouns that correspond with what appears on a student’s official record unless otherwise instructed by a parent. Moreover, students are only allowed to compete on sports teams that correspond with their biological sex, and schools must make single-use restroom and locker room facilities available for students who are uncomfortable sharing those spaces with members of the opposite sex.
The guidelines also clearly state that “every effort should be made to ensure that a transgender student wishing to change his or her means of address is treated with respect, compassion, and dignity in the classroom and school environment.”
However, despite this seemingly common-sense and measured approach to the issue – which has proven to be a major distraction in schools throughout the country – the mainstream media declared that Youngkin’s new model policies “roll back protections for transgender students” and are even a threat to their safety.
Yet while outraged liberal journalists insist conservatives like Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis are destroying students’ lives by forcing schools to tell the truth about history and keep parents informed about what’s going on with their kids, far-left lawmakers in states like California are continuing to destroy kids’ futures and potential while the media remains largely silent.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with more than a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.
