‘Woke Kindergarten’ program teaches kids to confront white supremacy | Maqvi News

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A Bay Area elementary school spent $250,000 on a “Woke Kindergarten” program where teachers are trained to educate their students about uprooting white supremacy and disrupting racism and oppression.

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But the program, funded through a federal program to help the country’s lowest–performing schools, is failing as the students’ literacy and numeracy rates have plummeted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

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The program’s teachers are trained on specific concepts and curriculum, and available to any of the 474 students at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, Calif., about 30 kilometres southeast of Oakland.

However, student achievement has plunged, leaving some teachers questioning whether the money should have better spent on its students.

Less than 4% of the students are proficient in math and about 12% are proficient in English, a decline of about 4% in each category, according to the publication.

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The philosophy of “Woke Kindergarten” is “abolitionist education,” teaching the children that the current state of the education system is steeped in racism and oppression and cannot be reformed.

Woke Kindergarten’s social media pages are not subtle about its beliefs, including posts of anti-Israel messages and the abolishment of police.

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Students are also taught a “woke word of the day” to educate them on “language of the resistance” and to “introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”

Woke Kindergarten was founded by non-binary early educator Akiea “Ki” Gross, who uses they/them pronouns.

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On its Instagram account, the bio of which reads “abolitionist early learning ecosystem, all power to the little people,” Gross defined “ceasefire” as “an order for people with power in places to stop fighting and using weapons to hurt large groups of people. When people use weapons to hurt others, we call that ‘violence.’”

They explained: “One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire for is in Palestine because they are being occupied, or controlled, by a made up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing the Palestinian people who have always lived on the land.”

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Tiger Craven-Neeley, a Glassbrook teacher and white gay man, told the Chronicle he was banned from the Woke Kindergarten training sessions after he asked a trainer what “disrupting whiteness” meant.

“I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?” he asked the publication.

Hayward Superintendent Jason Reimann defended the school’s decision to hire Woke Kindergarten.

“We are in favour 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back,” he told the Chronicle.

He clarified that the program isn’t intended to improve math and literacy scores but, rather, to help students “feel safe and whole” which is “is part and parcel of academic achievement.”

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