Like many other school districts, Montgomery County, Maryland has seen a precipitous drop in its students’ performance. But at least the district will have less racist students because its leadership invested a sizeable sum into ensuring that schools are teaching enough antiracism.

Washington Free Beacon published a report revealing that the district paid an “antiracist” consulting firm almost $1 million for a survey designed to make sure teachers were teaching six-year-old students enough about antiracism. From the report:

The survey, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, gives Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) parents a chance to rate the district’s “antiracism” curricula. The survey asks parents if they believe their children are being “taught about the negative effects of racism in their classes” and whether school libraries “represent people of diverse races, skin colors, ethnicities, and cultures.”

The report notes that since 2020, the district has allocated almost $1 million in taxpayer funds to a firm called the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium (MAEC), a popular “antiracist” consulting group. Dear reader, I believe you and I are in the wrong line of business – there’s a lot of paper to made in this antiracism grift.

Not surprisingly, parents whose kids attend schools in the district aren’t very happy about this and have argued that the county is prioritizing wokeism over, you know, education.

“They’re spending so much funding on this, and test scores are down,” former Montgomery County school administrator Dee Reuben told the Free Beacon. “Parents are livid. I hear this every day—parents are afraid to speak out because they’re afraid of the repercussions that will happen to their kids. Academics is going down the tube, and I think that is a shame considering we were one of the top school systems around—it breaks my heart.”

The county’s literacy readiness dropped drastically in 2021. It fell between 30 and 40 percent and only 54 percent of MCPS high school students test at or above the required proficiency level. MCPS happens to be one of those school districts that claims it does not teach elements of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in its classrooms. However, the article points out that “Byron Johns, the chairman of the NAACP Maryland chapter’s Education Committee, hosted an online webinar in November titled ‘Eliminating Institutional Bias: How New MCPS Data and Critical Race Theory Could Help.’”

MCPS superintendent was supposed to appear at the webinar but decided against it at the last second. Gee, I wonder why?

As RedState’s Mike Miller reported, the survey asked parents a series of questions, including whether they “believe my child should be taught to recognize, understand, and interrupt racism,” and others. Call it Critical Race Theory, call it progressive antiracist ideology – you can call it Happy Panda pedagogy for all I care – this is yet another effort to indoctrinate students into embracing the hard left’s ideas about race and racism.

But there’s another part of this story that is worth discussing and it has to do with the fact that MCPS, as well as other districts, have shown they are willing to prioritize wokeism over education. The fact that their leadership allocated almost $1 million ostensibly to make for less racist and more antiracist students is ludicrous – one does not need Dr. Ibram X. Kendi to teach kids how not to be bigoted.

Moreover, progressives’ focus on antiracism over teaching people that racism is wrong is more about accepting tenets of wokeism than actually making for a better society. As we already know, Kendi and his ilk are attempting to normalize the notion that if one is not sufficiently antiracist, they are, in fact, racist. Of course, we all know who decides what is “sufficiently antiracist,” don’t we? This whole trope is nothing more than a naked attempt to compel, shame, and coerce people into bowing to the likes of Kendi and others like him when they dictate how one is supposed to be antiracist.

It is this ideology into which the hard left seeks to inculcate young children into the wokeism religion; it is far easier to mold their minds at these ages. The low performance does not seem to bother MCPS administrators. Apparently, as long as their students are sufficiently antiracist, it does not matter if they are sufficiently educated.