Forget degrees and credentials. Forget grade point averages. Forget competency. It's becoming apparent that, in hiring teachers, education advisers, and "consultants," the American education system needs to start screening for sanity. As evidence I give you one "Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross (they/them)" who is evidently training Bay Area educators on something called "Woke Kindergarten," and it's a humdinger.
A San Francisco Bay-area elementary school was trained by an organization called "Woke Kindergarten," whose leader wants to see America and Israel destroyed as countries, according to posts on social media.
According to the website, the head of the organization is "Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross (they/them)" who "is an abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten."
"I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples, against Indigenous people, has no right to exist," Gross said in a recent Instagram post. "Y'all the demons. Y'all are the villains. We've been trying to end y'all. Get free of y'all."
"I believe in a free Palestine from the river to the sea," Gross continued.
Wow. Just... wow. And this person is proposing to train teachers who will be educating (using the term in the broadest possible sense) the Bay Area's children. While her list of nitwittery is remarkable even for a Bay Area liberal (I will not indulge her lunacy and refer to her with a plural pronoun, which is an affront to the English language), here's the real jaw-dropper:
Gross also believes that there are extraterrestrial beings that are oppressed.
"Solidarity with all oppressed BEINGS. That's what I meant, how I feel and what I should have said. Human, non-human animal & extraterrestrial alike. Universally. Infinitely. Always," Gross posted on Twitter.
You heard it here first, folks. This person, who is training teachers in the Bay Area, not only believes that there are extraterrestrial beings here on Earth but that humans — I'd bet money that she means only white male humans — are somehow "oppressing" them.
"But wait," some might ask, "in the interest of fairness, shouldn't we look at the test scores of students in these programs before we pass judgment?" Well, it's pretty hard to get past the whole "oppressed extraterrestrials" bit without already having passed some judgment as to this person's mental health status (barking nuts) the test scores are indeed pretty revealing.
Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, spent $250,000 in federal funds provided by a program meant to help boost test scores for some of the country’s lowest-performing schools, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. But after two years with "Woke Kindergarten," students’ scores are reportedly worse.
Less than 12% of the students can read at their grade level and under 4% are proficient in math, a 4% drop in both subjects in the last two years, according to the Chronicle.
So, crazy and incompetent. These scores are an utter calamity; less than one in four students can read at grade level, and less than one in 20 are proficient in math, but it's a sure bet they all know their preferred pronouns and can tell you their oppression status.
Lately, though, we've started to see some pushback on woke nitwittery in the schools, which may be cause for hope — unless you live in the Bay Area.
See Related: Indiana AG Launches Awesome Initiative to End Public School Indoctrination
I am so glad our own kids are grown and on their own. We have grandchildren, but they are going to school in a small town in eastern Iowa, where their odds of being exposed to woke nutballery are much less, although not zero. And I'm confident their parents can straighten out any crazy ideas that their teachers might try to inculcate.
This seems appropriate.
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