Like many other school districts, Montgomery County, Maryland has seen a precipitous drop in its students’ performance. The district’s leadership has invested significant sums to ensure that the schools teach 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. This is 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. This dropped between 30-40 percent, and 54% of MCPS high-school students tested at the recommended proficiency level. MCPS is one school district that says it doesn’t teach Critical Race Theory (CRT). 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.’”
The MCPS superintendent had been scheduled to be present at the webinar. However, he refused at the last minute. It’s a mystery, but I don’t know 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. Kendi and his cohorts are trying to popularize the idea that anyone who isn’t antiracist enough can actually be racist. Of course, we all know who decides what is “sufficiently antiracist,” don’t we? This entire trope is nothing other than an attempt to shame, coerce and coerce individuals into following Kendi’s lead when it comes to being antiracist.
This ideology is what the hard left wants to inculcate children to wokeism. It’s much easier to mould their minds at this age. MCPS officials seem not to be bothered by the low performance. It does not seem that it matters if their students have sufficient antiracist skills.
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