This Bay Area school district spent $250,000 on Woke Kindergarten (sfchronicle.com)

I also heard about this on social media – and thought it was probably blown out of proportion. Then I found the above news article and see that – oddly enough, the social media posts were correct.

The Hayward, CA school district hired an outside educational consulting named “Woke Kindergarten” to improve education and skills. But the program resulted in student skills going down. The school district that had hired the outside program was not even aware that scores had fallen after bringing in the program.

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning.

….

District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

….

But some Glassbrook teachers have questioned the decision to bring in the program, saying Woke Kindergarten is wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.

This tension is reflective of the nation’s ongoing culture wars, where the right and the left battle to influence what happens in classrooms. 

Thus, the program is a propaganda-based exercise designed to persuade children to adopt someone else’s agenda.

As reported, above, the school district did not know things had gotten worse – and yet it is their job to understand what is going on in their school.