California mandates victimhood curriculum. But will students be able to read it? Jonathan Butcher writes:
[W]hile 57 percent of black fourth grade students and half of hispanic fourth grade students cannot read at even a basic level, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a law in 2016 that required the state board of education to create a model ethnic studies curriculum, a project that is awash in ambiguous ideas and historical inaccuracies.
Start with the definition. The draft materials define ethnic studies as “the disciplinary, loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity.” Confused? There is a helpful footnote that says, “Throughout this model curriculum, language is used that deliberately offers an alternative to traditional wording that could have a particular context within the dominant culture. More information about these terms can be found in the glossary.”
Parents will not know what their child is learning because the state is making up words, but at least there is a glossary. More harmful are the few intelligible ideas. As William Evers, a former member of the California Academic Content Standards Commission, recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the model curriculum says capitalism is a “form of power and oppression” and such systems “dehumanize” people.
Yet as more nations have adopted free market ideas over the last 20 years, some one billion people, of different ethnicities, have been lifted out of poverty, a finding noticeably absent from the California draft curriculum. There is no discussion of the disaster that is Venezuela due to tyrannical socialism. Venezuela is mentioned in the sample teaching materials, though, in the lyrics to a rap song that include a helpful tip to “get out, Yankees, from Latin America,” which is provided in multiple languages.
Parents and students on both sides of political debates should object to this project. Conservatives will bristle at the inclusion of the revisionist history of Howard Zinn. Black and hispanic families, who overwhelmingly voted for liberal candidates in California, should ask why state officials are focusing on ethnic studies when the gap between white and hispanic eighth grade reading scores on a national comparison is 27 points, the fifth largest gap among states across the country.
[Jonathan Butcher, “California Has Curriculum Modeled More on Marxism than on Markets,” The Hill, August 14]
