"The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats."
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/04/pelosi-kamala-harris-and-gavin-newsoms.html
"California’s public education system, once the envy of the world, now ranks 49th in the nation." ROBERT J. CRISTANO, Ph.D
Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.
"The public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens."
California's Scandal-Plagued Progressive School Chief Eyes Governor's Mansion
Tony Thurmond has pushed transgenderism as student test scores plummet
California's schools superintendent Tony Thurmond, whose tenure has been marked by scandal, plummeting student proficiencies, and an aggressive push for radical gender ideology, is exploring a run for governor.
Thurmond announced Wednesday that he "will be seriously exploring a run for governor in 2026" to continue "taking on MAGA extremists who want to ban books" and "defending classroom teachers and students against the constant assault on our democracy." A close ally of term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.), Thurmond has served as California superintendent of public instruction since 2019. During his tenure, test scores have fallen nearly 10 percentage points as Thurmond focused on training teachers to help students change genders.
Thurmond could face an uphill battle in his bid for governor. Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis (D.) has already thrown her hat in the ring for 2026, and Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) is also expected to run. In addition to the crowded field, Thurmond has his fair share of political baggage. He came under fire in 2020 for giving a high-paying "superintendent of equity" job to a friend who lived in Pennsylvania. Nearly two dozen senior officials left the Department of Education after Thurmond took the helm, citing a toxic and abusive workplace.
Thurmond's announcement came on the heels of a damning report on California's public schools. Only 35 percent of low-income students met state literacy standards in 2022, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Just 21 percent were proficient in math.
As California's students faltered, Thurmond focused on pushing gender ideology in the classroom. He helped secure funding to train teachers to support students' gender transition and chose adamant purveyors of transgenderism, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation and the Trevor Project, to write the training. The State Legislature is advancing a bill that would make the course mandatory for all middle and high school teachers.
Thurmond also teamed up with the nonprofit Gender Nation to distribute books about transgenderism into public school classrooms for children as young as preschoolers. He is supporting a bill this year to prohibit school boards from removing LGBT books they deem inappropriate and has joined the LGBT rights group Equality California to rate California districts on their transgender policies.
Thurmond did not respond to a request for comment.
April 13, 2021
Education
California
The Social Order
California public schools are embarking on a new experiment: education as social justice. Earlier this year, the state Department of Education approved an ethnic studies model curriculum, and individual school districts have begun to implement programs that advocate “decolonizing” the United States and “liberating” students from capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism.
This will likely come as a surprise to most California residents, who may be familiar with the movement’s euphemisms—“ethnic studies,” “educational equity,” “culturally responsive teaching”—but do not understand the philosophical and political premises of these programs. As the state and many school districts begin to implement the state ethnic studies curriculum, however, details are emerging.
I have obtained documents from one such program, the Santa Clara County Office of Education’s Ethnic Studies Initiative, that paint a disturbing picture of the ethnic studies curriculum and the activists leading the charge. According to the documents and to sources within the district, the Office of Education held a series of teacher-training sessions on how to deploy ethnic studies in the classroom. The leaders, including district staff, an advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, and a professor from San Jose State University, encouraged teachers to inject left-wing politics into the classroom and to hide controversial materials from parents.
According to slides and contemporaneous notes from the session, the Santa Clara Office of Education began the presentation with a “land acknowledgement,” claiming that Santa Clara County and the public school system “occupy the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, the sovereign nation and original people of the skies, land, and waters.” The premise of this ritual, which has become common in progressive organizations, is that the American government, founded by white settlers, is an illegitimate colonial power that should return the land to the Native American tribes.
Next, Jorge Pacheco, president of the California Latino School Boards Association and advisor for the state Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, presented the movement’s conceptual framework. Pacheco explained that the ethnic studies curriculum is based on the work of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, who invented the concept of the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” which holds that students must be educated to understand their oppression and develop the practical skills, or “praxis,” to challenge and eventually overthrow their oppressors. Pacheco acknowledged that the Marxist underpinnings to ethnic studies “scare people away” but insisted that teachers must be “grounded in the correct politics to educate students.”
Pacheco then argued that the United States is a political regime based on “settler colonialism,” which he describes as a “system of oppression” that “occupies and usurps land/labor/resources from one group of people for the benefit of another.” The settler colonialist regime, Pacheco continues, is “not just a vicious thing of the past, but [one that] exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land.” The white colonialist regime of the United States is a “parasitic system” responsible for domestic violence, drug overdoses, and other social problems. In a related PowerPoint slide, Pacheco presented examples of this oppression, including “men exploiting women,” “white people exploiting people of color,” and “rich people exploiting poor people.”
What is the solution? Pacheco argues that teachers must “awaken [students] to the oppression” and lead them to “decodify” and eventually “destroy” the dominant political regime. The first step in this process is to help students “get into the mind of a white man” such as Christopher Columbus and analyze “what ideology led these white male settlers to be power and land hungry and justify stealing indigenous land through genocide.” Pacheco describes this process as transforming students into “activist intellectuals” who “decodify systems of oppression” into their component parts, including “white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, genocide, private property, and God.”
Teachers must be careful, though: Pacheco and the other panelists suggested that local educators hide this revolutionary pedagogy from administrators and families. “District guidelines and expectations are barriers,” said one panelist. “[We] have to be extra careful about what is being said, since we can’t just say something controversial now that we’re in people’s homes [because of remote learning].” In addition, teachers must acknowledge that they, too, can become oppressors in the classroom. “Inherently, [it is the] oppressor who sets the rules.” Teachers must “recognize [their] own privilege and [their] own bias” in order to align themselves with the oppressed and work toward dismantling systems of oppression.
The goal, according to the presenters, is to “develop, pilot, and refine an adaptable and scalable Ethnic Studies program design plan and curriculum that can serve as standalone courses or be integrated into core content areas.” This is already happening. Last month, the California Department of Education approved the statewide curriculum, which will bring the “pedagogy of the oppressed” to schools throughout the state. But for the movement’s leaders, the goal is to go further. At the end of the presentation in Santa Clara, Pacheco argued that schools should start transforming children into “activist intellectuals,” beginning in first grade. “[It’s] never too young,” he said, arguing that educators should be “cashing in on kids’ inherent empathy” in order to reshape their ideological foundations.
This is a dystopian project. As these pedagogical theories make their way into the classroom, California schools will be teaching millions of children to hate their own country. They will be oriented toward the work of “decolonizing,” “deconstructing,” and “dismantling” their own society. The ethnic studies activists grasp the destabilizing nature of their project—and believe that it provides them leverage for their broader political ends. During the Santa Clara presentation, Pacheco and the other instructors provided the audience with a handout quoting Freire: “Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic. Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid!” Though they are coy about their ultimate intention, the ethnic studies activists seek, at a minimum, a moral revolution—and, out of such tumults, political revolutions often follow.
California voters may not realize it, but they have installed a radical movement in the state educational bureaucracy.
Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal. Sign up for his weekly newsletter and watch his latest documentary, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” This article is part of an ongoing series on critical race theory.
Photo: gremlin/iStock
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