A California school district spent $250,000 on a ‘Woke Kindergarten’ curriculum for young children, according to a report in The San Francisco Chronicle, at a time when most of its students were failing to achieve grade-level competency in reading, writing, and math.
The teacher training provided by the group, which taught anti-Israel and anti-police messages and apparently told teachers they were meant to “disrupt whiteness” in school, was paid for using a federal program to help low-performing schools.
“Our reading scores are low,” one teacher told the Chronicle. “That could have gotten us a reading interventionist.”
Hayward district Superintendent Jason Reimann told the Chronicle that Woke Kindergarten was hired to boost attendance rates and eliminate suspensions, not for its political contents. And, Reimann said, the school has seen improvement in those areas: only 44% of students were considered chronically absent last year, the article said, compared to 61% the year before.
Nevertheless, the politics of the Woke Kindergarten group have, unsurprisingly, drawn significant attention and criticism: the for-profit education program, aimed at elementary-age students, advertises itself as “supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”
Anti-Israel 'zines and "Lil' Comrade Convos"
It also offers online materials such as “woke wonderings”— questions for students including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”— and educational materials such as “Free Palestine: a Visual History Instazine: for Kids” and “So You Made it to a Protest! A sensory guide for kids.”
On the website’s “woke word of the day” page, educators are offered “resources to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.” Words of the day include “ceasefire,” “strike,” and “anti-racist.”
A recent post to the crowdfunding site Patreon, through which Woke Kindergarten raises some of its money, included a re-written version of the classic kids’ song “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round-and-Round” to be about an Israeli tank.
Tiger Craven-Neeley, a self-described “gay moderate” who teaches in the district and previously sued a California school district for the right to discuss gay history, as well as his own husband, with students, told the Chronicle that he questioned a trainer who used the phrase “so-called United States,” as well as online materials such as “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” and said he didn’t mean to be difficult when he asked for clarification about “disrupting whiteness.”
“What does that mean?” Craven-Neeley asked, “adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions. ‘I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?’”