By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

PORTLAND, Oregon – Elected officials, parents and taxpayers have been scratching their heads for years, wondering what’s wrong with America’s public education system.

K-12 funding has been steadily increasing for decades. Teacher salaries and benefits have become more lucrative over the years. Yet America’s K-12 students keep falling behind their peers in other developed nations.

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Some point to the breakdown of the American family unit, and the indifference of many parents to their children’s education. No doubt there’s some tragic truth to that.

Others question the quality of teachers in today’s classrooms. That seems to be an obvious problem, since studies have shown that many American K-12 teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college graduating classes, and teacher unions work hard to protect their most mediocre members.

But there are still a lot of parents who care about education, and many great teachers in our public schools. So what gives?

Perhaps one growing problem is the curriculum being taught. Instead of focusing on academic fundamentals, too many teachers are being encouraged to use class time to promote radical, left-wing political ideas favored by their union leaders.

Last year EAGnews published a book – “Indoctrination: How Useful Idiots are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism” – which offered many examples of this troubling movement within the public school teaching ranks.

But new examples keep piling up quicker than we can keep track of them.

One comes from Chicago, which hosted the Midwest Marxism Conference at Northwestern University on Nov. 10. Many K-12 teachers attended the event, and many of the workshops were led by members of the Chicago Teachers Union.

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Workshops at the conference included “Marxism, Crisis and Resistance,” “Russia: A Case Study in Workers’ Power and Revolution,” “Education and Capitalism,” and “Imperialism: Why Capitalism Creates War.”

One Chicago teacher, Becca Barnes, declared at the conference that “The struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase.”

Perhaps we should refer to her as Comrade Barnes.

Another example comes from Portland, Oregon, which hosted the “Fifth Annual Northwest Conference on Teaching for Social Justice” in October.

As an article published by the Eagle Forum put it, “race, class, white privilege, oppression, alternative lifestyles, identity – all the liberal buzzwords – were represented, and methods to encourage, train and promote students to become activists were out in full force.”

The hippies take over the classrooms

In the old days professional education conferences focused on helping teachers become more effective instructors of math, science, reading and other academic disciplines.

You know, the subjects that taxpayers fork over hard-earned dollars for kids to learn.

But today there is increasing pressure on teachers to stress the concepts of social injustice and political activism in their classrooms, wasting precious instructional time and filling young heads with radical notions that most parents and taxpayers completely reject.

What’s worse is that there’s only so much local school boards can do about this phenomenon. That’s because many teacher union collective bargaining agreements give instructors a great deal of academic freedom to teach what they want, how they want.

Of course they still have to cover their assigned subjects, but they find clever ways to introduce radical thought into normal classroom exercises.

The problem is that many leftover hippies from the 1960s and 70s – some of the same students shown in the grainy old film clips protesting the Vietnam War – grew up (at least physically) and remained in education.

They have taken control of the nation’s powerful teacher unions, and they somehow believe it’s their moral responsibility to pass on their revolutionary tendencies to younger generations.

How best to do that? By convincing classroom teachers that they share that responsibility, and must deliver the message in their classrooms.

Too many young teachers get that message pounded into their heads at the university level.

As former California teacher Larry Sand explained his collegiate experience, “Teachers-to-be were forced to learn about this ethnic group, that impoverished group, this sexually anomalous group, that under-represented group – all under the rubric of ‘culturally responsive education.’”

And just in case they forget what they learned in college, there are professional conferences to update them on cutting-edge techniques for teaching modern-day Marxism.

‘Build a movement and change the world’

Just take a look at the various workshops offered to teachers who participated in the conference in Portland.

One English literature workshop allowed teachers to learn how to focus “on the application of various critical theories (postcolonial, feminist, Marxist and gay/lesbian) to the Great Gatsby,” according to the Eagle Forum article.

“The course description adds that ‘those theories can be applied to any text and provide students more ways to connect with literature, read more deeply, and develop intellectual and political autonomy,’” the article said.

In other words, here’s how you can teach your students to read Huckleberry Finn from a Communist perspective.

Another workshop, titled “Coal, Climate and the World,” began with a quote from leftist scholar James Hansen, who said “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”

Sounds like that workshop was a fair and balanced discussion on the pros and cons of the crucial energy produced through the coal burning process, doesn’t it?

There was also a workshop titled “Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill: Racial Micro-aggressions in Everyday Life.”

It was based on the work of Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue, who describes the “micro-aggressions” as the “brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities, and denigrating messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being communicated.”

This appears to be a strategy to make black kids feel even more alienated and victimized, and force everyone to walk on egg shells for fear of saying anything that might offend someone. We agree. They’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

The most telling workshops were designed to help teachers devise strategies to convert their students into left-wing activists.

One such workshop was called “Rethinking Democracy and Organizing for Change.”

It provided participants with “hands-on, interactive training that is designed to equip youth with the self-confidence, knowledge and skills to understand how our democracy was hijacked, the authoritarian tendencies that obstruct democracy, the critical link between human rights and values that lie at the core of a real democracy, and how to design and implement effective action plans to build a movement and change the world.”

The presenter of this workshop, Riki Ott, is the co-founder of something called Ultimate Civics, which encourages students to “challenge corporate power and co-create the democracy we thought we had,” the Eagle Forum report said.

Good grief.

Can’t we just make sure all the kids can read their own diplomas on graduation day? That alone would be a big step toward building a better and brighter society.