The Black Lives Matter movement is using Black History Month as a vehicle to insert its agenda into public schools across the country, using curriculum for elementary and middle school students that includes teaching diversity, globalism, and “queer affirming” lessons — all in formats conforming to the controversial Common Core framework.
The Progressive website reported on the Feb. 5-9 National Black Live Matter Week of Action in Our Schools taking place this year at schools in Seattle (where the movement started), Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.:
Educators in America know all too well that the school-to-prison pipeline is not just a political catchphrase. Those who work with students of color know this pipeline is as real as any other.
“It extends across this country,” says Seattle educator, attorney, and organizer Nikkita Oliver. “The Black Lives Matter at School movement is about dismantling the school-to-prison-pipeline,” says Oliver, “and creating a school-to-justice-pipeline for our youth.”
The curriculum includes “restorative justice,” “empathy and loving engagement,” “diversity and globalism,” “trans-affirming, queer-affirming and collective value,” “intergenerational, black family and black villages,” and “black women and unapologetically black.”
The Progressive website reported that the Black Lives Matter at School Coalition has three demands for the week:
— End “zero tolerance” discipline, and implement restorative justice
— Hire more black teachers
— Mandate black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum
The National Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Our Schools Facebook page has this list of demands put forth by a youth group in Minnesota:
— A complete and immediate end to the SRO (law enforcement on campus) program
— Restorative justice training for all staff
— Change the name of Patrick Henry High School to a democratically-elected replacement
— A moratorium on cuts to ‘non-essential’ programs such as art and sports
— An all-gender restroom at every school in the MPS district
— $15 an hour minimum wage for all MPS employees
— A maximum of 25 students in every class
— Make cuts to the Davis Center (school district administrative office), not the schools
The week of action website links to a blog written by a teacher in Philadelphia, Keziah Ridgeway, on the Black Muslim Women Matter website.
The blog says, in part:
Discussing Black Lives also helps to educate non-children of color on their history, how it connects to modern systems of oppression created by White Supremacy and Colonialism and provides avenues on how to move forward collectively.
As a teacher, my job is to give them the information, to be fair and balanced, to show representation of all cultures and races in my work and let the students develop their own thoughts on the things that matter. Unfortunately, in many classrooms, teachers aren’t doing that at all. They give students one side, a Eurocentric approach, and students end up graduating school uneducated about our diverse history and ill-informed plus unable to tackle the social issues that plague our society today. Teaching like this causes division and keeps us trapped in the cycle of White Supremacy that ALL of us want to escape from.
The blog also states that she showed students a video of the Black Panther Party feeding children in several U.S. cities years ago.
“It’s not hard to see the connection between what the BPP did for children in poverty and the federal governments’ hijacking of the program two years later,” Ridgeway writes. “After the video, the students in some classes said in unison, ‘Thanks, Black Panthers.’”
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