Students at California school struggling after $250K in federal funds spent on ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program
Students at a San Francisco Bay-area elementary school — where officials hired a for-profit company called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers — are continuing to struggle with some of the lowest math and reading scores in the state, according to a report.
The school spent $250,000 in federal funds provided by a program meant to help boost test scores for some of the country’s lowest-performing schools, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, but after two years with Woke Kindergarten, students’ scores are reportedly worse.
In a 4% drop in both areas in the last two years, less than 12% of the students at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, can read at their grade level and under 4% are proficient in math, according to the Chronicle.
Hayward Unified School District Superintendent Jason Reimann told the Chronicle that hiring Woke Kindergarten, which he said was supported by the parents and teachers after it was approved by the board, was more about boosting attendance than test scores.
He said, “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement. I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”
He added, “We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back. What I do believe is we should pick providers based on their work and how effective they are.”
Woke Kindergarten describes itself on its website as “supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”
The organization also has woke words of the day like “ceasefire“, “abolish” and “woke wonderings” about challenging the “legitimacy of the Supreme Court” and abolishing the police, money and the military.
“Our reading scores are low,” a Glassbrook teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Chronicle. The funds “could have gotten us a reading interventionist.”
The teacher added of the Woke Kindergarten training, “It slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice that it’s not what they wanted to hear.”
Tiger Craven-Neeley, another teacher at the school, told that Woke Kindergarten trainers told him he should focus on “disrupt[ing] Whiteness” in the classroom.
“What does that mean? I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?“, asked the teacher.
Craven-Neeley, who said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, told his requests for clarifications got him temporarily banned from training sessions.
He added that one of the trainers referred to the “so-called United States” in one of the sessions.
The school district didn’t return the request for comment.
An email to Woke Kindergarten received an automatic reply that the founder was recovering from surgery.
yogaesoteric
February 11, 2024