Test Scores Plummet At School That Spent $250K On ‘Woke Kindergarten’
A struggling San Francisco elementary school is in hot water after reporting plummeting test scores, which came after the school spent a staggering $250,000 on “Woke Kindergarten” — an organization that pushes messages of anti-police, anti-capitalism and “disrupting Whiteness.”
Glassbrook Elementary School in Hayward, California, has become one of the lowest-performing schools in the United States in recent years. The San Francisco-area school bizarrely thought that hiring “Woke Kindergarten” would somehow help boost these abysmal test scores — but instead, scores kept declining. The elementary school reportedly hired the organization using federal funds allocated specifically to help the worst-performing schools improve.
Woke Kindergarten describes itself on its website as a “global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem and visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators, and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”
The website also features a “woke wonderings” section proposing radical far-left ideas including challenging the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court, abolishing the police, eradicating borders, defunding all militaries, abolishing the concept of money, eliminating landlords and reallocating U.S. aid from Israel to rebuilding Palestine.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Woke Kindergarten has a mission “to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression, and remove those barriers to learning.”
The founder of the organization is Akiea “Ki” Gross, who describes herself as an “abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer, and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create,” and uses the pronouns they/them.
Meanwhile, teachers at Glassbrook Elementary School have pointed out that the curriculum is “wrongly rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism, and anti-Israel messages mixed in with the goal of making schools safe, joyful and supportive for all children.”
Tiger Craven-Neeley, a self-described “gay moderate” teacher who supports discussing the issue of racism in schools, called out “Woke Kindergarten” over its primary objective of disrupting “whiteness.”
Craven-Neeley explained to the San Francisco Chronicle that he had been temporarily banned from the “Woke Kindergarten” sessions for asking what “disrupting whiteness” actually means.
Glassbrook Elementary School students’ performance did not improve following the radical lessons, and instead continued to plummet, causing the school to fall to a lower level on the state watch list.
“English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nonetheless, school district officials are still trying to defend wasting taxpayer money on the woke program when it should have been spent improving test scores. Officials even tried to dismiss criticism in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle by claiming that Woke Kindergarten’s hiring was not meant to improve academic performance.
Hayward Unified School District Superintendent Jason Reimann told the outlet that Woke Kindergarten is “helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement,” while also acknowledging that the program costs “more money than we would have liked to have spent.”
