The answer appears to be yes. Ames Community School District (ACSD) has become the most obvious example of this sneaky movement. During the first week of February the ACSD pushed left-wing political ideology into the classroom under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion. In fact, ACSD Director of Equity Dr. Anthony Jones admitted as much in the March 11 Iowa State Daily when he said, “What we are doing is bringing ideology into the conversation, but just ideology, we are also bringing people.”
What exactly is this ideology? It is all based on something called Critical Race Theory (CRT). ” It decrees that the American social fabric is fundamentally constructed in race.
In practice it teaches race and sex stereotyping and race and sex scapegoating. Used in the classroom, it teaches students that character traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status, and beliefs are entirely tied to an individual’s race or sex. It further assigns fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex. CRT brainwashes people that, consciously or unconsciously, and by virtue of persons’ race or sex, members of any race are inherently racist or are inherently sexist or inclined to oppress others.
What was brought into the classroom and what was the impetus for the House Oversight Committee to question Ames school officials? The ACSD distributed a list of 13 glossary terms. Included in that list was the definition of White Supremacy. According to the ACSD, White Supremacy is “the belief that white people are better than other races. Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
Public dollars should not be used to teach K-12 students that one race is superior to every other.
The ACSD is also using the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement as not only the foundation of their BLM Week of Action curriculum but as the outline for how they are going to mentor students overall. Among those 13 guiding principles are Empathy and Black Villages. Empathy is defined as “one’s ability to connect with others by building relationships built on mutual trust and understanding. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts. While Black Villages is defined as “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that care for each other.”
The use of the term comrades is intentional and not simply a synonym for “friends.” As anyone who lived through the Cold War knows, communists like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev and the rest all referred to their countrymen as “comrades.” The use of this term is deliberate and clearly brings left-wing political ideology into the classroom.
Additionally, using public dollars to teach K-12 students that Western values surrounding the nuclear family need to be “disrupted” is clearly left-wing political ideology. It goes back the teachings of Karl Marx, the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party’s dictates to its citizens. Public dollars should be used to teach students their families need to be disrupted because they are somehow oppressive.
The ACSD distributed a year-long planner titled “2020-2021 Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Educators”. It is a 216-page planner for the school year from the Education for Liberation Network. The Education for Liberation Network is a national organization of teachers and activists who advocate for ideologies that support the Black Lives Matter agenda.
Included in the resource material for teachers to use are The White Supremacy and Me Workbook – A text and a process for those holding White privilege to examine and dismantle their complicity in White supremacy and Fighting for a Living Wage – A collection of links and resources related to organizing for the “Fight for $15” a national struggle to increase the minimum wage to $15. In the section titled, “Make the Fight for Living Wage a Teachable Moment” are lesson plans and multimedia resources related to the “Fight for $15”.
Labeling all white students as racist is clearly a violation of Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics by licensed practitioners under their jurisdiction of the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners. The code specifically prohibits licensed practitioners from:
a. Denying the student, without just cause, access to varying points of view.
b. Deliberately suppressing or distorting subject matter for which the educator bears responsibility.
Using public dollars to indoctrinate students into organizing and supporting a left-wing political stance such as raising the minimum wage to $15 is an inappropriate use of those dollars.
Who else is teaching this stealthy form of racism? According to the ACSD, the following school districts have joined them: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Ankeny, West Des Moines, Waterloo, Storm Lake, Pleasant Valley, Clear Creek Amana, Mt Vernon, and Holy Family Catholic Schools in Dubuque.
