Black Lives Matter at School ‘Week of Action’ Gives Leftist Teachers Free Rein to Push Social Justice Activism in K-12 Schools

Susan Berry, PhD

Radical Marxist teachers are celebrating Black Lives Matter at School’s (BLM at School) “Week of Action” February 6-10 in thousands of K-12 government schools.

The national BLM at School movement spends the first week of February – named as Black History Month – “organizing for racial justice in education,” its website touts.

The organization provides a “starter kit” for the “Week of Action” that includes the BLM at School “national demands” and the “Guiding Principles of BLM.”

According to the introduction provided in the “starter kit,” the BLM at School movement began in Seattle in 2016, “when thousands of educators in Seattle came to school on October 19th wearing shirts that said, ‘Black Lives Matter: We Stand Together.’”

The movement drew national media attention, which helped it spread to Philadelphia, Rochester, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and other large cities, the introduction states.

BLM at School justifies its demands by claiming this “era” is one of “mass incarceration,” a “school-to-prison-pipeline system that is more invested in locking up youth than unlocking their minds.”

“That system uses harsh discipline policies that push Black students out of schools at disproportionate rates; denies students the right to learn about their own cultures and whitewashes the curriculum to exclude many of the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color; and is pushing out Black teachers from the schools in cities around the country,” the BLM movement claims, demanding “restorative justice” instead of discipline; the hiring of more black teachers; mandated black history and ethnic studies in K-12 curriculum; and the funding of “counselors not cops.”

The “Guiding Principles of BLM” include restorative justice, diversity, globalism, transgender affirming, queer affirming, collective value, a “disruption of Western nuclear family” and a “return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, said in comments to The Star News Network the BLM “Guiding Principles” is not a program of instruction for students:

The BLM guiding principles instruct students to work towards disrupting the western nuclear family and to be queer-affirming and trans-affirming. Leaders of the BLM movement have supported efforts to defund the police and expressed public support for the Muslim Brotherhood. They have every right to hold those opinions but it’s ludicrous to pretend that BLM is not a highly political and ideological movement. The curriculum developed for K12 schools is based in that ideology and is designed to indoctrinate children into supporting causes they don’t understand. It isn’t about black history or solutions to racial injustice, and it has no place as a curriculum in the classroom.”

Other BLM proponents expressed support for BLM at School ‘Week of Action.”

Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center, has chronicled the events surrounding the College Board’s revision of its Advanced Placement African American Studies (APAAS) curriculum after Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration rejected the earlier radically leftist version. Kurtz commented to The Star News Network the BLM at School movement is breaching the norms through which the content of what is taught in schools is decided.

“School curricula are crafted by citizens through representatives they elect at the state and school district levels,” Kurtz explained. “Black Lives Matter at School violates these democratic and republican norms in two ways. First, BLM at School asks teachers to pledge to violate the law, disregarding the curriculum legally authorized by the citizens of a given state. Second, BLM at School wants teachers to turn students into leftist political activists on school time.”

The president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union said she is celebrating the BLM at School “Week of Action.”

“Today kicks off Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, celebrating the freedom to read and to teach Black stories,” tweeted National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle.

“Public school teachers who impose a political stance on students are grossly abusing their power over a captive audience of minors,” Kurtz asserted. “It is shameful to see the NEA encourage teachers to impose their personal political views on students, in violation of the law.”

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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “NEA President Becky Pringle” by Becky Pringle.

 

 

          

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