Hi Kid: What Are Teachers Taught?

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT…
What Are Teachers Taught?

Poudre School District and Colorado State University are tightly connected. The two influential organizations are among the top employers in Larimer County and they formalized their partnership with an agreement in 2018. According to the agreement, “PSD will provide teaching, learning and service opportunities for CSU students through interactions with the district’s students.”

PSD has also named CSU one of its Top Hiring Partners, according to a “Diversity in Hiring “ presentation provided to the PSD Board of Education on January 24, 2023. PSD’s recognition of CSU’s excellence is further demonstrated in the presentation when PSD lists CSU as one of “the best education preparation programs” in their pipeline of staff recruitment.

This made us wonder just what made CSU’s education preparation program so spectacular. We were curious about what topics and themes PSD’s CSU hires have studied.

We were surprised to learn that an upper level class in CSU’s education curriculum requires a textbook titled, “Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book” by W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz.

This text book includes lessons and themes such as:

• The United States is based on white supremacist culture which must be dismantled

• Each citizen is morally compelled to fully comprehend his intersectional characteristics so he may properly evaluate his personal relationship with white supremacy

• Page 102 encourages activism focused on and through public schools

• Page 113 states it is imperative for educators to speak with their students about race

• The “Bootstrapping Game” that addresses the “classic American myth that every hardworking individual should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed…”

• A “Check Your Privilege” list that includes privileges such as, “white, blue-eyed, parents are alive, married, and nice to me, car registration is paid, and not afraid to show ID.

• A recommended class lesson in which students are separated by eye color and then the different groups are alternatively treated favorably and poorly by the teacher based on those group identities.

Given that CSU is one of PSD’s “Top Partners”, is it reasonable to ask if PSD advocates for this worldview to be taught to our area students? Should children be taught these ideas of societal structure, as this CSU textbook urges?

Current PSD BoE Vice President Jessica Zamora seems to be aligned with the philosophies outlined in the “Do the Work!” book. During her time as chair of PSD’s District Advisory Board, Zamora promoted a training by Rachel Cargyle titled, “Do the Work”. The 30 day challenge Zamora recommended is predicated on the belief that white supremacy is predominant in American culture and that that participation in this class is an initial way for the reader to start working toward dissolving systems and institutions.

One of the daily lessons states:

CSU’s “Do the Work!” textbook recommends its readers “Learn more about whiteness and privilege by reading: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh.” This same resource espousing white privilege beliefs was also recommended by PSD in their recent DEI Hiring training delivered to staff and has been used in high school class assignments.

Given these interesting connections, does PSD advocate in its classrooms and academic systems for a worldview founded on the belief that American culture is upheld by invisible systems as McIntosh describes? Systems which are specifically designed to benefit white people over all other people?

• Does PSD believe in the concept of white supremacy culture and that our community has a moral imperative to dismantle the structures that uphold that culture?

• Is this worldview what most members of our community want taught to their children? 

• What benefit is it to our local kids to view their classmate and themselves by their physical characteristics?

• How are children affected when they are encouraged to evaluate each other as either participants in or victims of these invisible systems?

While you consider these questions, please mark Monday, April 8^th on your calendar. The author of the “Do the Work!” workbook happens to be the keynote speaker at CSU’s Democracy Summit. Bell will be featured in a conversation with CSU President Amy Parsons “about race, culture, and democracy.” We encourage you to attend and consider these important ideas for yourself!

TRENDING CONVERSATIONS
Are Vexatious Politicians Targeting Citizens?

Fascinating news circulated this week featuring Poudre School District, local HD52 State Representative and current State Senate candidate Cathy Kipp, and the Denver legislative process. Kipp is accused of forwarding legislation that would allow government employees to slap members of the public with the legal label of “vexatious” and then deny them reasonable access to public documents. The article below indicates that the legislation may be a result of Kipp’s partnership with PSD Board of Education members who are displeased that local parents were using the Colorado Open Records Act to peek behind the curtain and see just how their kids were being treated by the district.

Check out this thread and keep in mind:

Vexatious = “annoying, bothersome, or pesky”.

IS THIS A GOOD IDEA?
Should Someone Else Decide for You Just What Is True?

Democrat state Senator Cutter and Representative Garcia have introduced legislation that would require Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold to spend $150,000 in tax-payer provided funds to “prevent and combat the sharing and spreading of misinformation and disinformation” via legislative, ‘educational,’ and public relations means. The Democrats’ bill would force the secretary of state to recommend legislation eliminating the use of the internet for conveying information and propose legislation to use tax-dollars to fund public awareness campaigns against what the state deems ‘disinformation’.

Is there an objective way to determine ‘disinformation’?

Is it the proper role of government to grant elected officials the power to decide just what information is “true” for its citizens?

How does this bill jive with the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…”

WHY WAS I NEVER TOLD?
Gender Theory Started at Johns Hopkins

The idea of gender as socially constructed and completely separate from sex came largely from the controversial work of Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money during the 1950s and 60s. Money performed controversial experiments on children which he used to promote his theory. His famous “John/Joan” study involved the tragic story of identical twin boys who were brought to him at Johns Hopkins in 1967.

• The parents of genetically identical twin boys, one of whom had suffered a botched circumcision that physically destroyed the baby boy’s penis, were convinced by Money to “sexually reassign” the injured baby from a boy to a girl using surgery, hormones, and psychological treatments.

• The baby boy was renamed ‘Brenda’ and was raised as a girl. He was provided estrogen hormones during adolescence and not informed of his biological sex.

• Throughout their young lives, the twins on whom Money was performing his gender as a complete social construct theory experiment would routinely visit Money for analysis. During those sessions, Money would force the young boys enact sexual acts with each other and showed them sexually explicit photos of both adults and children.

• Despite all the surgical and psychological efforts to socially construct a female identity for Brenda (John), she consistently fought against the gender role socially constructed for her.

• At the age of 15, after years of rebelling against doctors and her assigned female identity, Brenda was finally told the truth that she was biologically a boy. According to Brenda, at that revelatory moment she felt overwhelmingly relieved.

• Brenda immediately changed her name back to John and surgically, hormonally, and psychologically reverted to his biological sex and gender as a boy.

• As a result of the psychological abuse suffered at the direction of Money during their young lives, the twins suffered profound psychological effects from the experiment and both eventually committed suicide as adults.

Despite having a gender identity physically, hormonally, and psychologically constructed to be female, John’s innate biological male identity could not be overridden.

When the twins were seven years old and while Brenda was still forcibly being raised as a girl, Money declared his experiment a success. His work has been used for decades to justify the theory of gender as a social construct. 

Money established the nation’s first gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1965. It is still in operation today.

DINNER TABLE DISCUSSION
What Is Good?

Stickers and t-shirts are everywhere, ordering the reader to “Be a good human”.  But just what is the definition of “good” and what is the basis of your standard of “good”?

BEFORE YOU GO:

• Another take on the Vexatious story above. Is this retaliation against Northern Colorado parents?

• New York Times now says that closing schools did not prevent covid spread and that keeping kids out of school caused significant harm. Is the NYT wrong now or were local leaders wrong enforcing these measures? 

• Poll shows that by a 7 to 1 margin, Americans object to boys and men competing in girls’ and women’s sports.