You call this woke?

This week a teacher in Pflugerville, Texas was fired after students captured him on video explaining that he was a white supremacist. He went on to insist that everyone is racist, they just don’t admit it (essentially telling the young people in his class that they were or would become racists, too.) Seeing the students process these attitudes of a man whose care they had been in for months is saddening and maddening.

It shouldn’t, though, be terribly surprising. Yet it may be to those who’ve been subject to a steady flow of propaganda that paints the teaching force as a cadre of radical leftists. I’ve written in the past about this myth, including in “America's school teachers aren't the Marxist cabal Fox News keeps depicting.” I noted in that NBC THINK piece that teachers’ political affiliations and ideologies don’t differ all that much from the general public’s:

Yes, teachers are more liberal than the nation at large, but not dramatically. A 2017 Education Week survey found 41 percent self-identified as Democrats, higher than the 33 percent of registered voters polled by Pew around the same time. Just as many teachers as voters overall were Republicans.

And while some on the right would like American voters and taxpayers to think that the nation’s most pressing education problem is “woke” schools, research shows that teachers remain just as racially biased as the rest of the nation. A recent study out of Princeton and Tufts found 3 in 10 teachers demonstrated explicit anti-black bias, no lower than the number among Americans overall.

Of course, what the right calls a “woke” school is one that makes any stated effort to combat the stereotypes and discrimination that result from and worsen these divisive and harmful biases. Indeed, this week, the Heritage Foundation, primary peddler of the manufactured CRT panic, published a piece, dressed up in scholarly regalia (citations! scatterplot charts!) with the results of a self-described “novel study”:

We devised a wokeness measure that is calculated by searching publicly available parent-student handbooks and tabulating their usage of certain keywords (such as gender identity, justice, and equity) that could signal affirmation of fashionable progressive theories about teaching and learning.

That’s right, Heritage created “a wokeness measure” out of the many words that it (in well-orchestrated concert with other right-wing organizations and agitators) has spent the past few years making into scare words. And what is the language meant to strike fear among RW media consumers, the words or phrases that whispered should clear them from a room faster than “Fire!” yelled at lung-top?

We then counted the number of times [school] handbooks contain words or phrases that indicate adherence to contemporary progressive education orthodoxy. Specifically, the terms we searched for in charter school student handbooks are: (1) diversity, (2) equity, (3) inclusion, (4) justice, (5) restorative, (6) social-emotional learning, (7) gender identity, and (8) culturally affirming.

In other words, the very appearance of a school seeking to combat the kind of damaging attitudes held by the fired Pflugerville teacher is a problem; it means that school has contracted the illness of “wokeness.” This teacher’s behavior screams the need for skilled, professional DEI recruiting and training of educators, but DEI is “woke”! It is numbers 1, 2, and 3 above! What’s being demonized are attempts — whether weak or effective, meaningful or tokenish — to make schools safe for all children.

Schools should indeed be accountable for and to the language in their handbooks. I’ll close with Pflugerville’s, which this week let go a teacher who failed miserably to live up to its stated mission and beliefs:

“The mission of Pflugerville ISD is to provide an inspiring, engaging, and relevant education that empowers students to reach their full potential as productive members of a diverse global community…We Believe: ● Diversity is our strength ● All individuals have worth ● Relationships are foundational to success ● A safe and nurturing environment is non-negotiable ● All students have the right to diverse educational opportunities ● Social-emotional learning is as critical as academic focus ● Civic-mindedness must be explicitly cultivated in our students ● Community partnerships and high expectations improve student outcomes ● Innovation and a strong work ethic ensure excellence.”