Students at a San Francisco Bay-area elementary school, where officials hired a for-profit company called “Woke Kindergarten” to train teachers, are continuing to struggle with some of the lowest math and reading scores in the state, according to a new report.
The school spent $250,000 in federal funds provided by a program meant to help boost test scores for some of the country’s lowest-performing schools, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, but after two years with “Woke Kindergarten,” students’ scores are reportedly worse.
You can’t make this up. A California elementary school spent $250k on a program called “Woke Kindergarten” to try to raise test scores. Test scores fell even further.
This is “Woke Kindergarten’s” homepage. They promote a “commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black… pic.twitter.com/BOHZVP1mV5
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 4, 2024
The teacher training taught anti-Israel and anti-police messages and told teachers they were meant to “disrupt whiteness” in school.
“Our reading scores are low. That could have gotten us a reading interventionist,” one teacher told the Chronicle.
“Woke Kindergarten, it slowly became very apparent if you were a dissenting voice that it’s not what they wanted to hear,” the teacher added.
The politics of the Woke Kindergarten group have, unsurprisingly, drawn significant attention and criticism. The for-profit education program is aimed at young students. It advertises itself as “supporting children, families, educators, and organizations” in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.
According to the Chronicle, in a 4% drop in both areas in the last two years, less than 12% of the students at Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward, California, can read at their grade level, and under 4% are proficient in math.
Hayward Unified School District Superintendent Jason Reimann told the Chronicle that hiring “Woke Kindergarten,” which he said was supported by the parents and teachers after the board approved it, was more about boosting attendance than test scores.
Reimann said, “Helping students feel safe and whole is part and parcel of academic achievement. I get that it’s more money than we would have liked to have spent.”
“We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back. I believe we should pick providers based on their work and effectiveness,” Reimann added.
The organization also has “woke” words of the day like “ceasefire,” “abolish,” and “woke wonderings” about challenging the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and abolishing the police, money, and the military.
An email sent to “Woke Kindergarten” received an automatic reply that the founder was recovering from surgery.
