Critics say “woke” education is fading. Some even say it’s dead. But the National Education Association‘s training materials suggest the opposite.
In a program called “Leaders for Just Schools,” the largest teachers’ union in our country teaches educators and administrators how to improve schools for everyone. Well, at least that’s what they claim.
The Leaders for Just Schools training includes sections on oppression, white privilege, microaggressions, biases, and racial dialogue. The goal of the training, according to the documents, is for participants to walk away with the tools to create equitable education systems, advocate for equity, empower students, and transform policy.
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As the largest labor union in the country dedicated to achieving “success, justice, and equity in our nation’s public schools” as well as the “well-being of all our students,” the NEA wields enormous influence over how educators are trained to think about their role in the classroom. Leaders for Just Schools is a three-year-long program, one that NEA president Becky Pringle claims is more vital now than ever due to ongoing efforts in the country to whitewash history and marginalize black students, students of color, LGBT students, and more.
The emphasis on privilege and identity begins at the start of the training, when educators are asked to “identify their privilege” and recall the first time they interacted with someone different from themselves. From there, participants receive a rundown on equity and biases, involving looking at “-ISMS,” which are defined as, “When one group experiences privileges and advantages over another group or groups.”
The training then moves into a lengthy section on “privilege,” which runs through Peggy McIntosh’s magnum opus titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. For those of you who haven’t read it, here’s a quick rundown: men are unwilling to acknowledge their oppressive privilege, and similar sort of privilege applies to white people. According to McIntosh, meritocracy is a myth, and white privilege is so endemic to the United States’s past and present that everyone really doesn’t have democratic choice.
After reading this material, participating educators and administrators are then invited to go on what is known as a “Privilege Walk.” In this exercise, the training facilitator reads a series of statements related to identity, opportunity, and life experience. Participants step forward or backward depending on whether the statements apply to them.
A couple example statements are: “If you’re in a position of power that has traditionally been held by people with dominant identity and social location markers, take one step forward” and “If your primary ethnic identity is “American, take one step forward.”
After this activity, participants are explicitly asked to connect privilege back to McIntosh’s work on males and whiteness.
If this training material is absorbed, and ultimately becomes how teachers view society and the educational system, the implications are troubling and numerous. Teachers are trusted to believe in the ability and power of every student. However, when teachers are trained to hyper-fixate on “whiteness,” “privilege,” and “oppression,” the objective becomes less so education and more so indoctrination, top-down style.
This is not to deny that inequality exists. Of course it does. But if every interaction is framed through the lens of social privilege and hierarchy, teachers are no longer treating students equally — they’re treating students differently based on their immutable characteristics and demographic markers.
In another part of the training focused on controlling people’s language, the NEA separates the ways that race-related dialogue can be silenced into “white people” and “marginalized people.” More specifically, a white person could silence the dialogue by saying, “I’m not racist.” On the other hand, someone in the “marginalized group” could silence the dialogue with, “I’m going to let that one go.”
After this section, participants explore oppression, defined by the NEA as “The one-way systemic mistreatment of a defined group of people, with that mistreatment reinforced and supported by society where one group systematically enjoys privileges while the other group or groups systematically experience disadvantage.” Once again, they are asked to connect it back to the privilege walk, specifically through the question, “In what ways did the historical connections to the Privilege Walk prompts shift your thinking or expand your knowledge about privilege and oppression?’”
At a time when boys feel more withdrawn now than ever from school, the NEA chooses to teach educators that males, as a group, are guilty of unconscious oppression. When fewer children are finding joy and intellectual stimulation in schools, they insist on painting the bleakest picture of America as a nation steeped in white supremacy, racism and oppression.
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The problem with this training isn’t that race and privilege are included. The problem is that these items are the NEA’s main organizing principles.
The NEA is one of the most powerful institutions in American education, and with that power comes the responsibility to strengthen our schools. If this is what “just schools” means, then parents and lawmakers are justified in asking: Is this the best we can do for America’s children?
Chloe Hunt is an investigative reporter for Defending Education.