WTW39: The Woke Kindergarten Is Coming For Your Kids
Lydia breaks down a very recent controversy that had every right wing source losing their absolute minds: a school in the Bay Area paid hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for Woke Kindergarten, and test scores plummeted even further! Or that's at least what they want you to think. We dive into the who, what, where, when, and how of this one and it is a wild ride. California School Dashboard WestEd Black Minds Matter Learning Policy Institute Feel free to email us at lydia@seriouspod.com or thomas@seriouspod.com! Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress Green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 39.
I'm Thomas.
That's our expert.
That's our researcher over there.
Lydia Smith.
How are you doing?
I'm Lydia.
I'm good.
How are you?
Doing great.
I am glad to be back.
The show takes some doing when we take research breaks, but I love to be back on.
I know.
I miss it when we're not recording this.
So happy to be back.
I'm so excited for today's episode.
Can't wait to get to that.
But before we do, I think it's worth making a few announcements.
For one, just in case there's people who only listen to this show, you might've missed that I'm back on Opening Arguments.
We haven't done one of these since I took back over hosting duties of the show.
Yeah.
You have no idea what went into that.
Absolutely no idea.
I cannot wait till someday I can talk more about it.
But in the meantime, it is really, really important for lots of reasons that if you left the show because of things that happened and you'd like to come back, please do so.
It's really good.
It's with Matt Cameron, a defense attorney, and sometimes Casey, his partner, who's a prosecutor.
A lot of criminal law experience there.
And it's just been great.
It's been fantastic.
It's real opening arguments again.
And I have to say it's been really fun for me to listen to you in that realm again.
I missed it a lot.
And so this has been like a homecoming almost for me being able to hear you opine and go off on the law.
Yeah.
I even dusted off the old gavel.
Yeah.
Actually, I guess I haven't told people I wear judges robes while I record just to kind of get into it.
He does.
I probably told you that, but no.
Also the wig.
Yeah.
So please check that out.
Also, we got to hang out, hun.
Yeah.
Hang out tomorrow.
Yeah, probably today, really.
Oh my gosh, today.
Yeah.
Hopefully you're listening to this.
Yesterday.
Hop on there, guys.
Two days ago, a week ago now.
Jeez.
What's happening?
Where are we?
February 27th, we will be hanging out with our top two tiers of patrons for this show, as well as serious inquiries only.
So you do have some time, hopefully, to up your tier so you can join us for that.
We do have some questions this time.
Yeah, people have been sending those in.
Questions, let's play Codenames.
Why?
How?
Why aren't we playing Codenames yet?
No, so we'll answer some questions, and it's always a good time chatting with everybody, and then we have our ongoing competition of code names.
And I am just going to keep pretending that the last two months did not exist, and that my teams are doing well, and we'll continue our winning streak this month.
All right.
Yeah.
So look out for that on the Patreon, either of them, WTW or SIO.
And thanks so much to those who support the show.
All right.
I think it's time to get into today's topic.
What do you think?
Let's do it.
It's Woke Kindergarten part one.
I don't know much about this.
Lydia has teased that it's Woke Kindergarten.
I'm already in.
A hundred percent in.
So has this not popped up on your radar like at all?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
Okay.
Oh boy.
You are in for a journey.
Let me tell you.
So this news broke.
This month, going back to February 3rd, with the San Francisco Chronicle, right?
So like a legitimate newspaper.
And they wrote an article, kind of like a little bit of an exposé.
The title of it was, This Bay Area School District Spent $250,000 on Woke Kindergarten.
OK.
Test scores fell even further.
Test scores in kindergarten?
Yeah.
Already I'm a little bit like, I don't remember taking a standardized test in kindergarten.
Maybe that exists, but I didn't.
Sure.
So essentially what it really is, you know, in the article itself, it is a program that was contracted through Hayward Unified School District.
And the program is called Woke Kindergarten.
Really?
Yes.
And it's intended to work with teachers.
In an elementary school setting.
So this was for a specific elementary school in Hayward Unified called Glassbrook Elementary School, and it was funded through a federal program that's called the Comprehensive Support and Improvement Funding Source.
And this is meant for schools that are kind of really, really struggling and need to make significant advancements in a number of areas.
Like wokeness.
And some of them are test scores, but essentially the, you know, we'll get into kind of the nitty gritty there, but I thought we could see how the right picked up on this.
Yeah.
Well, they called something woke kindergarten, like they're almost asking for it.
That's a weird thing to do.
What year is this just came out now or when did they start that project?
Whatever that is.
Oh, I have a lot of detail on this.
Why don't we start by swinging over to Bill Maher, who I am including in the right, because he asks Coleman Hughes about this.
Oh, yeah, I hope so.
He had noted leftist Coleman Hughes on to talk about this.
Right.
Let's swing over there.
Bob Costas?
What is Bob Costas doing here?
What is Bob Costas doing here?
An example of DEI running amok in schools.
Well, first of all, we'll have to explain what the woke kindergarten controversy is.
Here we go.
So the woke kindergarten controversy is at a school in San Francisco that is majority Hispanic.
That is to say two-thirds of these kids are speaking Spanish at home.
They need to be taught the basics, English, math, etc.
That school decided, instead of focusing on those things, to hire an organization called woke kindergarten, pay them a quarter million dollars over the years.
Literally called it woke kindergarten.
Literally called woke.
Oh, I see.
I thought that was the name.
I thought you called it that, though.
The article gave it.
That was their name.
They're owning it.
Okay, got it.
Owning it.
Owning it.
Woke kindergarten.
Self-awareness is a wonderful thing.
It really is.
Boy, kids.
Can't start them too young, huh?
And rather predictably, what happened is that their math and reading scores have been declining for several years.
And it's become yet another example of precisely the opposite priorities that typical, normal Americans want, which is we want to send our kids to school to learn the basics as we decline worldwide, not to be taught why math is racist, for instance.
Yeah, that's for sure a real thing that I'm mad about.
What about six?
That number, I always... Yeah, you're a little bit suspicious, right?
I think that the basic problem with wokeness One of the basic problems is that it views kids as somehow inherently racist and the racism needs to be hammered out of them in some way.
When the reality is that among all the problems kids have, for instance, being selfish and needing to learn to share, racism is not one of them.
So really, in the same way we want to protect a child's sexual innocence for as long as possible, we should want to preserve that racially innocent mindset for as long as possible, not hammer these ideas.
Oh, God.
I hate these people so much.
Yeah.
When is this from?
13 days ago.
Yeah.
Very, very recent.
Let me take a second to say, not for nothing, Bob fucking Costas is on there.
And I just think, like, this is why we're talking about this stuff.
It's so common.
These people have done such a good job of mainstreaming this disinformation.
That like, even if elements are true here and there, as we've covered on the show, the entire project is a lie.
And you got fucking Bob Costas on there being like, oh yeah, nodding along.
It's just, I don't know what he believes or cares about, but it's just a sign that like that guy, the sports guy, Bob Costas, who's on in front of millions and millions of people can just be on this show where they're like, yeah, Woke Kindergarten, am I right?
It's just like, God, we have so much work to do to try to make a dent in convincing people that this is bullshit.
So Coleman Hughes did mention a couple of things that are accurate in there that honestly, like a lot of other media sources were not accurately representing.
So one of the first things is that Woke Kindergarten is a program, right?
The name of the program and not the name of a kindergarten classroom, for example.
Oh, so some people were calling it that?
They were insinuating that it was going to be offered to kindergartners, rather than that it is a program meant to help teachers, regardless of the grade level, prepare for their classrooms.
Why call it Woke Kindergarten if it's not for kindergarten?
Because the founder... His name, Mr. Kindergarten.
No, they're in early education, child development.
They have that background.
Kaia Gross, and I think I'm pronouncing their name correctly, is an early childhood education teacher by practice.
Did a lot of work in preschool environments, young children environments.
And then during COVID and in the wake of Black Lives Matter and everything, they decided to explore this pedagogy specifically from their Patreon, actually.
It says, Woke Kindergarten is an unlearning.
It is not a school.
It is not a curriculum.
It is healing in practice.
It's the reclamation of learning beyond institutionalized spaces.
We thrive when learning is collective, communal, experiential, and pro-Black.
Join the community.
And they did a GoFundMe also to kind of raise money to launch this company and created, you know, like resources and workshops and sort of stepping into this space to help bridge traditional pedagogy with what was clearly a gap for a significant portion of the population that's, you know, non-white.
And from their words here, ensuring that it's pro-Black from the work that they're doing.
Now, are we going to find out that Kai is actually like a white savior?
No, no, Kai is black.
Okay.
Lends a little bit more legitimacy, I think, to it.
How do you feel about that?
I mean, it seems like it could be good.
It's sort of one of those things too, you can't really tell from like a pitch or necessarily even from like the website postings or the whatever.
A lot of things are good pitches, but are bad in practice.
And by the way, vice versa.
I think it could be like a bad pitch and then actually, Oh, that actually is good in practice.
I don't really know, but here's what I do know.
Like, I don't really see the harm in trying something like that.
If you have a community that might be underserved and you're like, Hey, maybe this will work.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
People constantly point out that like woke was originally a term among black people and kind of got appropriated and I might add a different reaction to like that branding if it was just like some privileged white person.
But, you know, if it's a black person using it, like maybe they mean it in a different way or want to do a different thing with it.
I don't know.
I think that your point is right that, you know, you can kind of say whatever you want in a pitch, right?
And me being pretty data-driven, I would love to see, and here's how we get there, and here are some accomplishments that we can tout as resulting from the work that we're doing.
And I find that even more compelling, and I wish there was more of that here, and there really isn't.
But again, you know, to be completely fair, it's only been in existence for a few years.
Yeah.
And we certainly give far more benefit of the doubt to tech bros that are, you know, pitching to VC funds.
Disruptors, right?
And no one asks to see their information.
That's another thing.
It could entirely be that, like, they have identified a completely legitimate problem, but then don't have the right solution.
And it's like, OK, trial and error is a way to get at that.
I don't see that as like some horrendous misuse of funds.
If you're like, well, they've identified a problem.
They have a theory about it.
Let's see if it works or doesn't, you know?
Yep.
When people look at the materials that are on the website for Woke Kindergarten, if they think that this stuff is being printed and handed out to five-year-olds, then I don't even know what to tell them.
Five-year-olds can't read, really.
They barely can read.
Yeah.
So, for example, one of their workshops that they've put together is called Abolitionist Teaching in the Early Years.
And it says, in this workshop, Kai illuminates the ways the prison-industrial complex manifests in early childhood and takes participants on an exploration of how we can disrupt the prison-industrial complex through a comprehensive and interactive journey into voc-kindergarten's abolitionist early learning pedagogy.
Again, that is something that is a workshop geared towards teachers.
Yeah.
To help them connect what some of the students might be faced with at home, you know, especially when we're talking about, hey, we're unified.
The other thing Coleman Hughes spoke about accurately is the rough demographics of the school that this program was coming through.
Glassbrook Elementary, two-thirds of the students are English learners.
More than 80% of the students are Hispanic.
In the San Francisco Chronicle article, they stated that 70% of the students at that elementary school are from low-income households, but it's actually only gone up since then.
I don't know what data they were looking at, but the California School Dashboard, with data as of 2023, it's 79.5% are socioeconomically disadvantaged.
79.5% are socioeconomically disadvantaged.
Of the students at this school, 44.7% are chronically absent as of 2023.
That means that students that have 10% or more unexcused absences from their total absences.
So Megan Kelly has a lot of thoughts about this.
She spoke about this on her show, but then she also started going to other people's shows to talk about it.
So I just sent you a clip.
There's something called woke kindergarten going on here in America.
And it's an actual federal program that states or cities are paying to bring into their kindergarten.
Yeah.
Kindergarten is, you're five.
You're five years old in kindergarten.
And I was saying on my show today, my youngest is only 10.
Wasn't so long ago he was in kindergarten.
And his biggest job, responsibility, and commitment was to see if he could make fart sounds that sound exactly like the real thing.
That, I mean, he nailed it.
He was great.
Here, now, now what they're doing, these kindergartners out in the Bay Area, of course, near San Francisco.
The Bay!
Bringing in some lunatic, who goes by they, of course, and calls herself, I don't, she calls herself, oh, let's see.
Yeah, I know, she misgenders.
Oh, God, where is it?
I'll find it.
Oh, yeah, okay.
She's an abolitionist early educator.
What?
She's an abolitionist early educator.
Goes in, and she offers this program, which they're eating up, at this school in which two-thirds of the students are still learning English.
Like, English is their second language.
Two-thirds of them, okay?
And she tells these children that they need to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism, and oppression.
That she wants them to consider, quote, wonderings, including the following.
These are five-year-olds.
If the U.S.
defunded the Israeli military- No, they're not five-year- I know that's not true.
There's no way that's true, asshole.
- The five yard fart sounds versus this.
- Oh, his sound is so messed up. - They're doing the fart sounds and they need to think about the Palestinian problem.
- They are like the woke word of this.
No!
There's no way!
No!
It's not true.
None of that's true.
- The ceasefire and protest.
- No, there's no way. - This is a language of the resistance to introduce them to liberatory vocabulary.
- No, that's not true.
No, that's true.
There's no possible way that's true.
- So her stuff is just, it's nonsense, right?
She goes onto the website, she pulls all the materials that are available on the website, totally glossing over the fact that, like, this is clearly intended for teaching workshops.
And also, if Hayward Unified is contracting with this program, they're probably not just downloading material off the website, they're probably developing material that's specific to the school that it needs.
This strikes me as, like, University of Beer, huh?
Well, let me show you what they're teaching at universities now.
They're teaching, and then you just read a beer menu.
Yeah.
It's like, it's okay.
I guess the word kindergarten is used, but it sounds like it's not for kindergartners is what I would say.
Yeah.
This has been all over the right wing media stream, so much so that it made it to the house floor, the United States house floor.
Low bar, again, low bar.
I mean, The United States House floor is Fox News now.
That's not even... I guess, but why is this happening?
Just please click on the link that I sent you.
They don't have anything else to say or do.
That's what they are.
Yeah.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
At a San Francisco Bay Area school, only 16% of students were reading at grade level and only 8% were proficient at math.
The school spent $250,000 in taxpayer money on a group called Woke Kindergarten.
To help boost test scores for some of the countries.
Okay.
I just have to point out the title of this video.
Yeah.
I wish this was made up.
Virginia Fox lets loose on the use of woke kindergarten curriculum.
From Forbes breaking news.
And then you click on it and it's like, woke kindergarten.
Like you can hear the dentures.
You can't.
Come on.
Lowest performing schools.
Wow.
She's letting loose.
But after two years with woke kindergarten, student scores are worse.
Now only 12% are reading at grade level, and fewer than 4% are proficient in math.
There's more.
The head of Woke Kindergarten is on record wanting, quote, a world free of the U.S.
Empire, unquote.
Believing space aliens are oppressed and supporting, quote, a free Palestine from the river to the sea, unquote.
I have no idea what she's talking about.
A teacher who questioned the program has been put on leave.
I wish this was made up, but it's real and sadly encapsulates so much with what is wrong with our education system.
Yeah.
So Virginia Fox is first of all, she's very old.
Yeah.
So she is 80 years old.
And I think what's concerning here is that she's on the Committee on Education and Labor.
She's the chair of that committee in the United States House of Representatives.
She is Crazy.
She's also the person that when Mike Johnson was getting those questions from reporters and the House representatives behind him were screaming like, shut up, go away to the reporter.
Do you remember that?
Oh, yeah, kind of.
Yeah.
She's the old lady that is in that going, shut up, get out of here.
Yeah, she's freaking crazy.
How long has she been in office?
She has been in office for a while.
Let's see.
It says that she joined the United States House of Representatives from North Carolina in 2005.
Richard Burr was her predecessor.
Wow.
I mean, I respect her ability to get with the times, you know, like she's 80 years old, but she's like, all right, this is what we do now.
Okay.
She voted against the aid package to victims of Hurricane Katrina.
She was one of 11 people to vote against it.
Wow.
Yeah.
She wants to prevent birthright citizenship.
Any kids that are born in the United States should not be able to be citizens if their parents are not citizens.
She obviously voted against both articles of impeachment for Donald Trump.
She also was fined because she evaded metal detectors outside of the chamber.
Oh my gosh.
After January 6th, yeah.
This person has a solid record of sucking for an incredibly long time.
Yep, yep.
An established seasoned piece of shit.
Horrible.
She obviously opposes abortion.
Yeah, so Virginia Foxx is standing up there again, chair for the Committee on Education in the House, talking about Woke Kindergarten.
I mentioned, you know, what the demographics look like for Glassbrook Elementary, which again is the one elementary school that was partnering with this program and Hayward Unified.
The enrollment is something that, you know, is continually dropping.
Hayward Unified's budget was showing, you know, a significant portion of students are leaving the district for private and charter schools.
This school, Glassbrook Elementary, was actually almost closed.
I think last year they were looking at shutting it down and parents went to the school board and were really pushing to keep it open.
It was very important to them that they kept this school in their community.
And so I think that there is a love for what this school could be.
I think a lot of the teachers really do see how good this school could be.
I've looked through a bunch of different report card sorts of things that Glassbrook has prepared for the school district and the school district has prepared for the state.
And overall, in terms of culture, I think there is a lot of respect for what the school can be and parents that have said, you know, that they really appreciate the school that But it's very clear that they have a segment of the population, they continually get these segments of the population that are
Yeah, it's the story of all of education in this country, which is assholes have ruined it and then they make it so that charter school and all that is the only way to go.
And then the people who have money to do that, do that.
And then everyone else is left over with public school or whatever.
And there's no funding.
It's constantly conservatives ruin the system and they're like, look at how bad the system is.
And then it like self perpetuates.
And it's sad, really, because I would love an incredibly robust public school system, but they've just they've they've eaten away at it so much.
And you know, I had mentioned the chronically absent percentage, that it was at 44.7%.
In 2022, it was over 60%.
So they're trying to make these steps to improve their absentee rate.
However, that number is still more than double from before COVID.
So I think moving into that virtual learning environment, there's a lot of things.
It's, I imagine, very, very complicated figuring out everything that is going into the data that we're seeing now here.
Oh, yeah.
Already, logically speaking, part of this debunk is, what are you comparing this to?
Like, if you're just in a vacuum, Fox News is yelling about, look at this school.
The something's going down.
And the what's-the-face is going down.
It's like, they're just assuming or asserting that it's because of this program.
When it's like, what's our basis for comparison?
Are we looking at a similarly situated school in a similar area at a similar time, or are we just doing no basis of comparison?
What they do is they leave it out so that you assume normal schools are great right now, like everything's fine.
Yeah, and I think that's a great point.
You know, in doing a lot of this research, I think what is very clear is as strong as California is in a lot of ways, the education system in California kind of overall is struggling.
I think there are a lot of when you look at the public school system and you look at the English scores and math scores for these standardized tests, they're not great, even at some of the good schools, quote unquote, you know, the public schools that have a lot of resources within their own community.
And so this is clearly a school that needs extra resources, hence the federal program to provide additional resources through that funding.
But it's not the only school.
You know, I was looking at some similar schools in our district out here, and they're, you know, looking at how they were approaching the request for those funds because they were on this list of being eligible.
And they're using a lot of the same language in their report that Glassbrook used and Hayward Unified used in requesting Funding and how it would be used in what particular ways, what metrics they were looking at improving.
Absenteeism kind of across the board is a big one in California.
And sorry, what was this funding again, just to spell that out a little bit more?
Yeah.
So it's called the Comprehensive Support and Improvement Funding.
It's federal funds that were designated for schools that were far below the benchmark.
Who passed this?
Did this just happen recently?
So this program isn't super new.
This funding area was developed through the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was signed by Obama in 2015.
It replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, so there's significant information here regarding How schools are meant to assist and support students that No Child Left Behind was seen to be leaving behind.
Leaving behind.
Yeah, exactly.
There were there were gaps that needed to be addressed.
And so this was an improvement upon that or an attempt at an improvement.
I'm not an educator.
I don't know exactly, you know, how they would feel about it.
But what's important is that it did carve out additional funding for schools so they could receive additional resources for the ones that needed it the most.
And what does it have to be?
What are the requirements on that funding?
Like, what do they have to do with it?
I'm just wondering if Woke Kindergarten fits within that.
Yeah.
So it's pretty open.
There are reports that schools submit called the School Plan for Student Achievement.
And in it, they say, you know, the purpose of the plan, what funding that they're requesting for their outcomes and the things that they're going to be exploring and improving.
There's a checkbox that's like wokeness, just general wokeness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And comprehensive support and improvement is one of those things.
And within it, it says, you know, summarize the school's plan for effectively meeting the ESSA requirements, that act that I just spoke about.
What was it?
Every Student Succeeds Act.
That are in alignment with your other federal, state, and local programs.
And they have things like authentic relationships and speaking about that strong, positive relationships between staff members and students are critical for student success, student engagement, communication, parental involvement.
These are all things that when you're in education, you see are connected to a student's academic success too.
I do want to say right off the bat though, knowing I don't know anything about any of this.
This is all your research.
I will say we can't do the thing where we set the unrealistic standard for comparison because all over this great shitty nation of ours and any system has these problems, there's going to be grift.
There's going to be, oh, people get a contract because they know someone who whatever.
Oh, develop a program that's for whatever.
We'll pay you way too much for it because we have personal or political relationship.
Like, there's gonna be that crap everywhere regardless of Wokeness.
And so I just want to make very clear before we get into this, if Wokeness has gone amok here, sure.
But like, as long as we're making the right comparison, like, but for Wokeness, would this happen?
Or would there just be some other program?
That could be grift.
And that's, again, just before I know anything about it.
Maybe it's a really good program.
Maybe it's worthwhile.
I don't know.
But even just sitting here, like, we always have to make sure we're comparing apples to apples and not just like they did with the school that I mentioned earlier.
By leaving it out, by omission, you just assume the basis for comparison is everything's great.
And when it's like, well, maybe it isn't.
Yeah, no, I think that's totally fair and we'll definitely get into the merits of this program and how it came about anyway.
But ultimately, I guess my point here is that this funding source does not have to be used for math tutors.
It does not have to be used for additional books for the library.
Could it be used for that?
It could be used kind of for everything.
My reading of this is essentially you have to just give justification.
Could you hire more teachers with it?
Or is it not that kind of thing?
That's a good question.
I don't know that you can, because they're one-time funds.
Yeah, it's like temporary.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So, looking through that material, that's the intention of this fund.
When the San Francisco Chronicle reported that scores did not improve after engaging this program, they actually fell.
The superintendent responded to, you know, their outreach saying, do you have a comment for this piece we're writing?
And said that the program was selected based off of input from parents, educators, members of the community.
You know, they had like a little stakeholder group, committee group, to identify appropriate vendors for achieving the goals that were set out in these reports.
And they defined woke kindergarten and the intention, what they were hoping to see in working with woke kindergarten is for their attendance rate to improve, those unexcused absences to decrease, and their suspension rate to improve, both of which did.
However, the superintendent said, and now we're off the state's watch list.
And the San Francisco Chronicle had to tell them, actually, you're not.
So that was really embarrassing and a little concerning to me when I read that.
I was like, Yikes.
Interesting.
But that's already really illustrative because so much of this crap, it's so easy to generate.
This is the huge disadvantage that we're at.
It's, well, kindergarten, they did this, they did that, blah, blah.
And then they make you, again, all by omission.
I assume when I heard them talking as a just average viewer or listener, I'm thinking, okay, so some person in there is like, I want to hire woke stuff.
So we hired woke stuff.
I was like, well, no, it sounds like maybe it was through the school board or through some group of like parents that like, at the very least it was done with, it sounds like some amount of buy-in from just people involved in the school, whether it's parents, teachers, whatever.
Right?
Yeah, that's my understanding of the situation.
Now, I spent a lot of time looking through a lot of board agendas and attachments to try and find where that meeting took place.
Couldn't find it.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
It could have happened, you know, out on a, you know, not part of the board meeting specifically or, you know, but I could not find mention of it technically.
But I also don't think the superintendent would be lying about that.
That would seem like a pretty Yeah, I don't know.
Ridiculous lie.
I think it'd be pretty easy to be called out on that lie, too.
Right.
Sort of like he did with the newspaper that called him out on being on the watch list.
Yeah.
You might run into other difficulties, of course, which is, well, maybe there's only a privileged select few parents that have the time or wherewithal to participate in that.
And that could be a very valid insight into it.
But it's still, I think it already paints a different picture.
It's like, OK, there's a group of people who did this in the interest of improving the school.
Now, can a group of people in a given place be wrong?
Yes!
Or not.
Again, I'm not sure if they're right or wrong, but just keeping in mind what the standard for judgment here is.
Is it schools have gone amok with some liberal woke overlord?
Or is it like, oh no, a group of parents looked at this thing and thought it might be a good idea?
Yeah, and you know, one of the other criticisms that I saw in some of the right-wing media coverage of this is that, why are we bringing in a woke kindergarten regarding anti-racism for black people when the school is 80% Hispanic?
You know, this doesn't speak to that.
It was very ridiculous.
Yeah, I didn't see anywhere, hear anywhere yet where it's just for black people.
Yeah, it's this assumption because of the language that they're using for the materials that it's for black people.
However, I do want to share that, you know, when we're talking about absenteeism, at Glassbrook Elementary, again, at this specific elementary school, Overall, the percentage of students that were absent 15 or more days in the school year was 13%, which matches California average.
But for the Black students at that school, the state average is 24% for Black students.
At Glassbrook, it's 75% of their Black students were absent 15 or more days.
So there is this disparity there, too, where they have their Black student population potentially needing more resources beyond the rest of the student population.
They're specific to absenteeism.
So this is what they wanted to pursue.
Now, let's talk about the contract, what it was meant to be.
The kind of statement of the contract is, Woke Kindergarten will partner with Glassbrook Elementary School to improve staff's capacity to implement healing-centered and liberatory learning practices made possible by developing their understanding of teaching through an abolitionist lens.
Glassbrook requests a school year-long partnership that incorporates a combination of workshops, applicable practice, feedback, and coaching.
So this was something that was for the teachers, workshops.
And this initial contract was for the academic year 2021 to 2022.
$50,000 at that time.
This is so nothing in comparison to... Cool.
Yeah.
Something that honestly rubs me the wrong way about this, and I'm going to be upfront about the areas where I have some misgivings.
It is a for-profit company.
I don't love that.
Yeah.
Not a fan.
But they do state that for every institutional booking that they receive, they organize a free community workshop for black and brown families and educators, and they dedicate a portion of their payments as mutual aid.
So even though it's a for-profit company, they're carving out additional free resources for the communities that, again, need it the most.
And I can appreciate that.
It doesn't sound like a whole lot, but sure.
Yeah, I personally would prefer public school where they can to work with non-profit companies.
Yeah, but I mean, who prints all our fucking textbooks?
Like, that's all profit, right?
I mean, it's like, there's plenty.
Again, what's fair here?
Like, where are we comparing to?
Yeah.
And then I was, you know, sitting there with myself and thinking about, like, is it OK that I have a problem with this company being for profit?
Like, why shouldn't someone who brings those skills to the table theoretically be able to make money off of it?
I don't know.
I went through a little mini existential crisis, I think.
Yeah.
I mean, it could kind of go either way.
I see what you mean.
Like, if there was a better option that was nonprofit, that might be better.
I don't know.
Maybe there wasn't.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, and so what that $50,000 broke out into was four workshops, costed at $15,000, prep time additional $5,000, etc., etc.
So there's a table here that, I'll be honest, here's another one of my misgivings, I feel like If this were the state and a vendor submitted this as part of their contract specs, it would not get signed.
I think that it just feels very vague.
You see it later with some of the other labor time for components that are listed, where it shows a range of labor time but then a flat cost.
And it doesn't say like up to, you know, X dollars.
So it could be that you spent 30 hours, but you still get to charge the full amount versus if you spent 50 hours.
So there are just some things that yellow flags, I'd say.
But they do itemize to a certain extent.
You know, it's kind of like overall components.
So workshops, the prep for the workshops, drop in hours for one-on-one coaching, resource distribution and creation.
They make all their own resources, graphic design, videos, all those sorts of things.
So that obviously is quite a bit of work.
But apparently the first contract seemed to go well because the teachers asked for an additional contract just to continue their work over the summer.
Following the end of the school year, they requested a one-month term for the month of August, $20,000 to continue the planning of their thematic units before the next school year began.
This is the one that's a little vague.
It says it's one-line item.
It says summer planning with teachers.
And it says 30 to 50 hours of prep planning and creation, 10 hours facilitating at a flat cost of $20,000.
We're not getting to $250,000 so far though, right?
No, yeah.
That's $70K over the course of a year, essentially.
And the other thing to keep in mind is this is federal money.
So oftentimes a lot of these stakeholders, a lot of people making these decisions are like, well, It's not like you get this money and if you don't spend it here, you can do whatever you want with it.
Now it sounds like it's pretty open.
So, you know, I would be interested in what the other options are, but it's also in a certain sense, it's kind of free money.
So like there might be a lot of like, eh, you're not scrutinizing super hard on like every single line item dollar.
It's not like, it's not like it's coming out of teacher's pockets.
I'll put it that way.
It's not like, oh, well we're, we're not paying teachers in order to do this.
So that might go into some of this decision-making.
Yeah, yeah, and that's fair.
And how we get to then the $250,000 total is that, again, I'm guessing this is going well because before that contract was over, that summer contract, they decided to engage with Woke Kindergarten for a multi-year contract, and that would be working through the end of the 2023-2024 school year.
So this is adding additional information, workshopping their Woke Read Alouds, doing follow-up sessions, a lot of coaching, meeting with the school leader on a regular basis.
This is how we get to that total $250,000.
That added $180,000 because it was over the course of another couple years and, you know, the 2022-23 school year and the 2023-24 school year.
because it was over the course of another couple years.
And, you know, the 2020-23 school year and the 2023-24 school year.
And so now we have, now I've tied out to my 200.
Yeah, okay.
I see the spreadsheet here.
Yep, now those numbers match.
Got it.
Yep, yep.
So that is something that I think is really important.
Coleman Hughes did touch on that a bit.
Not every media source did.
Some of them tried to obscure some of the facts, so it sounded like they were getting $250,000 for a year.
No, it was over the course of multiple years.
And that it was an additional contract and an amendment to a contract for working with a vendor that they've I've been working with, so something's going right.
Yeah.
The other thing I want to talk about is, why are we talking about this now?
This is not new information.
If you live in the right-wing media bubble, you've already heard about Woke Kindergarten.
Oh, you mean even to the right-wing bubble?
Oh, I thought, I took that to mean you were saying like, why did the right-wing people only pick up on it now?
Because that also happens a lot, where it's like they discover something, they circulate it.
But you're saying even they have already covered this?
Fox News covered that $20,000 contract for August 2022.
They covered it back when it happened.
Daily Wire covered this way back when it happened, from the beginning.
Breitbart covered this before it broke in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Federalist Papers captured this.
Yeah, I mean, in fairness, I feel like often that's just like something needs to hit the right place at the right time to go viral.
And that's my point, that all of this stuff is not new information to these organizations.
And the only reason this is a story and has made it to the House floor and is all over the place and you have Bill Maher talking about it and you have like all these other places that normally probably wouldn't always see it is because a legitimate news source is running a piece on it.
Oh, who?
San Francisco Chronicle.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
So they broke this story and now this is everywhere.
Quote unquote broke it, though.
Like, well, so they must have had some reason.
So what like what new insight were they bringing to?
I think it's because the test scores came out and the test scores went down.
Yeah.
People are so bad at this.
I think people everywhere have their agenda that they're trying to fit everything into.
Yeah.
And so I just, one thing I try to do is keep the goddamn perspective.
Yeah.
Okay.
Test scores came out, they went down.
Let's look at the worst case scenario.
Let's re-examine that contract that again is free money that it looks like we could be doing something else with that money.
Maybe we could do something that would improve test scores.
Yeah.
You know, or, or maybe by the way, maybe they'll pick the next thing and it won't work either.
But when you hyper-focus and selectively pick and choose what information you're going to present when, again, what are some other programs that were available?
Do we have any evidence on them?
And maybe it will be that, oh, this fucking school board full of normal goddamn people made an incorrect call.
That could be, again, worst case, maybe it's like, oh, we tried that, didn't end up working.
Let's try something else with our free federal government money.
Yeah, I think the other thing that I wanted to mention here is that clearly I see this as when you legitimize this complaint in a particular form of media, and then that creates the firestorm.
How I know this is happening is because the right-wing media, back when they were calling out Woke Kindergarten years ago, they were also calling out other vendors that Hayward Unified was working with, and San Francisco Chronicle did not talk about them at all.
As in you're saying, for a given drop in test scores, what's going into that?
Exactly.
Yeah.
They contract with tons of stuff.
Anti-woke first grade, for example.
But there are things like math tutors and, you know, reading intervention that they do partner with.
So why aren't they carrying the blame?
Well, and I tell you what, I bet you they're teaching anti-woke math and that's the issue.
They're too focused on anti-woke math.
Again, I can make that claim.
It sounds like bullshit, but I could just as easily... The test scores have gone down and they've hired tutors, right?
Well, are those tutors not teaching them that math is racist enough?
Maybe that's the problem.
Does that sound stupid?
Well, it's just as logical as what you're saying.
It's funny that you say that because one of the vendors that they partnered with And that goes against my point.
Also, education consulting.
And one of their big things is actually anti-racist math.
And they have an entire frequently asked questions section.
And that goes against my point.
Oh, well.
But I think what's interesting here, that vendor was funded through the same dollars.
But San Francisco Chronicle, they're not talking about them because the name isn't as eye catching.
Oh, the name.
Yeah, even though I was going to say, we're kind of giving them like, don't say it too loud because they will.
Like if these people are also teaching anti-racist math or whatever.
The right wing already knows about it because they called out this vendor and their stuff from years ago.
That's interesting.
So that makes me wonder why the San Francisco Chronicle just focused on them.
This is less money.
So that program didn't have $250,000 in their contract.
They had, you know, it was like $80,000 something.
I don't know.
I have a spreadsheet going where I was trying to capture everybody.
That's still a lot.
Especially, is it per year?
It sounds like per year, the woke kindergarten was only $50,000 or so.
Yeah.
Here, let me give you an example.
Same year.
So Woke Kindergarten, their 2021 contract for $50,000.
It's significantly less.
Ketzel Education Consulting was $15,500.
Okay.
Yeah.
But they also worked with a company called RaceWork and that company got $28,700 in that same time period as well.
All right.
I'm finding it a little odd though.
I actually will say that this school that, again, it sounded like it was largely Latino, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I don't find on average Latino people to be like super woke.
So I worry, is there a privileged white liberal elite kind of bullshit thing happening where they're the ones making all the decisions for people of color?
That would worry me a little bit.
Pin in that.
Okay.
So I think what I see here is, you know, just to kind of wrap up the San Francisco Chronicle piece, is that Wilt Kindergarten is a name that's going to get clicks.
Yeah.
The Money Amount is going to get clicks versus these other ones, Ketzel Education Consulting.
And granted, not all of these programs are happening at the same exact school.
They're contracted through the school board and might be, you know, for a different school.
Like I think RaceWork might have been working in some of like their middle school programs or something because The approach was different.
But just to kind of get my last little bits out there on Woke Kindergarten and some of the things that I would have wanted to see as a parent, as a taxpayer, I guess, too, you know, if I'm just going to give benefit of the doubt to the San Francisco Chronicle and how they approach the story, I do feel like the line items were vague in some of these budgets.
There's no indication in the line items themselves of not to exceed, even though there's a range of hours that might be expected and kind of a significant range.
There's nothing wrong with a local, that's why we need more local papers.
It's bad that they're gone because, yeah, there's nothing wrong with being like, hey, if you were a parent at this school, you might be concerned with how they're spending their money.
Nothing wrong with that.
Maybe they made a bad decision.
Maybe it would be better if they spent their money a different way.
Cool.
Yeah.
I also would want to see metrics.
So superintendent... Yeah, so I was going to ask you, what is the national or at least California average of test scores year over year here?
And that's, you know... It's also not great.
It's not great.
And you would need to compare, again, similarly situated schools.
Has anyone done the comparison, including you or some other anyone, of what's a roughly similarly situated school?
Maybe the makeup, socioeconomic makeup.
What happened with them year over year?
That's going to give you not a perfect, but a way better basis of comparison rather than just, well, it went down, so therefore bad.
Well, what if the nation went down twice as much?
Yeah.
You know, you need that information.
Yeah.
I mean, I can tell you at the state level, just looking at the entire state of California and, you know, I don't have a school by school comparison that I put together, but in terms of their English language arts academic performance, it's gone down.
It's in the orange range, which is kind of a, red is the worst it can be.
Orange is the next step up.
Yellow is middle, green and blue.
Blue is amazing.
We are not there.
We're at orange across the state for English language charts.
Yeah, can you give us a sense of numbers here?
It says 13.6 points below standard.
It identifies it as year over year having maintained its position and went down by only 1.4 points.
Okay, and this is California?
From last year, yes.
So what did this school do?
Glassbrook Elementary, it's very bad.
And I mean, this is why they're on the state watch list, I guess.
They're 101.8 points below standard.
Yikes.
But what was it the year before?
14.5 points higher than that.
So still in the red, honestly, though.
Yeah.
So it's very bad.
Math is very similar as well.
But I do, again, I do want to note, you would want to pick a similarly situation.
Again, I don't think here, so look at it this way.
I highly doubt that this one program, which was, what was it?
A couple of seminars or whatever?
What did it amount to?
It was significant.
It was a lot of hours, honestly, of workshopping.
I would say multiple workshops over the course of the year.
It was probably, probably one a month, maybe?
So the first one was four workshops.
Over the course of how long?
Over the course of one year, that was the academic year, but then also coaching sessions that they were doing, one-on-one coaching.
Here's my point.
Right-wing media treats it as though what happened is the woke mob took over the school.
And they started, they did that horribly unfunny video someone did where it's like, it's actually woke math and you can't get the right answer, but whatever.
That's what people are envisioning.
And I'm saying, I would think it would be pretty improbable that a couple of workshops and some coaching sessions are going to dramatically reduce children's reading scores over and above what it would have been otherwise.
Like, that's hard to believe.
Like, you would have to, you have to really mess up, you know, like, really, like, how much do you think?
And everything else would have had to stay constant from, you know, all their other intervention specialists and all those things, right?
Yeah, so I'm saying in order to actually isolate the variables, which is going to be really difficult, you would have to get similar situated schools, students, everything.
And even that would only tell you maybe because it could always just be statistical noise as well.
But it would tell you maybe what's going on with this particular school.
And the Woke Kindergarten is but one ingredient of it, as you say.
There's also these other tutor programs.
There's also, I don't know, did the principal change?
Did anything else go on?
Fires?
Who knows?
And you could do that, and I think it's worth doing that.
And I'm fully open to the idea that if you somehow isolated, accounted for every variable, if then you found like, yeah, well, it looks like controlling for everything, Woke Kindergarten wasn't a good idea, then it's not a good idea.
But the idea that as long as there's a decrease, you can just assign it all to what was a couple seminars and some coaching.
So, you know, it's not it strikes me as highly implausible that that would really make that big of a negative difference.
Yeah.
In a couple years.
Yep.
I agree.
I think it just doesn't make sense.
But I do think That what's missing here is that objectives to fight back against that narrative, right?
Had that been built into the contract, that this is our intention of what we're hoping to improve and this is how we're going to measure it over the course of this, you know, two year contract or whatever.
I don't know exactly how you could.
I mean, it would probably have to be some level of like student surveys.
You would look at the absentee rate.
Yeah, I was going to say, were they just trying to do fix because that was the superintendent's answer was like, hey, our absentee rate is way better, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And their absentee rate did improve.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that was one of the goals.
I mean, I forget, was it a stated goal for like specifically, no, your math scores are going to go up.
Like, was that a stated goal of Woke Kindergarten?
No, because I think what is understood is that, and this is why the comprehensive support and improvement federal funding is tied to this, is that in order for students to achieve academically, there are things that are deeper that need to be addressed in order for them to feel like they are showing, first of all, like physically showing up to school and then actually paying attention in school and feel like they can connect with the material in school, right?
Those are all things that I think overall people are starting to understand.
The way that has been done, you know, status quo doesn't work for a lot of students.
So how do we fix that?
And so Woke Kindergarten, the hope is to help teachers navigate that space.
And figure out how they can alter their lesson plans, how they can connect with students in that way so the students feel supported and you feel like you have a teacher that you can make a mistake in front of, that you can get something wrong in front of.
Developing that relationship, I think, is incredibly important for academic success for kids.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's as simple as it would be good to try to improve the quality of teachers.
I do think that there's a lot of things that could be done there, including teacher pay.
And so if this were a question, if somehow there were a question of, should we spend $250,000 on Woke Kindergarten or should we, you know, hire a couple more teachers or pay our current teachers better?
I'd probably be like, well, let's do the second thing.
Yeah.
Better.
But I don't know that that's a choice.
Like, I don't know that that's actually, given the way this federal money works, you know, I don't know that that makes sense.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
It's not my job to do this, but those are things to keep in mind.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, due to the amount of just absolute ridiculous research this takes, we're going to have to cut this off here to give Lydia a break to get back to kindergarten.
Let me breathe.
Drink the weird cafeteria milks, you know, the envelope ones.
Yeah, that you can't open, right?
And then it's ruined and it's just wet paper.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
Really weird.
How did we ever do that?
Anyway.
But we had the chocolate ones, which were not chocolate flavored, but they were at least different tasting.
They were brown flavored.
Yeah.
Did the nineties happen?
Was that real?
I know.
Anyway.
It's dark.
We're going to take a little break here.
This is it for part one.
I can't wait to hear all there is to hear in part two.
There's so much coming.
Twists and turns, kindergarten graduation ceremonies, you know, all that stuff.
Yeah.
But in the meantime, make sure you support the show on patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Skip all the ads and all that, and we'll see you very soon for part two.
Yeah.
This is episode this one.
It's the next one.
It's the next one.
Number, our favorite number.
It's woke kindergarten part one.
That's why we don't know what number it is.
It's because we have to go back to kindergarten.
Well, I went to a woke kindergarten where they didn't teach me numbers.
