THE SRV EXPOSITOR
"The past and the present are within my field of inquiry." — Sherlock Holmes,
in The Hound of the Baskervilles
SRVUSD'S VILE, OVERTLY RACIST "ANTI-RACISM" PROGRAMS
SRVUSD Board Policy 0410: "The Board of Education is committed to providing equal opportunity for all individuals in education. District programs, activities, and practices shall be free from discrimination based on race, color, ancestry, national origin, ethnic group identification, age, religion, marital or parental status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or genetic information; the perception of one or more of such characteristics; or association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics."
SRVUSD Board Policy 6144, in relevant part: "The Board expects teachers to exercise discretion when deciding whether or not a particular issue is suitable for study or discussion in any particular class.
"The Board also expects teachers to ensure that all sides of a controversial issue are impartially presented, with adequate and appropriate factual information. Without promoting any partisan point of view, the teacher should help students separate fact from opinion and warn them against drawing conclusions from insufficient data. The teacher shall not suppress any student's view on the issue as long as its expression is not malicious or abusive toward others."
For a quick example of the District's destructively prejudicial "anti-racism" materials and classroom lessons, see This Book Is Anti-Racist. "This book" is in fact a ludicrous caricature of "anti-racism."
Author Tiffany Jewell's first paragraph says “We’ll capitalize Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Folx of the Global Majority.” Notice that "Whites" are excluded from the list. And "Folx"? That, says Jewell, is because "'folx' spelled with 'x' is a gender-neutral term created by activist communities.” But since when is "...ks" somehow a gender-connected word ending?
The book presents sentences like “Richard Loving was white (no cap) and Mildred Loving was Black Indigenous biracial” (with caps). Ironically, though unmentioned by the author, this regards 1967’s famous Loving v. Virginia case, which overturned a ban on white + black marriages.
Then, there’s this gem: “Being racist against white people is not a thing. So I can have prejudice against white people…. In our society, REVERSE RACISM IS NOT REAL.” A genuinely anti-racist book would oppose racism in all its forms.
Author Jewell, though, appears to be obsessed with race, self-pity, and bitter disdain for whites. Her genuinely racist, supposedly "anti-racist" book reads like a parody of opportunistic race hustlers who enrich themselves by perpetuating a never-ending narrative of “white supremacist” oppressors supposedly making victims of everyone else. So Jewell's outlook reminds attentive readers of Ibram X Kendi's twisted advice in How to Be An Anti-Racist: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Nevertheless, the SRVUSD Board of Education adopted Jewell's book on October 26, 2021 as a student text. Click here for the more extensive analysis that was presented to the Board at the time. They were unresponsive.
SRVUSD's activists deny that Critical Race Theory (CRT)is taught in the District. But it isn't just taught; CRT's essentially racist notions suffuse SRVUSD's "social/emotional learning" (SEL), with CRT's presumptions of "white privilege," "systemic racism," "implicit bias," "microaggressions," "intersectionality," etc.
The very title of a text listed for the "My Story, Your Story, Hxrstory" (sic) course (which seems to have morphed into "Ethnic Studies") is Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. And kids here are led to believe that racism permeates American society and that whites are born and raised in a "systemically racist" culture.
SRVUSD brings in expensive CRT consultants for racialist workshops to indoctrinate the teaching staff— and textbooks are adopted — with an apparent expectation that the teachers and their classroom materials will then transmit the lessons learned to their captive-audience students. These poisonous attitudes appear even to have driven Superintendent Malloy's amplifying of a fabricated social media post which blamed a Stunt Team's members for a supposedly "Racist Incident" last May.
Even Brookings Institution liberal William Galston recognizes the subversive nature of Critical Race Theory. His revealing July 21, 2021 Wall Street Journal article notes and explains the following about CRT and its pernicious elements and outcomes:
• Critical race theory denies the possibility of objectivity.
• The theory moves race to the center of our focus.
• The founders of Critical Race Theory identified with Black Power movements much more than with those who were working for integration.
• Critical race theory is an explicitly left-wing movement inspired by the thinking of an Italian neo-Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. [Exposure of this inconvenient fact especially angers the left.]
• The theory offers a fundamental critique of the civil-rights movement and the liberal ideology it reflects.
• Critical race theory rejects the principle of equality of opportunity.
Despite all the massive problems of CRT, SRVUSD has promoted it heavily in staff training, and moved it wholesale into the District's captive-audience classrooms. We suspect that some SRVUSD personnel who teach CRT (and its destructive, centrifugal notions) don't realize that's what they're doing.
Alternatively, in today's bizarro world of defining one's own reality, there may be some other SRVUSD teacher and administrator radicals who believe it's enough for them simply to identify as non-CRT instructors, i.e. to deny that's what they’re teaching (though in fact that IS what they’re teaching) — so they believe that should end the inconvenient discussion.
June 2024: Zachor Legal filed a Public Records act request to see SRVUSD's Course Description for what has become its "Interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies" curriculum. Parents Defending Education posted it on June 5, 2024. It proves the use of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction as part of this leftist curriculum.
This web page includes a download link for the entire 18-page prospectus/syllabus in PDF form for this subversive course and all seven pages "Course Materials" listing.
How to understand the difference between Constructive Equity Studies and "Liberated" (Marxist) version favored by SRVUSD's radicals: see the helpful table posted by the Alliance for Constructive Equity Studies.
Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You, by Jason Reynolds, was adopted March 9, 2021 by SRVUSD's Board of Education for use in 7th-grade classrooms. That adoption ranks among the very worst examples in SRVUSD's long history of irresponsibly bad decision making.
The book’s introduction, by Reynolds' fellow racial activist Ibram X. Kendi, immediately misleads readers regarding statistical correlations involving race and crime — relationships which are clear to anyone who takes a little time to review the relevant FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
Author Reynolds prejudicially divides Americans into three classes — SEGREGATIONISTS, ASSIMILATIONISTS, AND ANTI-RACISTS.
To Reynolds, SEGREGATIONISTS are haters of other people based on race. OK, that's a workable characterization.
But also to Reynolds, ASSIMILATIONISTS are go-along, get-along cowardly types who “think there is something wrong with Black people and … that Black people as a group can be changed for the better.” Among those he judges to be guilty of ASSIMILATIONISM — each of them a "coward," Reynolds includes Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Clarence Thomas, and even Barack Obama.
Reynold’s fashionable paragons of ANTI-RACISM are communist agitator Angela Davis and the self-acclaimed Marxist, co-founders of BLACK LIVES MATTER, grifters who want to do away with the nuclear family and “tight grip of heteronormative thinking.” And the ANTI-RACIST music which Reynolds recommends for “driving CHANGE AND EMPOWERMENT”? It’s the vile output of individuals and rude, crude, and/or lewd groups like “SLICK RICK,” "ICE T," and "N. W. A."
"N.W.A." is the chosen abbreviation by the "Niggaz with Attitudes" outfit. Reynolds specifically recommends their viciously depraved celebration of rape and murder, Straight Outta Compton, lyrics of which were presented to the school board in printed copies and then eventually in audio form. Board members and Supt. Malloy sat reading and listening stolidly to this abomination, but proceeded to adopt — and later to retain that adoption — of this degenerate "textbook" anyway.
A more detailed examination of this book — again, as presented to the stolidly indifferent Board — is available.
As with the other racialist program elements being adopted by this school district and its ossified school board, there is no balance here — no inspirational, rags-to-riches accounts of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Thomas Sowell, Colin Powell.... Instead, blacks are all to be considered victims, and whites all as systemic racists.
SRVUSD's Board of Education and activist teachers greatly accelerated their push for "critical race theory" in District classrooms in February, 2020 when they launched 9th and 11th grade "Justice and Community" courses. A justification offered for these courses was the claim that “educators must acknowledge the existence of [oppression] as a primary root cause of institutionalized racism, structural racism, and [privilege],” etc.
That wording in red derived from a 2018 National Education Association resolution, into which SRVUSD promoters inserted the bracketed abridgements in place of the original terms “White supremacy culture” and “White privilege," likely realizing that the original NEA resolution (itself titled “White Supremacy Culture") would stir stronger opposition. And so, 57 years and $35 Trillion into the “War on Poverty,” we still have the centrifugal notions of actual racists (and Frankfurt School Marxists) driving a race-baiting agenda in union-dominated schools, like those in SRVUSD.
The “lens” of common sense should have prevented even the introduction of these two ridiculous, intentionally divisive courses. The naive young teachers who pushed for adoption should have been told to save such juvenile radicalism for whatever local writing workshops or left-wing college courses in which they might still be enrolled.
The California Teachers Association (California’s NEA branch) was itself unusually candid about its own fanaticism in a 1984 booklet which that radical, subversive outfit published, entitled Guidelines for Academic Freedom in the Public Schools: “Who dares take on religion, free enterprise, patriotism, and motherhood? We do — and we must!”
Unfortunately, many or most of SRVUSD's curricular decisions are driven by activist teachers who likely are union members of the San Ramon Valley Education Association (SRVEA), California Teachers Association (CTA), and the National Education Association (NEA); and joining SRVEA means joining all three. NEA's notorious Business Item 39 (summer, 2021) shows how some of the worst ideas emerge. Quoting:
"The NEA will, with guidance on implementation from the NEA president and chairs of the Ethnic Minority Affairs Caucuses:
"A. Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) — what it is and what it is not; have a team of staffers for members who want to learn more and fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric; and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members.
"B. Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project...."
... And so on. NEA adopted this item. But after intense blowback by critics nationwide, NEA belatedly decided that "This item cannot be accomplished with current staff and resources under the proposed Modified 2021-2022 Strategic Plan and Budget. It would cost an additional $127,600." For perspective, that's 39% of the NEA president's salary, and 30% of her total compensation. Finding Business Item 39 now seems to require a Wayback Internet Archive search.
The “Justice and Community” courses, by their very design, serve to foster tribal segmentation and a demoralizing sense of grievance and victimhood. That counterproductive outcome is actually anticipated in both course-justification documents, slightly more overtly so in the 11th grade version, wherein reading material is to be assessed “through the lenses of marginalization, equity, and distribution of resources in American society,” while “connecting the literature of study to past and present inequities.”
Wiser heads among leading black intellectuals despise what has accurately been called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” — and the diminished achievement and promotion of racial animus which go with it. Ten examples….
George Washington Carver, Botanist and Inventor: "There is no short cut to achievement." "Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have a habit of making excuses." "I know that my Redeemer lives." "Thank God I love humanity, complexion doesn't interest me one single bit."
Ward Connerly, Businessman and former UC Regent: "If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives."
Star Parker, Founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education: "The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools and broken black families."
Robert Woodson, Founder of 1776 Unites: "Diversity warriors need to understand that the key to assisting minorities to achieve isn’t to lower the standards against which they must compete but take steps to assist them to meet the standards."
John McWhorter, Columbia Linguistics Professor, regarding "anti-racist wokeness”: "It has become a major problem today. Not only because it isn’t pretty. Not only because it is extremely dishonest. But because in the name of helping Black people, this philosophy often harms Black people instead."
Winsom Sears, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia: [Regarding the need for school choice:] “The money in education follows the brick building, it doesn’t follow the child. I don’t care about the brick building. I care about the human life. We don’t get do-overs for our children.”
Shelby Steele, Stanford University Hoover Institution: “For black leaders in the age of white guilt, the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident provided the 'truth' of 'systematic racism.'”
Walter Williams, Economics Professor, George Mason University: (deceased): "The well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement."
Thomas Sowell, Stanford University: "Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity."
Booker T. Washington, Educator: "There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.... [They] do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."
In marked contrast to the accomplished, insightfully honest individuals above came Ibram X. Kendi (born Henry Rogers) to Boston University. Author Jack Cashill characterizes Kendi's rise and scandalous fall with a quote from Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
SRVUSD took another giant radicalization step a year later in its February, 2021 adoption of a course outline for what was called "My Story, Your Story, Hxrstory" (yes, spelled that way) — eventually using the framework introduced to initiate racialized "Ethnic Studies" courses in its high schools. The 16-page course outline exposed SRVUSD's full-on determination to indoctrinate local kids with some of the worst elements of Critical Race Theory along with the warped outlooks of communist revisionist Howard Zinn. Page 10 from that outline (here, with annotations added in red) illustrates the degree of SRVUSD's officially adopted radicalism:
On June 7th, Superintendent Malloy appeared to be leveraging his irresponsible amplifying of the fabricated "Cal High Racist Incident 5.23.22" as he promoted and then got School Board approval for the hiring of up to 15 "Equity Liaisons," at total cost $1.875 Million annually in salaries and benefits.
But what would a school district's "Equity" obsession be without bringing in outrageously expensive outside "experts" to lecture teachers and administrators on their "white privilege," their "systemic racism, their "microaggressions," their "implicit biases," etc., with an expectation that the same prejudicial outlooks will then be targeted at students?
Some Other Outrageous Expenditures
So among others, SRVUSD engaged a presenter from Courageous Conversation / Pacific Educational Group to conduct six 8AM to 3PM sessions (including a lunch hour) of "Culturally Relevant Instructional Coaching" during 2019-2020, at a cost of $6,000 per 6-hour day ($1,000 per hour, total $36,000). And since those were school-day sessions, thousands of dollars more were spent on substitutes for teachers away from their classrooms.
In another case (February, 2021), the District contracted with the "Equity Literacy Institute" (ELI) for 4 x 2.5 hours, including 15-minute breaks) of online training, at a cost of $250 for each of 55 District personnel (= $13,750 altogether). The course was not specific or customized for SRVUSD; in fact, other organizations and / or individuals in different time zones were simultaneous participants, and the audience was apparently much larger than SRVUSD's 55 individuals.
The ELI "Facilitator Training" Zoomed session consisted primarily of a vapid, repetitive, stream-of consciousness conversation between two ELI principals, situated somewhere remotely from each other (Georgia and South Carolina, apparently), saturated with temporizing “um” and “you know” fillers, and distracted / distracting further by one fussing periodically with her hair and by the other with a cat wondering around in his background.
Among additional 2021-2022 contracts a $22,750 amount authorized for Lori Watson and her "Race-Work LLC" to cover "Racial Equity consulting services for staff and parents."
Just this past July (2022), SRVUSD conducted an "Equity Summer Institute." A Stanford education professor was paid $5,750 (of SRVUSD taxpayer dollars) for his 120-minute presence ($48/min), specifically to include a 60-minute keynote address, a 30-minute Q&A, and a 30-minute book signing (= more dollars, from hawking his own book). Among "Institute" presentations, an assistant SRVUSD superintendent showed a slide saying "grades are inequitable."
A compromise of grading standards is where SRVUSD is headed next in its drive for race-based "Equity."
And these wild expenditures only scrape the surface of SRVUSD's overtly racist "anti-racism" expenditures. Even worse than the money wasted is the misuse of precious class time — and worst of all, the confusion, guilt or resentment, and other harmful effects imposed on captive-audience young minds and hearts.
What Is Racism?
“Racism” can be understood generally as favoring or disfavoring — or expecting less or more — of someone based merely upon the color of his or her skin.
Other factors, such as real-world crime statistics however, can enter into realistic assessments of one’s situation.
Consider this statement: “There is nothing more painful to me... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Is the statement racist, or simply realistic? Does it change your understanding to know that it quotes Jesse Jackson
(Baltimore Sun, Dec. 3, 1993)?
Consider the FBI's report on murders for 2021, below. It's less comprehensive now under Mr. Biden than before, whether under Trump (e.g., FBI’s 2019 Uniform Crime Report) or Obama (e.g., FBI's 2016 Uniform Crime Report)
But taking some time with “Offender Race” data allows a summary of the following tragic data for murders (homicide). Where the races are known: blacks, though only about 13% of U.S. population, commit more than 60% of murders and represent nearly 60% of murder victims. Violent crimes as a whole show similar disproportions.
Lunatic D.E.I. Obsession
The organized Left's obsession with "diversity, equity, and inclusion" has had and is having real-world consequences outside the insular world of education. Merit and ability, in even the most critical of institutions and individual professions are being superseded by preferential racial, ethnic, and gender-based selection and even with quotas, despite the principles of equal protection under law.
Richard Delgado and Elise Stefancic, the authors of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, assert that “For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics. In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.” And the Rule of Law, a foundational American principle, is defined as just "Legal formalism, which some theorists believe is necessary for order, stability, and cohesiveness in a society.”
So it's only "some theorists" who believe in the Rule of Law?
Some of the more prominent critical race theorists in fact do want to do away with the rule of law. They're the active proponents of, or willing spectators to, what you saw in the absence of Rule of Law during the summer of 2020, in the burning down of businesses and the wave attacks on police. And in America's big cities, the mayhem continues.
Meanwhile, the fixation on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" ("D.E.I.") instead of demonstrated merit is already affecting such fields as Medicine and Health Care, the Legal profession, airline pilots and attendants, ranging even to the California State Water Resources Control Board.
Even when D.E.I. isn't downright dangerous, it's ludicrously absurd. See, for example, the chart on "ASPECTS & ASSUMPTIONS OF WHITE CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES," as published by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020. The Museum received immediate condemnation from multiple directions, so took down its chart, and apologized.
But the "ASSUMPTIONS" about "WHITENESS," treated as negative or counterproductive behaviors (e.g., the notion that "Hard work is the key to success"), are in fact baked in to current D.E.I. training around the country. The increasingly common result in schools is a system of diminished standards for academic performance (to generate equalized outcomes rather than equal opportunity), with differential behavioral rewards and penalties based on race.
Even proposals in response federal Department of Energy, Office of Science grant solicitations for the most important foundational work in science (think particle physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, for example) is required to include a "Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research" statement ("PIER plan") to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.”
Even the AP Course on African-American Studies Gets into the CRT Act
See the revealing Wall Street Journal editorial on what the irresponsible College Board tried to slip into its AP course on African-American Studies: reparations, "Black Lives Matter"(more than others), "Black Queer Studies," "Postracial Racism and Colorblindness" (including "racecraft"), "Intersectionality and Activism."
These particularly centrifugal lessons begin in Unit 4 of the course, at page 21 of 79. This post may have disappeared by the time you read this, because the College Board has been caught in the act of sordid reverse racism, and has apparently had to back down.
So what’s to be done?
Instead of counterproductive victimology lessons and incitements, a factual study of American race relations would be beneficial. It could include the slave-reliant economy of the Democrat Old South, then the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party. It could continue on with the early 20th Century's still-overt racism and KKK support by Democrats and Democrat leaders such as Woodrow Wilson (who approvingly showed The Birth of a Nation at the White House.)
That could lead to an understanding of the modern welfare state and its multigenerational cycles of cynical paternalism, dependency, family dysfunction, and savage criminality — and its $30 Trillion of “Great Society” / “War on Poverty” spending, which has left poverty rates essentially unchanged. Poverty has won the "War on Poverty" because the huge sums expended have so been badly targeted. Figuratively, welfare programs have been a mile wide but an inch deep, designed more to buy votes than to strengthen families (the ultimate, real-world need).
A factual course on race relations would and should incorporate Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s March, 1965 analysis, The Negro Family: the Case for National Action, written for the Johnson administration. Moynihan’s statistically backed report showed the American black family already in crisis, particularly in its nearly 25% rate then of missing fathers in black family households. The result then was, and still is, “a tangle of pathology.”
The report’s concluding programmatic recommendation was for Lyndon Johnson and his Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Department to state that “The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”
President Johnson expected to utilize Moynihan's report in a keynote address for his planned White House Conference on Civil Rights. But the grievance industry of the time, already well-established (including some black “leaders,” white liberals, and HEW bureaucrats) objected, and the paper was suppressed. Today, 55 years later, the rate of fatherless black homes with children is tragically three times its 1965 rate — and white illegitimacy is itself now at 27% or higher.
So yes, American blacks (and others) are victims, all right — of a welfare state which enriches certain self-appointed racialist mouthpieces, along with welfare-administering bureaucrats, activist teacher unionists, and other rent-seeking opportunists of all races. It’s that story which needs to be told, not exhortations for captive-audience students to join an already overcrowded field of miseducated malcontents, marinated in a "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" propaganda stew.
What works is work.
In reality today, in school districts across the country, including SRVUSD, D.E.I. stands for Division, Exclusion, and Incitement. That needs to change — soonest!
Effects of Ideological Indoctrination on Academic Performance
In SRVUSD's recap of its California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), the District noted that in comparing the 2021-2022 school year to 2018-2019, "Overall 2022 SRVUSD CAASPP scores fell 2 percentage points in English Language Arts and 5.5 percentage points in math." And they still haven't recovered, as of 2024.
Educational researchers Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu observe that "From 2020 to 2022, reading scores for nine-year-olds on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the nation’s report card, registered the largest decline since the 1990s, while math scores declined for the first time ever. These score comparisons were the first nationally representative snapshot of student learning during the pandemic."
And "While school closures and ineffective distance-learning efforts were important reasons for the slide in test scores, former North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue, who chairs the board responsible for the NAEP, warned, “We can’t keep blaming COVID.”
An in fact, "Many students report that increasing ideological indoctrination in the classroom is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations.... The politicization of classroom instruction leads not only to indoctrination but also, as [a] California student noted, to lower student achievement. 'It’s not a school’s place to impose on the students any viewpoint,' he observes. 'What we need to do is really encourage achievement for all people.'"
Izumi is the Pacific Research Institute author of Not As Good As You Think, a 2007 book which showed SRVUSD high schools performing poorly in State testing of college readiness, then averaging only 49% proficiency in English, for example.
And before the State ended its Academic Performance Index (API) testing, SRVUSD used to average only 5.6 or 5.7 out of 10 in the API comparison with demographically similar schools. Unfortunately (due to political pressures?), California's API program reporting was ended in 2013.
But even the present CAASPP test data shows worrisome performance drops, especially in SRVUSD's middle schools and high schools (where ideological intrusions are most intense), and particularly in mathematics. See the individual school data, below the District summary. And now, here comes GRADING for Equity....
SRVUSD Data, CAASPP, Individual Schools
Ed Source provides helpful summaries of California school district results on CAASPP tests. In one of the charts shown for SRVUSD, the percentages of "Standard Met or Exceeded" test scores are shown for various racial cohorts.
Note: Students of Asian parentage (48% of SRVUSD enrollment) performed best, but even they have dropped off to their lowest marks since CAASPP tests were initiated in 2015.
White students lagged far behind, with Hispanics and African Americans faring even worse. Without the higher numbers generated by the Asian kids, SRVUSD overall performance would have been even more dismal.
CAASPP testing in SRVUSD Middle Schools and High Schools shows that the longer students attend SRVUSD schools, the worse their academic performance becomes, especially in math and science. SRVUSD needs to STOP displacing core academics with irresponsible indoctrination programs.
Short Commentaries of Importance
Notable & Quotable: Thomas vs. Jackson — Appeared in the July 1, 2023, print edition of the Wall Street Journal.
[srvEXPOSITOR comment: Ketanji Brown Jackson is the new Supreme Court Justice who couldn't/wouldn't define the term "woman" in her confirmation hearing.]
From Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided June 29, 2023 (citations omitted):
"Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.
"Nor do Justice Jackson’s statistics . . . prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race — rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor — and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood….
"Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything — good or bad — that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.
"Justice Jackson then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine.
"Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able — at some undefined point — to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously."
With dangerous consequences — including difficulty in recruiting — even the Armed Forces have been infected with "D.E.I" political correctness. Dr. Ronald J. Scott, Jr., Colonel, USAF, Retired, CEO and President of Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism (STARRS) has written about that contagion:
"Diversity, equity, and inclusion training stems from Marxist-inspired ideology known as critical race theory. While attractive to [some of those} who believe in justice and equal opportunity, it empowers those who hold positions of authority or influence to coerce others into compliance. This phenomenon is what C.S. Lewis wrote about when he grouped people into 'the conditioners' and 'the conditioned' in his 1940s book The Abolition of Man."
RACIALIST DOUBLE STANDARDS ARE HURTING US ALL
Society at large, and blacks in particular, are being harmed by racist double standards — "the soft bigotry of low expectations," in George W. Bush's memorable phrase.
See "The Racial Achievement Gap and the War on Meritocracy"
See also: "Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns"