Americans have no reason to be shocked at the wildly leftist turn young people are taking. Malignant leftist propaganda has been hiding in plain sight in our taxpayer-funded schools for decades. Warnings have been issued by many and ignored by more because taking seriously the warnings would require courage, sacrifice, and tenacity. I will tell the true story of just one school, the school in which I used to work: Deerfield High School (DHS), which is part of Township High School District 113, in Deerfield, Illinois.
Twenty plus years ago, a small cadre of leftist faculty members and administrators decided that they would use their taxpayer-funded positions and resources to promote controversial leftist views on power, race, and sexuality that they personally had concluded were objectively true. Dissenting views were excluded.
The administration began by sending faculty and administrators to feminist Peggy McIntosh’s National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project seminars and White Privilege conferences. As with all professional development, the goal of both is to worm leftist ideas into classroom teaching and then into the hearts and minds of children.
McIntosh socially constructed the infamous questionnaire titled “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” to shame certain students by convincing them that whites and males enjoy “unearned” systemic privilege. No word about impoverished, disadvantaged whites, and no word about the ability of individual effort to improve one’s circumstances.
Leftist indoctrination really kicked into high gear when District 113 hired Superintendent George Fornero from an Ann Arbor, Michigan school district. Fornero, who had left his wife and children to take up with men, had hired race grifter Glenn Singleton to indoctrinate students in Ann Arbor and decided to do likewise in Deerfield and Highland Park high schools through Singleton’s Pacific Educational Group (now laughably rebranded Courageous Conversation).
As I wrote in 2020,
In 2007, District 113 … received a federal grant of thousands of dollars because Highland Park High School (HPHS) had failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP). AYP is a tool for measuring how well a district’s students perform on standardized tests under the controversial No Child Left Behind Act.
The reason HPHS’ scores on standardized tests failed to make AYP is that HPHS has a sizeable Hispanic population …. Most of these families do not have the financial resources available for private subject area and test-prep tutors as many Highland Park and Deerfield families do, and in many of these families, English is not spoken at home.
To be clear, District 113 had received a hefty federal grant to help Hispanic students score better on standardized tests. And what did the administration and school board choose to do with those taxpayer dollars?
Between spring 2007 and spring 2008, District 113, using both the federal grant and some district money, spent approximately $83,000 to hire … shyster Glenn Singleton and representatives from his Pacific Educational Group to come seven times to District 113 to teach employees about their “whiteness.”
Every time Singleton or his representative came, every administrator and department chair, two teachers from every department and area (e.g., multi-media, custodial pool, technology, secretarial pool) from bothhigh schools attended all-day meetings during which they discussed their “whiteness.” This meant that all the participating employees missed seven days of work or classes.
The $83,000 included $53,000 for Pacific Educational Group’s fees, travel expenses, and per diem; $10,000 for hiring substitute teachers for all the teachers who were absent from class to attend the all-day indoctrination seminars; and $20,000 to feed all the district attendees at the swanky Highland Park Country Club where the meetings took place.
Ironically, both Singleton and his facilitators explicitly stated at the time that neither he nor his book (Courageous Conversations) on which his “consultations” were based provided any solutions for the problem of underperformance of minority students on standardized tests.
Singleton also preposterously claimed that neither poverty, nor language issues at home, nor lack of family support, nor family mobility contributes to the racial learning gap. The causes, Singleton claimed, are “institutional racism” and “whiteness.” Singleton also declared that anyone who disagrees with his preposterous theories is “gifted at subverting reform.”
… I asked the District 113 School Board and administration at the time how even in theory would having secretaries, custodians, and teachers miss school to talk about their “whiteness” at the Highland Park Country Club help minority students improve their test scores. They offered no answer—as in, they literally said nothing.
Imagine if the educationally and economically disadvantaged Hispanic community had known the shameful truth that District 113 had had thousands of dollars available to help their children score better on standardized testing and used it instead to line Singleton’s pockets while district employees talked about their whiteness and noshed at the Highland Park Country Club.
Near the end of the year of indoctrination, Singleton briefly visited DHS classrooms, including for about five minutes the writing center in which I worked. I was told by multiple department chairs that in an after-school debriefing meeting with administrators, Singleton had called for me to be fired, citing the following quotes I had on my wall as his justification:
- “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” (The Supreme Court of the United States, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943)
- “Despite incessant repetition of the word ‘diversity’ in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas.” (Thomas Sowell)
- “One is an individual, not an instance of blood or appearance. The assault on individual identity was essential to the horror and inhumanity of Jim Crow laws, of apartheid, and of the Nuremberg Race Laws. It is no less inhuman when undertaken by ‘diversity educators’.” (Alan Kors, Penn Professor of Intellectual History)
- “‘[D]iversity’ — nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses – [is] the . . . belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation.” (George Will)
Here’s an ironic quote from Singleton’s book:
Speaking your truth in Courageous Conversations about race requires a willingness to take risks. Speaking your truth requires being absolutely honest about your thoughts, feelings, and opinions and not just saying what you perceive others want to hear. Too often, we don’t speak our truth out of fear of offending, appearing angry, or sounding ignorant. But until we can become completely honest, the dialogue will remain limited, and ultimately ineffective.
A week after Singleton called for me to be fired for expressing my thoughts through quotes from scholars, I was called to a meeting in which I was told that starting the following year, I would no longer be in the writing center or a member of the English Department. I was being reassigned to the testing center where I would distribute and collect make-up tests in a windowless room in the bowels of the school. It was the equivalent of a Siberian exile.
It sure doesn’t seem that Singleton, who is black, has been harmed by the systemic, institutional racism that allegedly oppresses people of color. He makes $30K-50K for live speeches and $10K-20K for virtual speeches. I wish I were similarly oppressed.
What would Singleton do if people learned that institutional racism, like polio and smallpox, was largely eradicated by the 1970s?
The term “social justice” refers to a set of arguable beliefs that have been promoted as objective truth for decades in public schools. In regard to economics, it is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. Its other dominant features pertain to race, gender, class, and sexual orientation/identity/expression.
“Social justice theory” encourages students to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics, which demarcates groups according to who are the purported “oppressors” and who are the purported “oppressed.” It has nothing to do with individual acts of actual persecution or oppression.
As one of the preeminent social justice activists at DHS (and now at Oak Park and River Forest High School) the continually-divisive Daniel Cohen said ad nauseum, “If you are white, male, and heterosexual, you are an oppressor.” Someone should tell Cohen that this is an offensive, racist, sexist, heterophobic stereotype.
Social justice theories rob minorities of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives, telling them that their lot in life cannot improve through their own efforts but only through an appropriate degree of guilt and self-flagellation on the parts of the purported oppressors. It cultivates a sense of perpetual victimization and powerlessness on the parts of minorities and an irrational and unjust sense of guilt on the parts of members of the alleged oppressor group.
Without admitting to students that they—leftist teachers—are teaching through a biased, arguable, socially constructed oppressor-oppressed lens, leftists have spent decades inculcating children with ideas students assumed were objective.
Concomitantly, these propagandists who self-identify as “educators” have sliced, diced, poisoned, and distorted the teaching of history so grievously that two generations of young people have no understanding of the suffering caused by the oppressor-oppressed paradigm of Marxism.
And so, here we are today with a generation or two of government-created revolutionaries seeking either to appropriate or destroy the very institutions that made possible the prosperity and freedom they enjoy.