SCOOP: Seattle Public Schools tells teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and that white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

Let's review the whistleblower documents.👇

The trainers begin by claiming that teachers are colonizers of Native American "ancestral lands" and that “the United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved Black people’s work, which created the profits that created our nation.”
The participants identify themselves by both gender pronouns and race labels. While it has become commonplace in academia to use gender pronoun identifiers, this is perhaps the first example of an institution creating the expectation for explicit race-labeling in the workplace.
The trainers tell white teachers that they "must commit to the journey" of anti-whiteness, even if their "lizard-brain" makes them "afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any kind of ‘ism.’"
The central message is that white teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege” because of their “possession of white skin.” To atone for this guilt, they must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”
Next, the teachers hold a discussion about “spirit murder,” which, according to Dr. Bettina Love, is the concept that Americans schools “murder the souls of Black children every day through systemic, institutionalized, anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence.”
The goal of this program is to transform public schools into activist organizations. At the end, teachers must explain how they will practice “anti-racist pedagogy,” address “current social justice movements taking place,” and become “anti-racist outside the classroom.”
In recent years, the district has expanded its Department of Racial Equity Advancement and deployed “racial equity teams” in dozens of schools. The stated goal is to “advance educational racial equity,” but in practice, this program often serves to enforce an ideological agenda.
Seattle Public Schools likes to claim they are “teaching tolerance,” but in truth, they are teaching hate.

Read my full analysis in the New York Post: https://t.co/QO10qtzsfv
P.S. I'll be releasing a series of investigative reports on "wokeness in K-12 schools" over the next three months. To support this work, please consider making a $5 or $10 monthly contribution here.

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An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
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