Two months ago, a teacher’s union held an event in a California high school designed to spread the concept of “adult supremacy” to teachers. Not surprisingly, this happened in San Francisco.
According to the Friends of Lowell Foundation, the nonprofit organization that launched legal strikes against SFUSD, the training framed the fundamental relationship between teachers and students as inherently oppressive. Educators were positioned as “oppressors” and students as the “oppressed,” consistent with core tenets of liberated ethnic studies ideology. Participants were further instructed that academic rigor is a Eurocentric and harmful imposition, and that teachers have a duty to resist administrative mandates that emphasize it.
A screenshot captured by an attendee summarized the presentation: “Due to systemic power dynamics, the relationship between students and educators is inherently an oppressive one,” with the educator cast as oppressor and the student as oppressed.
California has an Ethnic Studies requirement for all high schools and this training was apparently designed to introduce these ideas to teachers who might be teaching those classes. The seminar was titled “Youth as Knowledge Producers: Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies.”
This workshop has a connection to the effort to rename San Francisco’s public schools which was so unpopular a few years ago that three members of the SF school board were eventually recalled.
The workshop was led by Jennifer Sanchez, a third-year ethnic studies educator in the Central Valley, and convened by Teachers 4 Social Justice, a nonprofit that aims to create “empowering learning environments, more equitable access to resources and power, and realizing a just and caring culture,” according to its website.
Teachers 4 Social Justice was founded by local teacher activist Jeremiah Jeffries, who led an unpopular push to rename public schools during the pandemic that was abandoned after sparking outrage from local parents.
To be clear, SFUSD did not support this workshop, but it was promoted by an SF teacher’s union.
San Francisco Unified School District administrators confirmed that the district neither paid for the conference nor played any role in the content or promotion of it.
“Outside organizations can use and rent SFUSD facilities for events,” said district spokesperson Laura Dudnick. “People can choose to participate in non-SFUSD events outside of their contractual work time.”
The San Francisco teachers union promoted the one-day training through its newsletter. It’s unclear how many district or outside educators attended.
Regardless of who is behind it, some residents think the idea of teaching teachers that they are oppressors of their own students is a dumb idea.
“We have knowledge and life experience, and it is our job as parents and teachers to impart information on the next generation, on our kids,” one flabbergasted San Francisco parent, who asked not to be named, told The Post.
“Given that a large percentage of students in the district do not meet grade level standards in ELA and math, our focus as a school district is clearly way off track,” the parent said.
The idea of “adultism” is not restricted to San Francisco unfortunately.
The Santa Clara Behavioral Health Services Department sponsored an “anti-oppression training series” that explores how “ageism and adultism” fuel discrimination.
“Participants consider how the myth of independence, rooted in settler colonial capitalism, contributes to the marginalization of youth & elders by diminishing agency, excluding perspectives, & reinforcing stereotypes in behavioral health practice,” an invitation read.
Capitalism is always to blame if you look very deeply into these woke concepts. You also often find some criticism of “European culture” which is short for white people.
My own take on this is that nothing has driven more people in education completely crazy than the education gap which finds Asian and white kids outperforming Hispanic and black kids on standardized tests of all kinds. As a result, there has been a concerted effort to remove standardized testing (such as SATs), tracking and to criticize the concept of academic achievement and hard work in favor of blather about indigenous knowledge, alternative ways of knowing and equity.
The problem is that if you eventually apply any rigor to these ideas, you inevitably find that the same gaps persist. Attempts to hold back the high achieving kids rarely succeed because they are driven to excel and will jump over whatever obstacles you place in their way.
DEI and woke Ethnic Studies programs don’t exist because they solve any problems. They exist to spread the idea that all of the problems are someone else’s fault. Until that changes, the problem and the achievement gap will likely continue.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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