
the staff if the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, it’s what every parent wants to know these days… Who is injecting politics into our schools? Thanks to a heads-up from a friendly teacher, now we know that the NJEA is training teachers to become political activists in local school districts.
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Yes, you read that correctly. The NJEA – the state union that represents 125,000 teachers of our children – is training teachers to become political activists and push for radical education policies in local school districts.
Now we know that the NJEA is actively taking sides against parents in the fight over the state’s controversial education standards. Now we know that radical groups sponsored by the NJEA are training teachers to engage in local district politics and change education policies. Now we know that these trained teacher/activists are pushing radical curriculums for even the youngest schoolchildren – precisely what parents are fighting against.
In the latest report from Sunlight Policy Center, we take a deep-dive into the truly radical education policies being pushed by the NJEA, and ask whether most New Jersey teachers approve of their highest-in-the-nation dues being used for these purposes.
TEACHING IS POLITICAL, PART I
THE NJEA TRAINS TEACHERS TO BECOME ACTIVISTS FOR RADICAL EDUCATION POLICIES
Thanks to a heads-up from a friendly teacher, Sunlight was alerted to this page on the NJEA’s website:
Sunlight thought it was important to dig into this issue because we were not aware that the NJEA was actively taking sides in the political fight over the state’s controversial learning standards, nor that it was training teachers to become activists pushing radical education policies. We don’t think that parents or most teachers or the general public were aware either. But here are the facts.
The NJEA’s ”Teaching Is Political” Summer Collaborative
This summer, the NJEA conducted a two-session 2022 Summer Collaborative run by the Radical Pedagogy Institute (see below), which provided teachers with the political organizing and advocacy tools to fight for radical education policies in their school communities. The ultimate focus was on the students: the goal for these trained teacher-activists is to “impact the educational outcomes of PK-12 [pre-kindergarten to 12th grade] students and pre-service teachers [who teach future teachers].”
The first session, “Teaching Is Political: A Convening to Enact Education Policy Change,” was dedicated to exploration of the political landscape of the New Jersey education system. Participants identified district-level and state-level action needed to create a “re/humanized” education system for New Jersey PK-12 students and educators, “especially those who are Black, Indigenous, students of color, English language learners and/or queer.” Working groups of teachers then developed plans for political action at the local and state levels to defend the state’s controversial New Jersey Student Learning Standards against “the current attacks on critical race theory, ethnic studies, and LGBTQ+ inclusive education.”
The second session, “Teaching Is Political: Advocating and Organizing for Social Change,” trained twenty selected PK-12 teachers and teacher educators, who researched the push-back by New Jersey parents and political leaders, including “critical race theory bans, teacher shortage, trans sport bans, voter suppression.” Teachers learned political organizing strategies and received feedback on their plans to take “direct action” to fight this parental pushback in their local communities.
The explicit purpose of these sessions is to train teachers to politically organize fellow teachers, find allies in the local community and help effect radical education policy change in their local school districts. While the NJEA claims it is fighting “bad actors who seek to politicize our schools,” it is the NJEA that is seeking to politicize teachers and schools.
The Radical Pedagogy Institute
The Radical Pedagogy Institute (RPI) is as radical as its name. RPI is a collective of educators from the greater New Jersey area that was founded to “take action to implement anti-racist initiatives and dismantle institutional structures upholding white supremacy.” They are political organizers who take decidedly political approach to accomplishing their mission, which is the radical indoctrination of students, including the very youngest ones.
The RPI educators believe in “the transformational power of radical pedagogy and local political organizing.” Their aim is to “Re/humanize PK-12 Education,” so what do they mean by re/humanize? Using the “tenets of critical pedagogies – queer, anti-racist, DisCrit [Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education] … and other liberatory pedagogies – to re/humanize educational experiences for all students.” And what do they mean by all students? Pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, so they intend for their impact to reach all the way down to very youngest children in the pre-kindergarten and the early elementary school-level.
RPI’s Proposed Curriculum for First, Second and Third Graders
The NJEA’s Summer Collaborative does not provide a detailed description of the curriculum to be pushed by these trained teacher-activists, but we do know the details about the curriculum proposed by RPI.
Here are some examples from RPI’s Searchable Database of their proposed curriculum for “Early Elementary” (1st to 3rd) grade level focus for both classroom teachers and educators of future teachers:
- “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” (Number 7 in the Searchable Database). This course seeks to “provide a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education.”
- “Black Lives Matter at School: From the Week of Action to Year-round Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Protest” (Number 4), which states that there is “daily curricular violence” against Blacks in American public schools, including: “the erasure and appropriation of Black struggle, as in the Lincoln-freed-the-slaves myth; the failure of the curriculum to account for the centrality of slavery and anti-Black racism in the shaping of U.S. history, North and South; teaching contempt for Black culture — including African American Vernacular English.”
- “Reading, Writing and Racism: Disrupting Whiteness in Teacher Education and in the Classroom.” (Number 63); which “examines current examples of racist curricula that have gone viral to demonstrate how Whiteness is entrenched in schools and how this reinforces racial hierarchies in the younger generation.”
For future early elementary school teachers: “Queering Mathematics: Disrupting Binary Oppositions in Mathematics Pre-Service Teacher Education” (Number 14). This course “documents the extent to which sexist and heterosexist ideologies … perpetuate borders in mathematics that marginalize women and queer people” and presents “recommendations that will be useful for teachers, teacher educators, and mathematics researchers alike about how to queer mathematics education.”
Remember that RPI deems this subject matter appropriate for early elementary school children.
The NJEA Has Some Explaining To Do
The facts show that the NJEA is training teacher-activists to advance radical education policies at the local district level.
This is precisely the nightmare scenario for many parents, who have already pushed back against the state standards in school districts across the state. Now the NJEA – the association that represents 125,000 teachers who teach their children – is training teachers on how to fight these parents and enact education policies that permit the radical indoctrination of six and seven-year-olds in New Jersey’s elementary schools. Perhaps the NJEA can explain to parents why it is doing so.
Sunlight wonders if most New Jersey teachers even know about – let alone support – these activities by their state union. We hope that knowledge of these activities is spread far and wide so teachers can consider whether they approve of their highest-in-the-nation dues being used for such purposes. Perhaps the NJEA could then explain to them why it is doing so.
We’re tired of the proven corrupt Black Lives Matter movement (fact is that the founders of BLM used millions of $ in donations for personal vacation home purchases, etc).
And we don’t need our elementary school kids being forced to take courses in BLM, transgender conversion, drag queen story time. Kids at that age cannot absorb anything constructive from controversial subject matter. Teach them the alphabet and arithmetic. That’s what elementary school is meant to be.
Parents HAVE TO call or email local board of education as well as the NJEA and express opposition to elementary schools with a radical agenda. Your influence counts , use it.
Now that the Chicago BLM came out in support of the hamas…hows that sit with all you liberals who got suckered with your donations and lawn signs for that BLM scam
They don’t care.
Liberals are ignorant fools who think they are smarter than everyone else.
This is revolting and really horrible. I hope Ridgewood parents stand up against this. If not, save your kids and send them to a Catholic school.
preciscely why unions are vehemently opposed to school choice vouchers
my kids will NEVER attent a public school to get indoctrinated by this CRAP
this= > https://reason.com/2022/07/27/covid-taught-more-than-1-million-parents-the-value-of-school-choice/
Why do unions have a say over curriculum and content at all? Their job is to negotiate salary and represent members, not decide what is taught.
Every accusation an admission.
We Don’t Care.
We are…
RICH and STUPID
This “Sunlight Policy” blog completely misrepresents the NJEA event.
The 4-day collaborative was for 20 teachers to research (not “train”) and discuss the current hot-button issues.
There was no “pushing radical education policies” or taking sides either way. That did not happen.
The Sunlight blog further attacks RPI’s goals and curriculums out of context and adds biased, conspiracy-laden language when describing abstracts, articles, and research originating from other sites.
The “Sunlight Policy” writer needs to hire a proper fact-checker.
And maybe get some therapy.
lol…. nice try the txt is copied of the NJEA site
In each case I compared what Sunlight wrote, to what was on the NJEA site. Sunlight cherrypicked parts of quotes, then added their own context to change the meaning and motive. Anyone can do the comparison and they will see the same thing.
you are correct Comrade.
That is an absurd defense of the indefensible. This subject is one of the very few issues that should be easy to resolve. The NJEA doesn’t need to do any “research” on this. Boys are boys, girls are girls and leave that biological fact alone.
None of the links work. Has this been taken down?
parents with younger kids need to do their homework on the boe candidates. putting a sign in ur lawn to feel part of the “in” crowd without knowing what a candidate stands for is absurd. i gtee those with teacher unions candidate signs don’t have a clue
This is seriously upsetting and disturbing. I grew up through Ridgewood schools, sent my kids to Ridgewood schools and sadly, now I see little choice but to help my kids send my grandchildren to Catholic schools.
I feel sorry for kids today. All of the topics, movements and overall everything else these days that wants to be changed is being shoved down all our throats. Example: editing our countries history so as to not to offend anyone. It’s all out of control. Can’t change history but they try to. No wonder these poor kids are confused about who they are or should be. SAD
We agree with the above comment about feeling for the kids and where we are today relative to the overall state we are in when it comes to being “woke” . We also agree with another comment that it is coming to a point where the kids are better off in Catholic school. Let parents PARENT and have teachers to truly teach all subjects without adding all the radical stuff. Call us old school but, think about it