By MARK SARDELLA
Serious question: Are all educational gurus Marxists?
Or is it just random luck that we keep finding them to guide curriculum development and teaching practice in Wakefield Public Schools?
We’ll get to the latest example in a moment, but first a quick review.
Last fall, I wrote about Jamilah Pitts, one of the “educational consultants” that your local school administration has brought in to conduct multiple “professional development” sessions in “Culturally Responsive Teaching” for Wakefield’s grade 5-12 faculty.
Pitts wrote an article in 2020 in Learning for Justice, a professional magazine aimed at teachers. In a piece entitled “Teaching as Activism, Teaching as Care,” she talks about ways that teachers can incorporate current events into student reading assignments.
“Teachers can allow students to apply critical lenses, such as critical race theory and Marxist theory, to the reading of news articles to allow students to think more deeply about who is being most affected and why,” Pitts wrote.
Also last fall, I wrote about the fact that Wakefield Public Schools have been developing an “Indigenous Curriculum,” to atone for Wakefield’s past sin of having a Native American warrior image as its sports logo. Used as a guide in developing that Indigenous Curriculum was a book called “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a self-identified Marxist, who has written numerous articles for socialist publications such as The Monthly Review: an Independent Socialist Magazine.
But let’s skip ahead to the latest example of the radical texts and consultants being employed to provide training and professional development for Wakefield teachers.
As part of their ongoing training, Grade 5-12 teachers are now being required to read and discuss a book called, “Cultivating Genius: an equity framework for culturally and historically responsive teaching,” by Dr. Gholnescar “Gholdy” Muhammad.
The forward of Dr. Muhammad’s book is written by Betina L. Love, author of a 2020 article in Education Week entitled, “White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy.”
In her foreword to Muhammad’s book, Professor Love notes that “This book is written in the tradition of Ella Baker, Ida B. Wells, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis and Cherrie Moraga.”
Ella Baker was a socialist. Angela Davis is a Marxist. The other women listed as inspirations for the book also espouse radical views.
A central tenet of Muhammad’s book involves “critical theory.” Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical theory as a “Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the Frankfurt School.”
In her book’s introduction, Dr. Muhammad explains how critical theory fits into her educational philosophy.
“The model and content of this book puts critical theory, sociocultural theory and cognitive theories collectively into a practical model for teaching and learning,” she writes.
In her book, Dr. Muhammad rebrands critical theory as “Criticality,” which she defines as “the capacity to read, write and think in ways of understanding power, privilege, social justice and oppression.”
In her chapter entitled, “Toward the Pursuit of Criticality,” Dr. Muhammad lets the cat out of the bag with regard to CRT in public education.
“Critical theories that are helpful to educators,” she writes, “include critical race theory, Black feminist theory and LatCrit.”
How many times have we heard school officials swear on a stack of Little Red Books that critical race theory is not being used anywhere in public education, and certainly not in Wakefield. But here, in a book that Wakefield public school teachers are being forced to read for professional development, the author lays out a detailed blueprint for applying critical race theory in public education.
Dr. Muhammad knows that simply teaching students to read, write and think will not be enough to bring about the Revolution. They also need criticality “to work toward social transformation.”
One tool to jumpstart her dream of “social transformation” is a concept she calls “agitation literacies.” In Muhammad’s view, agitation literacies have historically bridged the gap between “criticality” and activism.
“I argue that the need to agitate is still necessary and pressing in classrooms today,” she contends.
The author also suggests a way to engage students in boring classroom subjects like math, science, social studies or writing.
“As teachers start the school year, they can ask students to collectively compose their classroom community manifesto,” she writes, in an interesting word choice.
She provides two examples of such “manifestos,” followed by her own observation.
“Notice that neither of these express the goal of passing high stakes tests or grades,” she writes. “This was never the focus.”
Nor should tests and grades be the focus when selecting texts to be used in the classroom, Muhammad insists. Rather, teachers should ask themselves these questions: “How do my selected texts agitate the oppressors of the world?” and “How does the curriculum (including texts and exercises) engage students’ thinking about power and equity and the disruption of oppression?”
The entire book is written in this vein. The focus is always on race and the “oppression” that the author imagines everywhere.
On the whole, teachers tend to be liberal thinkers. So, what does it tell you when many local educators consider Muhammad’s ideas too radical and not relevant to the practice of teaching in Wakefield Public Schools?
These kinds of radical, Marxist-centered attempts at teacher indoctrination in the guise of professional development aren’t just happening in Wakefield. They’re happening in school systems everywhere.
That shouldn’t make you worry less. It should make you worry more.
