The Virginia school districts have been quite busy. Last month, the Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative (VMPI) announced that they would be eliminating all advanced math courses prior to 11th grade as a way to promote its “equity-focused” math programs. The school districts would continue to offer Algebra 1 and other traditional math courses but claimed they would be moving towards “heterogeneous” classrooms to avoid separating students according to ability.
Parents who help lead “Parents Defending Education” said that the Virginia Department of Education officials are treating them like fools and called it a ‘national embarrassment’ to gut math in the state in the name of equity. They said that the VMPI site calls for two to three years of mathematics in a “common shared pathway” and that they will specifically call for an end to “tracking” to increase educational equity among students.
“Families with means are going to escape and take their kids to private schools and it’s going to be those who are not able to leave the schools that are going to suffer the most. So this is not going to advance equity,” Virginia public school parent Carrie Lukas said.
The VMPI site reads that tracking “too often leads to segregation, dead-end pathways, and low-quality experiences, and disproportionately has a negative impact on minority and low-socioeconomic students.” It adds that tracking in schools often lacks transparency and accountability.
GOP lawmakers argue that the goal of all schools is to educate the students to their full ability, instead of making smarter students appear to be as slow as the slower students. They said it is not a “race issue” but a failure of radical-left politicians and education systems that do not expect all students to learn and be successful. Public schools are failing children from the academically gifted to the at-risk learner.
Virginia’s Loudoun County public school district is reportedly spending over $6 million on ‘equity training,’ which will include presentations on immigration, deportation threats, health concerns, family economics, and racism.
Lottie Spurlock, the equity director for Loudoun County Public Schools, recently sent out a graphic that used defining characteristics to divide people into two groups – oppressed and privileged.
The graphic deems “privileged” people as those who identify as men, White, Christian, or heterosexual, as well as those who are born in the U.S, able-bodied, college-educated, English-speaking, and average or thin in size. It deems “oppressed” people such as women, children, people of color, non-Christians, sexual and gender minorities, immigrants, disabled, those who speak English as a second language or are overweight.
Ian Prior, Fight For Schools executive director, claims that the mention of Christians and non-Christians as “privileged” and “oppressed” is a direct attack on religious belief and that Virginia’s “state-sanctioned racism and bigotry seemingly knows no bounds.” He previously emphasized the fact that school officials want teachers and students to see everyone as part of a group, instead of individuals.
But the Virginia school district has been pushing numerous race-centered teachings and instructions for quite some time now. Whether it’s “anti-racist math” or presentations about equity, liberals are pushing a victimhood agenda and their own divisive pet projects to tell people what they are. Democrats operate on hypocrisy. They claim to be about unification and justice while insisting on dividing people into groups of oppression and opportunity. It’s all about the problems, never the solution.
