From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
Governnor Ron DeSantis has carried the anti-WOKE crusade into Florida’s classrooms by introducing the “Stop WOKE” bill in 2022. The bill seeks to block the teaching of an Advanced Placement course on African American history in Florida high schools. Before I touch on both sides of this issue, allow me to clarify one point: Advance Placement courses are college level courses taught to high school juniors and seniors for college credit. The students in those classes are young adults, equipped with plenty of healthy skepticism, and well on their way in life already. They are not impressionable children who might easily be brainwashed by some radical ideology. Furthermore, the very core of an Advanced Placement course is balance and objectivity, not extremism.
Not knowing Governor DeSantis personally, it is presumptuous of me to speak for him, but I will try. He has small children, and they are white. Presumably, he does not want the education system teaching his children that they have anything to be ashamed of owing to their whiteness. I can understand and sympathize with that concern. Furthermore, I think we can all agree that we do not want Angela Davis or any other extremist teaching only one biased side of African American history. We want, as I said, objective and balanced teachers delivering that course material.
However, Ron, if you attempt to white-wash or sanitize history, you are beginning to look like some of the reprehensible despots of our past.
We do not want to shield our best and brightest from the facts.
Proposed: Let’s wake up and start using our heads for something other than a hat rack!
When we have public spending in a representative republic, what government entities do is everyone’s business, including taxpayers and voters. Elected officials are the bosses.
The solution to this problem is the complete expulsion of government from the schooling business.
The AP course is called African American Studies, not history.
Presumably, African American studies would be pretty much the same as African American history. If not, let me know.
DeSantis is a double racist: white and Rethuglican.
Those who position themselves to write curricula and tests are paragons of objectivity. For example, Weather Underground founder and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers and community organizer Barack Obama co-chaired the Collaborative, part of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to shape education policy.
Leon: Thanks for the lead on some very important history in US Education. I was unaware.
The Annenberg Challenge it turns out was a gift to Chicago schools from a rich donor. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about it:
Annenberg ignored criticism from conservatives that he was wasting his money on public schools—he believed that government had a responsibility to educate its citizens and that the nation could not walk away from its public schools. Annenberg also ignored criticism from within the education and philanthropic worlds that after five years the Challenge had not produced measurable reform—he hoped that good would come of his gift, but was realistic and doubted he would ever see any concrete, measurable results. For Annenberg that was not the point—his goal was to spur communities and other donors into action—and in that he was not disappointed, with the Challenge raising an additional $600 million from foundations, businesses, universities and individuals.
On June 12, 2002, the Annenberg Foundation released its final report on the Annenberg Challenge to the press and an audience of education leaders and policymakers at a luncheon in Washington D.C., a few blocks from the White House, with Annenberg’s wife, Leonore, on hand to represent her 94-year-old husband. The keynote speaker was the George W. Bush administration’s Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who had been Houston superintendent of schools (1994–2001); in 1997, Houston had become the last of nine cities to win a large urban Annenberg Challenge grant over five years. Paige said he had witnessed the good that came from Annenberg’s gift and had no doubts about the Annenberg Challenge’s accomplishments. The June 2002 final report listed nine lessons learned over the course of the Annenberg Challenge. The first two were:
Lesson 1: Every child benefits from high expectations and standards.
In Chicago, where the Challenge sought out the most racially isolated and impoverished schools, the elementary students the Challenge worked with went from a half-grade behind the city average to a quarter-grade ahead of peers in other schools.
Lesson 2: Even large gifts like ours are no substitute for adequate, equitable and reliable funding.
Although the Challenge made multimillion-dollar grants, nearly every site reached out to hundreds of schools. In Chicago, where the Challenge helped more than 300 schools, the typical grant was $39,000 to an elementary school with an annual budget of $3.8 million.
An August 2003 final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project by the Consortium on Chicago School Research said that while “student achievement improved across Annenberg Challenge schools as it did across the Chicago Public School system as a whole, results suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistically significant differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy, and social competence.” “Breakthrough Schools,” which received special financial and professional support from the Challenge between 1999–2001, a time during which the Challenge began withdrawing funds from other schools, “began to develop in ways that distinguished them from other Annenberg schools and sustained or strengthened aspects of teacher professional community school leadership, and relational trust while other Annenberg schools did not.”
Leon, you also linked Ex-President Barack Obama and Former Weather Underground activist Bill Ayers to this project.
Correct to some extent. Both names were associated with the effort in some respect or other, but sources say that further investigation did not show a close relationship between the two men.