At Wesley Yang's Year Zero substack site, a left-leaning public teacher in a leftist school district published an article describing just how crazy things really are in such schools.  While your children may be behind in reading, writing, and arithmetic, it's clear they're getting an extra-large dose of hard-left racism (and probably gender theory and America-hatred, although the essay doesn't touch on those things).  If you have children or grandchildren in public schools, or you simply care about America's future, you should read that essay and then pay close attention to your next school board election.

The essay, entitled "Yes, Things Are Really as Bad as You've Heard," sounds like one of the more outlandish Babylon Bee parodies.  However, Yang vouches for the essay, saying he's spoken with the author and reviewed correspondence that confirms the statements and events that the teacher describes.

The teacher identifies himself (or herself?) very clearly as a leftist:

This is where I have to stop and make one thing very clear: I'm a leftist. Like, a big one. I hate capitalism, I support abortion on demand, and I unironically use phrases like "systems of oppression" and "the dominant culture." The last big paper I put together for my undergraduate degree was on critical race theory, for the love of God! I'm not the sort of person who can be easily dismissed as a conservative crank.

This identification matters because his point is that, if things have gotten too extreme for him, the education system in this blue school in a blue state has tilted so far to the left that it is no longer anything approaching a functional educational entity.

The first story the teacher recounts is about the elementary school summer class he was given to teach.  The students were all placed there at a teacher's recommendation because they were struggling in school.  Within a few days, his classroom was empty, with some students never appearing at all.  However, when the teacher wanted to have the no-shows officially withdrawn from the class so that the wait-listed children, who were also struggling academically, could get the benefit of the program, he learned just how the system operates.

Image: Classroom by freepik.

To the teacher's surprise, he was told that the district may not remove non-attending children.  Those children remain on the rolls until a parent officially removes them.  The reason for this policy is race-based:

Now, when I say the district is "not allowed" to do so, I don't mean they're forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student's grades during the regular school year. 

Moreover, a teacher may not reach out to a parent to ask that parent to make an official withdrawal request.  Why not?  "[D]oing so, I was told, could 'make them feel disrespected' and 'communicate to them that their children are not welcome.'"  And so, in the name of racial "respect," children who could benefit from summer school are denied the opportunity.

The teacher offers other narratives that would be impossible to believe if we hadn't already seen Libs of TikTok and Christopher Rufo use their Twitter accounts to expose radical teachers and programs.  At a scheduling meeting, when the anonymous teacher pointed out that the planned schedule wouldn't allow teachers to fulfill curriculum obligations, he learned that was a good thing:

When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state.

On the flip side, when it came to trying to increase AP enrollment among Black students, one teacher pushed back against that, too:

When we moved to discuss the gap in enrollment between Black and white students, a senior teacher said that trying to register more children of color for AP classes is inherently racist and that putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy.

No matter your race or your child's race, what's happening in these schools is the anti-intellectualism that's characteristic of all totalitarian states.  It was expressed most clearly in Cambodia, when Pol Pot executed all intellectuals, including those who wore glasses because they looked too smart.  Tyrants do not want citizens who are intelligent, logical, and moral.  They want indoctrinated drones — and that's what these teachers aim to create, beginning with the Black kids and then moving on to everyone else.

You'd better start attending those school board meetings or, in a few years, you may want to remove your glasses just to be on the safe side...