The Daily Signal - Woke Culture Comes for America’s High Schools

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

High schools across America are embracing a woke curriculum. Charles Fain Lehman, adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says he is troubled by a trend in education of embracing wokeness above reason and fact.  Lehman, who is also a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, joins the show to discuss his recent article "American High Schools Go Woke" and how this development may affect the nation years from now.  You can follow Lehman's work and read his other pieces here. We also cover these stories:  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the length of a quarantine after exposure to the coronavirus may be shortened from 14 days to seven to 10 days.   CDC Director Robert Redfield says America could see a massive spike in COVID-19 cases this winter.  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asks the Supreme Court to hear an emergency appeal on Pennsylvania's election results. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, December 3rd. I'm Rachelte. And I'm Virginia Allen. Woke culture is quickly infiltrating America's schools. Charles Fane Lehman, a journalist at Washington Free Beacon and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, joins the show to discuss his recent article, American High Schools Go Woke, and the impact progressive woke initiatives are having on our nation. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

Now on to our top news. The CDC says that quarantine time following coronavirus exposure might be shortened. While the original suggested quarantine was 14 days, the CDC has shortened the recommended quarantine to seven or 10 days. For USA Today, the new guidelines announced Wednesday say individuals who have close contact with an infected person, can end their quarantine after seven days if they receive a negative test or after 10 days without a test. CDC director Robert Redfield says America could see a massive spike in COVID cases this winter. Speaking at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event Wednesday, Redfield said, the reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times.

I actually believe they're going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation. About 270,000 people have already died from the virus in America, and Redfield predicts that number could increase to 450,000 by the end of the winter. The CDC director added that mitigation works. The challenge with this virus is it's not going to work if half of us do what we need to do. It's not even going to work, probably, if three-quarters of us do what we need to do. This virus really is going to require all of us to really be vigilant. Texas Senator Ted Cruz is asking the Supreme Court to hear an emergency appeal on Pennsylvania's election results.

In a Monday press release, Cruz said, Today, an emergency appeal was filed in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the election results in Pennsylvania. This appeal raises serious legal issues, and I believe the court should hear the case. on an expedited basis. Cruz added, as of today, according to Reuters Ipsis polling, 39% of Americans believe that the election was rigged. That is not healthy for our democracy. The bitter division and acrimony we see across the nation needs resolution. And I believe the U.S. Supreme Court has a responsibility to the American people to ensure that we are following the law and following the Constitution. Hearing this case now, on an emergency expedited basis, would be an

important step in helping rebuild confidence in the integrity of our democratic system. Former Vice President Joe Biden has announced plans to nominate Newark Tandon to head the Office of Management and Budget. A move, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arizona, told Fox and Friends on Wednesday, will not be approved. Well, the problem with Neartanan is not so much her tweets. It's her radical liberal ideas. Neartanan has no chance of being confirmed. This is a woman who wants Congress to hold up coronavirus relief for the American people so we can give checks to illegal immigrants. There is no chance near Tandon's going to be confirmed. She might as well step aside or Joe Biden might as well withdraw her and go back to the drawing board.

Tandon is currently the president and CEO of the far left Center for American Progress. She is also a prolific Twitter user and, according to the New York Post, has recently deleted about 1,000 tweets, including some of which she criticized Republican senators, some of whom she would need to vote for her if she were to be confirmed to the key White House position. Also among the deleted tweets are one that reads, one important lesson is that when they go low, going high, doesn't work. I left out the expletive tandem used before the word work. Senator Cotton said the people who Biden is appointing are the same people who, who left the American economy stuck in neutral for years under the Obama administration.

Now stay tuned for my conversation with Charles Fane Lehman, as we discuss his recent piece, American High Schools Go Woke. Conservative women. Conservative feminists. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen, and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are a particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded are mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcast. I am so pleased to

welcome to the show, Charles Fane Lehman, a journalist at the Washington Free Beacon, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Charles, thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for having me on, Virginia. I feel glad to be here. So today, we're talking about a pretty popular subject, and that is woke culture. And that word woke is thrown around a lot. So I want to begin by just asking you to define exactly what we mean when we use that word woke. You are a great piece on this. that we're going to get into in just a minute. But I think it would be really helpful to start with just, what exactly do we mean by that? What does that term woke mean?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, as a term, it contains contradictions or contains multitudes, as it were. I like, as an author Wesley Yang, who I think is generally attributed to the term of stream to you, but humorous to what he calls the successor ideology, sort of the ideology that comes after late 20th century, sort of Clinton-I triumphalist liberalism. And it's really more of an inchoate thing, but it's the sort of set of increasingly dominant liberal progressive ideas that really took off in the wake of Barack Obama's re-election in 2012. This we see a lot of this turning up. So it imports a lot of academic ideas from the 1990s and earlier has a great deal of focus on race or critical race theory on sex, gender and trans issues sort of broadly.

I think is characterized by this particular sort of social justice outlook on how the world works, a fixation on identity categories, and defining things in those terms and defining the world as a set of struggles between those identity categories. And also in some senses by the degree of its sort of interested in ideological purity in getting people to commit themselves fully to the ideology and sort of spurting the non-believers even within their own circles. And I think, you know, I think most viewers, most listeners will recognize this as an increasingly dominant strain in the American left more broadly, especially the college educator elite left.

Well, and you have done quite a bit of reporting on this subject. You just wrote a piece called American High Schools Go Woke. And in the area of education for several years, we have seen this increase in woke curriculum being promoted, being endorsed. But after the death of George Floyd and then across the summer with protests and riots, it felt like a lot of that very, very progressive education was fast-tracked in schools. So can you just kind of give us an update? What exactly are we seeing now? What's actually happening in high schools across America? Yeah, absolutely. And I think the first thing that I would do is I would encourage your viewers to type in the name of their local school district

or type in the name of their local private school into Google with the word anti-racism. And they will find almost invariably that there's a set of resources or page or a letter discussing the school's commitment to the importance of anti-racism. By anti-racism, what's really meant is a set of particular active commitments meant to combat racism that's distinguished from being not racist as being a set of beliefs that are subputedly about correcting racial injustice and justices actively. And I think, you know, I think across the country,

there are both private and public schools that have poured huge quantities of time, money, and energy into so-called anti-racist agendas over the past since the summer, essentially. So, for example, in my article I looked at, on the one coast, there's a hard-in-west lake, which is by some measures, the most, the number one prep school in the United States,

and they released a 20-page letter over the summer from their administrators saying, here's all of the ways in which we are racist, and here are all of the stuff that we're taking to combat racism. For example, their 11th grade U.S. history course is going to be overhauled, to be taught from a critical race theory perspective,

which means it will incorporate the latest in progressive pedagogy. On the other coast, we've looked at, we had the Brebeacon have looked, at Fairfax County, which is one of the Collar counties, D.C., in Virginia, where they spent something like $20,000 an hour, or $20,000 to get me from Kennedy as a prominent racist scholar to come talk to them. These are $20,000 taxpayer money. They also, I dug out details on the anti-racist reading list that was sent out to parents and students at one Fairfax area

school. So really, I mean, there are no, I have identified very few schools that haven't been touched by this stuff in some way. And they're sort of pushing the same ideas everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I love the examples that you give in the article because it's wild when you actually see what's happening and what's happening not that far away. You tell about one Connecticut prep school in your article, Loomis Chafee, and they have introduced mandatory diversity, equality, and inclusion training for students, and they're also requiring faculty to read Kendi's stamped from the beginning and DeAngelo's white fragility for what they

call professional development. So you obviously see that there is a problem here, that this kind of mandatory woke education is harmful. Why do you see it as so harmful? You know, I think there were a couple of answers to that, and you can talk about whether or not, what sort of ideas. It's spreading. You know, I think that there were derogatory features of it. If you look at responses to DeAngela's book, or if you look at some of the sort of more extreme instances, frankly, the accounts of race that they give are startling and disturbing. There's a controversy because the National Museum of American History, I think over the summer, released an info sheet about norms of white culture, which implied that like non-white people

aren't on tying this stuff, and that that's a white norm. It's like, you know, what non-white people don't work hard? of white people who are to work hard. It's like, no, I believe that everyone is able to work hard. That's an important tenet of racial equality, is that we believe that people are equal competency and dignity. But I think the other thing to highlight is that a lot of this stuff doesn't appear to work. It doesn't appear to have a major impact.

You know, I think everyone can reasonably agree that if we have tools that reduce racial animosity and tension, those are good. And all else you want that. But there's reasonably strong research finding at the core level, the corporate diversity trainings, their primary effect is not to reduce inequality in either experience or in hiring, but actually increase racial animosity and to have no effect otherwise on who ends up in top positions.

It seems like mostly to take the sort of extreme example of Robin DiAngelo, if you spend two hours, if you pay somebody $20,000 to spend two hours screaming each your employees about how all of their problems are caused by racial animosity, the effect of that would be to cause and to resent each other even more, which is not really surprising. You look at, and then, you know, I think this plays out, I highlighted in the piece, a couple of different stories about progressive schools that have, really, the progressive has veered into sort of disturbing level of anti-Semitism. It was reporting from Tablet Magazine, looking at Fields and Ethical School in New York,

where they divided kids up by affinity groups that were based on their ethnic identity and how all of the Jewish kids felt super-targeted by being put in the Jewish. group and being told that they were terrible Zionists and they were encouraging the oppression of the Palestinians that was their fault as Jews. So, you know, that kind of division by race, especially among high schoolers, can promote bullying and destructive behavior. Wow. No, I mean, I think on so many levels, just fundamentally the fact that, okay, you know, why are we continuing to do things that, one, we're seeing really don't help and then two, that actually have real harmful effects.

I do want to get your opinion on something that you reference in your article. That's the 1619 project. We've talked a lot about the 1619 project on this show, the flaws with the curriculum, but we are seeing it continue to be implemented in schools across the country. I want to get your perspective as a journalist, and specifically how the media reports on the 1619 project. because we know that there are flaws. The New York Times themselves,

they published a major correction to the project's central piece. So why do you think so much of mainstream media just kind of looks the other way at something that's being so promulgated, but is so clearly flawed? I mean, I think I want to answer that question pretty generally and then focusing on the particular example,

which is that there are lots of institutions in American society, already today, whether it is, or, you know, in society with brother, whether it's the Pulitzer Prize in the New York Times or it's who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, which have sort of historical legitimacy, which their authority derives from a past treatment of authority, and which today have been more or less co-opted by sort of parties in liberal interests. They use the stamp of their legitimacy to approve things which are ideologically correct if they're not factually correct. And so this is how you end up in situations where, and this is we talk about journalists

specifically, where journalists are happy to pat themselves on the back for things that are factually inaccurate or which don't have an accurate picture, but which serve the ideological ends that they want them to serve, that you have a sort of wandering of legitimacy that goes on. So I think something like 1619, the question is not, is it right? is it presenting an accurate picture rarely? I don't know a huge amount about the details, but the question is, for I think we're reporting on it, the question is,

is this how we imagined history really looks, you know, in the sort of Howard Zinn's sense of like, is this, is this, you know, the untold secret story of history that confirms our ideological priors? And if the answer is yes, then they're going to go, okay, this is good, and we're going to put our stamp of approval on it.

And we're going to help advance this thing having influence in society. That toolset is apparent across American elite society, and it's apparent in that case, too. Interesting. So I want to dive in a little bit more into some of these examples that you give in your piece about what is happening at some of these schools. I was really fascinated, and then I did some extra homework on it because I was really interested, that in San Diego, their public schools have actually overhauled, their kind of traditional grading system because of racism.

So they've changed the way that they grade as a way to combat racism. It's a little unclear how, you know, one plus one, not sure. They didn't seem to draw a super direct link for how, you know, changing the grading system then will help to defeat racism in that school district. Do you know more about that situation? Yeah. I mean, I think basically, so one of the enduring problems in American education policy with past 40, 50 years is that there are large and persistent gaps along race

on any standardized tests that you cared a name, which is to say Asian students and then white students consistently and significantly outperform Latino students and then black students, and this is called the achievement gap. And the why is a really complicated question, and there are lots of different debates about how we can address this. And I think, you know, it's important to ask what are the underlying causes that might be, whether they're socioeconomic inequality or lack of access to resources or lack of school choice. Are there any of a number of factors in play? But having observed this disparity is from beating their heads against it for the past 50 years. I think many of the most progressive figures in education policy and in teaching theory have basically said, it is no longer.

longer relevant to ask what is the cause of this disparity. We should assume the disparities, it's a factor racist, that because this is the end of the logic, if there is a disparity, then racism is what causes it. There's no other plausible explanation. And therefore, we should modify at the level of metric what, we should have to address the disparity at the level of metric. We should say if being graded poorly on homework is the thing that is leading to the achievement cap, the measure achievement gap on homework between black kids and white kids, then the solution to change how we grade homework until the achievement gap goes away. In other words, I think their contention is that the measures are hopelessly racist, and so we should change the measures. I

think my contention might be, maybe not home, certainly standardized testing, is a reasonably good measure of something like academic ability. And so, you know, whatever the underlying causes of the disparities, again, you know, which maybe says you can own inequality, whatever, what are the underlying causes of disparities are changing the measure to make that disparity, that measured disparity go away. Changing what your measure is doesn't actually address the inequalities or issues that are causing the disparity to emerge in the first place. But I think that's the thinking that's going on there. Yeah, and I mean, that seems so dangerous and obviously so not helpful to those students

that are struggling that need the extra help. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, for a few years, you'll have sort of, you know, teachers and administrators thinking, well, we quote unquote fixed the problem kind of through a bizarre solution that isn't a solution at all at a major problem that needs to be changed probably on multiple levels to really get these students up to par and get them the help that they need. I do want to pivot and just ask you a little bit about something that you referred to, which is Director of Diversity. This has become a popular job title, a number of schools, lots of schools, lots of businesses are hiring someone that's specifically

just on staff to make sure that that community is racially aware that they are diverse enough. So what exactly do these people do who wear this title of something like Director of Diversity? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a person who is responsible for, so the industry buzzword is DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. And broadly speaking, it's a person who's responsible for any initiatives related to those things as a sort of priorities for a business or a school or a nonprofit, what have you. And I think that, you know, that can mean metrics for diversity, that can mean getting, you know, organizing a speaking event that can mean consulting on, you know, who's getting promoted and who isn't. I think it's a person who's specifically responsible

for forwarding diversity-active inclusion set of goals. To some extent, that might be good. It's conceivable that they can do that well. I think often in practice that role, as I argue in the piece, often in practice what that role does is identify reasons that more diversity equity inclusion are needed. So if you look at these schools, their roster of DEI people have only grown over the past five to ten years.

They might have started with one diversity chief and then, because of that person finding issues, they hire another person in a seven-person group who's responsible for diversity. And it is telling to me that as these organizations add administrators, the number of accusations of racism only increase, the number of identified causes, the number of identified instances of racism only increase.

Maybe they're measuring better, but they may also simply be measuring more. And I think it is generally true that administrators of this sort seek their own interest in trying to accrue. just like anybody, and try to accrue resources. And the best way to do that is to say, well, actually, you need even more DEI than you first thought. Wow, fascinating.

I know you have specifically written about that subject in other pieces, and we'll link those in the show notes. So our audience could read your work on that. But I want to ask, apart from education, we are seeing that woke culture is really seeping in to, you know, things like professional sports, of course, TVs and movies, large corporations. So if we fast forward maybe 10 or 15 years, what do you think the effects of this very progressive woke culture ideology is going to have on America long term? I'll say two things. One is, you know, I'm not sure what's going to happen in 10 to 15 years. In part because it is hard to disentangle the sort of like pushful workness from contemporary political context from, you know, it clearly it's started the second half of the Obama administration, but was empowered by the Trump administration, sort of a liberal, visceral backlash against the Trump administration. Maybe with Joe Biden in office,

it'll ratchet it back. Maybe not. Who knows? Let's imagine it doesn't. You know, I think I would say, here's a thing that's not going to happen. I am not optimistic about the sort of spread of woke ideology actually reducing substance of racial equality in the United States. You know, if our priority is doing something like reducing the black-white wealth gap, I don't think it's have a major impact on that. I don't think Uber eating from a black owned restaurant is a major impact on that, even though the election would be about it all the time. I certainly don't think you're lecturing your employees about their white

fragility is going to have a major impact on that. And I think in general, it is unlikely to even help diversity at sort of the top end of the distribution. It doesn't, you know, the NASDAQ can require you to have a more diverse board in order to be admitted to it, but I think companies will be really good at skirting that. Instead, what I imagine is that mostly, you know, the serpent will leave its own tail, that as with diversity execs, as I talked out a minute ago, in schools, the principal applies more broadly, that most of it will happen is that we'll find new ways to identify sort of hard-to-measure racial problems,

racial wrong think, and then hire new consultants and new employees and new directors who are responsible for farering it out, none of which will have any interest in, like, you know, correcting any substantive imbalance from policy perspective, but will instead focus on, like, reinforcing this idea and therefore, frankly, generating more profit for the people who propounded. Charles, we just so appreciate your insight on this issue. I do want to ask, where can our listeners follow you, find your work? Absolutely. I think the best place is at the Freebeacon.

That's freebeacon.com. I'm there. All of my great colleagues are there. You can also follow me on Twitter. I'm at Charles F. Lehman, L-E-H-M-A-N. Those are both good places. Great. Charles, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

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