Thanks to a request through the California Public Records Act, Fox News obtained the training materials that teachers and administrators were forced to study prior to the 2021-2022 school year in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school district.
The instructor for the training was Tyrone Howard, an author and well-known education professor at UCLA. In a training video, Howard criticizes the idea of “meritocracy,” the idea that success comes after hard-working people have proven their merit. That concept can apply to everyone from to self-made millionaires to a high school valedictorian, but Howard warned the teachers they need to “recognize that some groups have had much more opportunities, some groups have had far more advantages, and some groups have certain types of privileges that other groups have not had."
The same training materials criticized the idea of individualism, too, because that concept “proposes that each person is responsible for his or her outcomes.”
That open criticism of individual achievement is especially telling in Los Angeles, where the A-to-F grading system was dropped in 2021 to help students raise their grades and to close gaps in racial achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mark Schneider of California-based Protect Our Kids tells AFN the training for LAUSD matches a backwards trend in the American educational system, which now goes back decades.
“It's basically an assault on Western civilization," he insists.
The decision to introduce “anti-racism” training in Los Angeles is a curious one, since the county of 10 million Californians is famous for its large Hispanic population, followed by Asians and blacks. In the school district itself, Hispanic students make up approximately three-fourths of the student body followed by whites and blacks.
Among the teachers in the classrooms, the most recent data from EdData.org shows a majority of teachers (40%) are also Hispanic, too, followed by white teachers (34%), black teachers (10%), and Asian teachers (8%).
If the mandatory training was directed only at white teachers, which is likely, then those teachers were instructed to "identify the specific ways the constructs of privilege, whiteness, merit and individualism may be present in your setting" and "determine the immediate changes you will personally make, small or large, to promote increased racial and cultural sensitivity, inclusiveness and awareness in your work."
According to Schneider, the anti-racism teaching is nothing but a “Trojan horse” to get inside the classroom and to tear down what Western civilization has achieved.
After seeking comment from the LAUSD, a spokesperson told AFN in an email the school district “supports and respects the diversity of our students and families, which includes providing safe and affirming learning environments.”
According to training materials obtained by Fox News, that "learning environment" also meant subjecting white teachers to Critical Race Theory, which suggests that minorities cannot achieve success as long as white people hold power over them.
