Acting on tips from the community, Caroline Moore, vice president of Parents Defending Education, says her organization reached out to Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Kentucky and found documents from the district's 2023 "Racial Equity Institute" that instruct teachers to prioritize students' race and sexuality over their education.
"We found they used this Intersectionality Wheel of Privilege (pictured above), which is not abnormal; a lot of school districts use this to teach kids about white privilege in their school and how you should recognize privilege," Moore details.
According to the documents, terms like "monogamous marriage," "Christian," "white," and "cisgender" are people who come from a power position, and people who are marginalized would be considered phrases like an "unemployed" person or an "undocumented" person.
"We also found documents about confronting white supremacy, dismantling the racism in math, supporting LGBTQ students -- as opposed to all students -- and talking about racial equity in the classroom," Moore reports.
She says this is concerning because "all students should be treated the same, no matter their skin color."
"Providing instruction to teachers to teach based on how a kid looks and how they should be treated and how other kids should interact based on privilege is very concerning to us," Moore tells AFN.
Parents Defending Education's purpose is to raise awareness about such things and let people know what is going on in their districts, so that is exactly what they plan to do in Jefferson County.
"We have members all over the country, and we see problematic districts, whether it is training teachers or students are having to take classes on pronouns or this race-based equity in education," Moore relays. "They are dealing with these kinds of things instead of the math, science, English, and history."
AFN reached out to JCPS but did not hear back by press time.
