The public learned about Glassbrook Elementary’s contract with the “Woke Kindergarten” website thanks to a Feb. 3 story published by The San Francisco Chronicle and education reporter Jill Tucker. The school used federal funds, set aside to improve student test scores, to send its teachers to work sessions where they were told white supremacy and oppression are the barriers to learning, the story said.
CA teachers instructed by group that praised Oct. 7 attackBob Kellogg, AFN.net California Family Council is raising the alarm after learning a group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel organized a pro-Palestinian training session for public school teachers. California Family has learned the group Middle East Children’s Alliance, or MECA, recently trained Oakland teachers on integrating “Palestinian history, narratives, and culture” into K-12 curriculum. 
MECA was allowed to organize the session despite celebrating the gruesome Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel. In a message posted to X, the group said the people of Gaza are “rising up to respond to decades of Israeli settler and colonial violence.” The session called “Palestine in our Classrooms” was held January 20. “They're training their teachers how to teach what they call ‘Palestinian history’ but from one perspective – completely a biased perspective,” says California Family spokesman Greg Burt. |
A follow-up Chronicle story by Tucker, published Feb. 13, said Glassbrook Elementary has now terminated the contract after public uproar, but it has also fired a white male teacher who had complained to his colleagues – and eventually to the Chronicle – about the Marxist ideology he had to sit through.
Glassbrook Elementary, where only 12% of its 476 students can read at grade level, is part of the Hayward Unified School District located in the Bay Area south of Oakland.
During the 2022-2023 school year, Hispanics were the majority of students at Glassbrook at 82% followed by black students at 7%. White students, supposedly representing a system of white supremacy and oppression, are 3% of the students at Glassbrook.
Greg Burt, vice president of the right-leaning California Family Council, has been following the Chronicle’s stories about Glassbook Elementary.
“They're training kids to become revolutionaries,” he warns, “instead of instilling the knowledge they need to succeed in society."
Burt’s description of Glassbrook and “Woke Kindergarten” was corroborated in the Chronicle story. The teaching concept behind "Woke Kindergarten" is called “abolitionist education,” the story said. A Berkeley professor described it as a way of “starting over” when an oppressive system can’t be reformed or tweaked to fix itself.
In other words: Communism.
White teacher questioned 'disrupt whiteness'
“It slowly became very apparent,” an anonymous Glassbrook teacher told the Chronicle, “if you were a dissenting voice, that it’s not what they wanted to hear.”
One Glassbrook teacher who pushed back – and got punished for it – is Tiger Craven-Neeley, a white male described by the Chronicle as a “gay moderate.”
During the teacher training sessions, Craven-Neely said he was told the objective was to “disrupt whiteness” but he demanded to know what that meant for teaching third graders. He also questioned a trainer for using the phrase “so-called United States,” asking what that phrase meant, too. The teacher said he also questioned why the school was using materials from a website with “Lil Comrade Convos’" about ridding the world of police, money, and landlords.
In other words: he was considered a dangerous counter-revolutionary, according to Marxist thinking.
Another teacher, in fact, got in his face and angrily accused Craven-Neely of being a "danger" to the school, he said, referring to a tense faculty meeting before he was suspended.
The unhelpful disruption from the third-grade teacher didn’t go unnoticed by Jason Reimann, the Hayward superintendent. He told the Chronicle the goal of using "Woke Kindergarten" was not to help students in reading and math but to abolish barriers so they “feel safe” in school.
“We are in favor 100% of abolishing systems of oppression where they hold our students back,” the superintendent, who is in charge of a school system that is holding students back, told the Chronicle.
In the Chronicle story, Glassbrook credited "Woke Kindergarten" training for removing the school from a state list of poor-performing schools only to be informed by the Chronicle reporter that Glassbrook had actually dropped farther down that state list.
“In these groups,” Burt warns, “there's always the oppressor and the oppressed. Right? And the oppressor is always wrong, the oppressed is always right.”
