A prominent teachers union is training it members to inject identity politics into nearly all aspects of teaching, and included in its journals biased and debunked information.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union, took to the pages of its quarterly journal, “American Educator,” to instruct members to incorporate liberal ideology in classroom teachings. The College Fix reported that the main theme of the issue is confronting bias in schools, but “the essay that kicks off the issue almost treats the theme as an afterthought.”
That essay, written by AFT President Randi Weingarten, wrote that President Donald Trump “has fanned biases that aim to dehumanize ‘the other’ and that erode our democracy,” and said teachers “can’t ignore Trump’s bigotry and cruelty, or the fact that his erratic behavior is intended to create chaos and confusion.”
Weingarten also wrote that Trump is “leading a homegrown hate movement.”
The implication is clear: That children need to be taught these things about the president of the United States, even though it is an ideological point — no matter how much the Left claims it to be fact.
The Fix also pointed out that the “44-page issue includes 13 references to ‘tolerance,’ 15 to ‘equity,’ 32 to ‘racial identity,’ 33 to ‘racism,’ 34 to ‘diversity,’ 39 to ‘discrimination,’ 52 to ‘prejudice,’ 54 to ‘hate,’ 79 to ‘identity,’ and 102 to ‘bias.’”
Some of the people who wrote articles for the issue promoted misleading and biased information in an effort to suggest that America is racist and in need of further leftist ideology in schools.
For example, one article in the issue was written by staff from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a notoriously biased organization that paints pro-family, pro-Christian organizations as “hate groups” in the same league as the KKK. The authors, Maureen Costello and Coshandra Dillard, cite the SPLC’s woefully inadequate report from three years ago that claimed hate crimes increased after Trump was elected. The report relied on unproven and unchecked allegations of “incidents involving racial slurs and symbols, bigotry, and the harassment of minority children in the nation’s schools.” The SPLC did not confirm the anonymous reports it received, some of which turned out to be false.
Further, the SPLC’s report ignored 2,000 similarly anonymous reports of anti-white hate incidents in schools, the Fix reported. The authors of the article try to downplay these allegations by writing, “Teachers also reported a handful of incidents involving name-calling directed at white people.”
It should also be noted that the SPLC is currently conducting an internal investigation after allegations from current and former employees surfaced claiming the organization is a hotbed of racism and sexism. The allegations led to the firing of the group’s co-founder and the resignation of its president.
Another article in the journal, from Adam Sanchez, implores teachers to teach students an anti-American version of the country’s history, which emphasizes racism and inequity over all else. That version of American history is from Marxist historian Howard Zinn, whose work was criticized by a Stanford University history expert as “a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions.”
The main theme of the journal is actually teaching students what to think, not how to think.