An elementary school in California was reportedly pushing a critical race theory curriculum on eight- and nine-year-old children.
According to a tweet thread posted Wednesday by City Journal writer Christopher Rufo, a teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School was instructing third-graders to rank themselves based on a spectrum of “power and privilege.”
Rufo reported the educator “told the eight- and nine-year-old students that they live in a ‘dominant culture’ of ‘white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied Christian[s]’ who ‘created and maintained’ this culture in order ‘to hold power and stay in power.’”
The curriculum was based on the book “This Book Is Anti-Racist” by Tiffany Jewell, in which the author provides a guide “for the young person who doesn’t know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life” and, according to the summary, “the kid who has lost themself at times trying to fit into the dominant culture.”
“The teacher asked students to create an ‘identity map,’ listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics,” Rufo explained. “They were told to ‘circle the identities that hold power and privilege.’”
The young students were learning lessons about “intersectional hierarchy.”
It’s worth pointing out, as Rufo did in his article about the curriculum, that the vast majority of students at Meyerholz Elementary are non-white in a city where the median household incoming is more than $170,000 per year:
The irony is that, despite being 94 percent nonwhite, Meyerholz Elementary is one of the most privileged schools in America. The median household income in Cupertino is $172,000, and nearly 80 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. At the school, where the majority of families are Asian-American, the students have exceptionally high rates of academic achievement and the school consistently ranks in the top 1 percent of all elementary schools statewide. In short, nobody at Meyerholz is oppressed, and the school’s high-achieving parents know that teaching intersectionality instead of math is a waste of time — and potentially dangerous.
Rufo went on to argue in his piece that the country’s Asian-American population are an “inconvenient minority” for the progressive left, which is frequently pushing claims of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
“Asian-Americans are the ‘inconvenient minority,’” he wrote. “They significantly outperform all other racial groups, including whites, in terms of academic achievement, college admissions, household income, family stability, and other key measures. Affirmative action and other critical race theory-based programs would devastate their admissions to universities and harm their futures.”
One parent of a student at the Cupertino school argued to Rufo the third-grade teacher was “basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old.” Another parent of Chinese descent “compared the training to the [Chinese] cultural revolution,” telling Rufo: “Growing up in China, I had learned it many times. The outcome is the family will be ripped apart; husband hates wife, children hate parents. I think it is already happening here.”
Ultimately, according to Rufo’s Twitter thread, a group of predominantly Asian-American parents met with the administration, which agreed to “suspend the program.”
Jenn Lashier, principal of Meyerholz Elementary, said the teacher’s training was not part of the school’s “formal curricula” but was the result of “daily learning facilitated by a certified teacher.”