EXCLUSIVE — DC Area Educators for Social Justice, an activist network of teachers and school administrators, is hosting a curriculum fair next week to push public schools into “national demands based in the Black Lives Matter guiding principles.”
The fair comes in the lead-up to the seventh annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, which DCAESJ helps organize, in D.C. Public Schools, set to take place from Feb. 5 to 9.
Some topics from the curriculum fair, which is scheduled to take place Jan. 20, include “queer affirming,” “trans affirming,” “restorative justice,” “anti-racist professional development,” and “reproductive justice,” which is a term used by abortion activists.
“It’s lamentable that DC public school teachers believe that diverting finite classroom time to encourage student activism, given the district’s lamentable proficiency and truancy rates,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner. “The best way to set underprivileged students up for success in life is to facilitate mastery of core subjects like reading and writing – not to tell children that they’re destined for permanent victimhood based on the color of their skin.”
One session, called “From Inspiration to Action: Making a Plan for Monday,” appears to offer a blueprint for teachers and administrators to advance critical race theory ideology in their classrooms by “organizing” and “collaborating” to implement the “Week of Action” at their schools. It is recommended for school officials working in early elementary childhood through upper elementary.
The fair will also include an “Afrofuturist” to talk about perspective on “one way to reclaim ourselves through examining spacetime, power, and bodily identity” and features keynote speaker Enid Lee, who is an “anti-racist professional development specialist.”
DCPS has celebrated the Black Lives Matter “Week of Action” in years past, including last year. This year, however, is marked by Black Lives Matter at School’s open support for Hamas in the aftermath of its Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israeli citizens.
The attack was a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians,” the group said in an Oct. 17 statement.
“Education should be wielded in service of struggle. The ongoing fight to #TeachTruth in the U.S. must include Palestinian existence, resistance, culture, global contributions, and the ongoing struggle to realize a free Palestine,” the statement continued. “It also must directly name the ways that U.S. imperialism has fueled and supported apartheid and war crimes.”
Neily called the group’s support for Hamas “appalling.”
“The fact that BLM Week of Action is still taking place in any public school district in America in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attack, and BLM’s unabashed support of Hamas, is appalling,” she said.
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Black Lives Matter at School’s program includes a “year of purpose” in which it asks “educators to reflect on their own work in relationship to antiracist pedagogy and abolitionist practice, persistently challenging themselves to center Black lives in their classrooms.”
DCPS did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
