Enhancing students’ skills in reading and math… or training students in progressive activism?
Long Beach Unified School District in California seems to favor the latter, paying high school students $1,400 each in taxpayer money to become left-wing social justice warriors. And we wouldn’t even know about it if not for an investigative report from The Free Press—highlighting the urgent need for transparency in public schools so that parents can find out what’s happening to their children.
According to The Free Press, the district paid students to join a club run by Californians for Justice, a nonprofit that claims to be a “youth-powered organization fighting for racial justice.”
These stipends for students engaging in activism were just one of the many payments that the district made to the progressive special interest group. Between 2019 and 2023, the district paid Californians for Justice nearly $2 million for various programs, including training sessions for teachers and students. According to the Free Press report, these sessions involved Californians for Justice-trained students lecturing their teachers on such topics as “implicit bias,” “student voice,” and “antiblack racism.”
One teacher in the district said the students in these trainings were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say…it just feels like indoctrination and not information.” Another teacher observed, “They’re teaching them parroting, which is the exact opposite of how you empower children.”
The district shelled out heaps of taxpayer money to Californians for Justice despite persistent shortcomings in student academic performance. In the 2022-23 school year, less than half of the students in the district met the California state standard in assessments for English. Only one-third of students met the standard for math.
Californians for Justice, in contrast, has benefitted immensely from its contracts with Long Beach Unified and other California school districts. In the 2022 fiscal year alone, the group reported over $10 million in revenue and almost $16 million in assets.
Long Beach Unified’s largesse toward Californians for Justice is just the latest example of California public school districts getting in bed with leftist advocacy organizations. Just last month, a report revealed that a Bay Area elementary school is spending $250,000 in federal grant money for teacher training sessions run by Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit entity that advocates for “queer and trans liberation.” Journalist Kenny Xu has reported on a corrupt scheme in the Santa Barbara Unified School District involving a nonprofit known as “AHA!” that provided programming in social-emotional learning for students. The district paid AHA! with the understanding that the funds would enable AHA! to secure a large donation from a private donor.
Do students and teachers really benefit from giving massive amounts of taxpayer money to organizations with such a clear ideological agenda? Surely this money would be better spent on improving core academic outcomes rather than enriching the heads of leftist organizations and training foot-soldiers for the progressive cause.
This latest grift demonstrates the urgent need for transparency in public schools.
Parents deserve to know what their children are learning, and parents and taxpayers alike should know whether school districts are giving sweetheart deals to progressive organizations. But when parents seek information about the materials used in their child’s classroom or extracurricular programming at their child’s school, public school districts often stonewall the request or demand thousands of dollars in fees to retrieve the documents.
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That’s why the Goldwater Institute, where I work, has released a landmark Academic Transparency reform that brings much-needed sunlight into the classroom by requiring public school districts to disclose the books and teaching materials used in the classroom. No parent or taxpayer should need to become an expert in requesting public records to know what our schools are teaching—and what organizations they’re paying.
California should move quickly to arm parents and taxpayers with information that enables them to hold public schools accountable. And the leaders of our public schools must return these institutions to their core purpose—the education of skilled and knowledgeable citizens, not the creation of a progressive activist corps.
Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy. He advances policies and develops programming that promote constitutional principles in education and public life.