$250,000 'Woke Kindergarten' program adopted at failing California school

(The Center Square) - A failing California school’s test scores continued dropping after spending $250,000 on a program called "Woke Kindergarten," which deployed anti-police, anti-capitalism, and anti-Israel messages to advance “abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.”

The Woke Kindergarten teacher training and curriculum program, first reported on in the San Francisco Chronicle, was available to all of Glassbook Elementary’s 474 students, who most recently fell to new lows of grade-level math and English proficiency at 4% and 12% respectively.

Woke Kindergarten founder Akiea “Ki” Gross recently took to TikTok to tell the world “I believe Israel has no right to exist. I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples has no right to exist.” On Woke Kindergarten’s website, Gross is described as an “abolitionist early educator, cultural organizer and creator currently innovating ways to resist, heal, liberate and create with their pedagogy, Woke Kindergarten.”

In the Chronicle’s reporting, Glassbrook teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley, who is white and describes himself as a “gay moderate,” questioned a Woke Kindergarten trainer who described the nation as the “so-called United States” and promoted “Lil’ Comrade Convos” for children about imagining a world without police, money, or landlords. Craven-Neeley, who sued and settled with his former school district for not being allowed to talk about LGBTQ+ history before moving to the Bay Area, says he was banned from future Woke Kindergarten training sessions for his questions.

Other teachers questioned why the school opted to use $250,000 in limited federal funding meant to be used on improving educational outcomes for the nation’s worst-performing public schools on science-based math and reading interventions that are proven to work.

One teacher who spoke to the Chronicle anonymously said, “Our reading scores are low. That [$250,000] could have gotten us a reading interventionist.”

Meanwhile, nearby John Muir Elementary adopted a math intervention program that increased math proficiency rate from 15% — barely higher than Glassbrook’s 12% — to more than 50%. A recent Stanford study found reading interventions for the state’s 75 worst-performing public elementary schools based on scientific, phonics-based programs accelerated reading learning by 25% and, as a spillover effect, boosted math advancement by 12% relative to students in schools that didn’t adopt the programs.

The majority of California students do not meet grade-level proficiency in any tested subject, and over 1,400 California public schools have lost more than 20% of their students since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to outmigration, declining birth rates, and parents choosing education options outside of public K-12.