(Karen Freeman, Headline USA) Add Pittsburgh to the growing list of Democrat-run cities that prioritize identity politics and critical race theory over teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.
On Oct. 25, Pittsburgh Public Schools’ board of directors voted to hire a consulting group, Quetzal Educational Consulting, to “disrupt” racism in math classes for the price of $50,000, the Center Square reported.
Ebony Pugh, director of public relations and media content for Pittsburgh Public Schools, confirmed the contract to Fox News.
According to the meeting agenda, Quetzal will provide workshops for math teachers to replace “oppressive practices in math instruction with practices that center the wellness of students of Color” and “provide opportunities for math departments and math teachers to grow their antiracist math praxis.”
In addition to workshops for math teachers, Quetzal will provide an ongoing workshop series to address “antiracist” math leadership where teachers will “learn how to train others in the topic of antiracist math” and “how to identify issues of equity in math spaces.”
Quetzal’s home page boldly promotes its objectives to “Decolonize. Reclaim. Reimagine.” The stated goal is to change culture and praxis in education to encourage “anti-oppressive” spaces.
However, far from being a con-artist, the company is simply catering to the overwhelming market demand for such toxic ideologies, rooted in neo-Marxist principles, which now have infected the U.S. education system at a level some fear may be beyond redemption.
Deborah Lowenberg Ball, a mathematics professor and former dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, proclaimed that math is a “harbor for whiteness,” and “mathematics is itself dominated by whiteness and racism.”
Even the once respectable publication Scientific American came out with an August 2021 piece titled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past,” in which it lamented that math was a field based on bias, harassment and exclusion.
“Racism, sexism and other forms of systematic oppression are not unique to mathematics, and they certainly are not new, yet many in the field still deny their existence,” asserted the article’s author, Rachel Crowell.
Those opposed to this new math argue that it is dumbing down math education.
Yet, Pittsburgh Public Schools is not the first—nor will it be the last—to embrace the theory that math and other once-thought-benign school subjects are racist in nature.
According to the New York Post, several schools, organizations and states have issued guidance and promoted teachers’ programs seeking to eliminate racism from math.
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, in a 2022 webinar, discussed ways to combat racist math—including the elimination of “tracking,” which they claimed, “was a form of spirit ‘murdering’ inflicted on children of color through math.”
Tracking—the practice of separating students into different class levels based on their abilities—takes many forms, according to the far-left Brookings Institute, such as matching students based on test scores or previous work to certain curriculums.
For at least a decade, education schools and pedagogy programs pushing the Marxist agenda have instead promoted “differentiation,” which lumps students of all ability levels into the same classroom and shifts the burden onto teachers to create seperate lesson plans for each student according to his needs.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
