A Philadelphia public elementary school forced 5th grade students to simulate a “black power rally” to “free Angela Davis from prison.” La...
A Philadelphia public elementary school forced 5th grade students to simulate a “black power rally” to “free Angela Davis from prison.”
Last year, a teacher at the William D. Kelley School designed a social studies curriculum celebrating Davis, a militant communist with ties to the Black Panther Party — as whose guns were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom that left four people dead.
Photographs obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo show that students were also told to “define communist” in favorable terms in an assignment.
“At the end of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-olds into the school auditorium to ‘simulate’ a Black Power rally to ‘free Angela Davis’ from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. The students chanted ‘Black Power!’ and ‘Free Angela!'” Rufo tweeted.
Rufo added that “the William D. Kelley School’s student population is 94 percent black and 100 percent ‘economically disadvantaged.’ Academically, it is one of the worst-performing schools in the state: by graduation, only 13 percent of Kelley students will have achieved basic literacy.”
“Despite this abysmal academic performance, administrators have gradually abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of political radicalism. They recently commissioned murals of Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton, who represent the Communist and Black Panther revolutionary movements,” he continued.
The Philadelphia public school district has fully embraced activism instead of traditional learning. Last year the superintendent released an Antiracism Declaration promising to “[dismantle] systems of racial inequity” and implemented racially-segregated programs.
Rufo also noted that the teachers’ union openly demands that the United States overthrow the “racist structure of capitalism,” provide “reparations for Black and Indigenous people,” and “uproot white supremacy and plant the seeds for a new world.”
Reporting on the insanity for the City Journal, Rufo wrote “one teacher at William Kelley, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, expressed deep pessimism about the future of public education: ‘I’ve come to realize that no policy hurts African-Americans more than the public school system and the teachers’ union.’ The teacher is right. In absolute terms, the numbers are demoralizing. The School District of Philadelphia has 18,000 employees and a $3.4 billion annual budget—and fails, year after year, to teach the basics of ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic.’ As it turns out, education is hard; political fantasy is a useful diversion.”
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