All over the country, taxpayers are unwittingly funding dubious professional development opportunities that schools provide to teachers through conferences, workshops, and seminars that teachers attend during the school year and summer vacation. I’ve written about these primarily in the context of high schools, but, unfortunately, these ideologically driven professional development activities have been making their way into middle and even elementary schools.

According to the Homewood, IL, District 153 Winter 2008 Newsletter, taxpayers have been subsidizing the deeply troubling National SEED Project on Inclusive Curricula for several years: “Over the past three years, about 90 staff members have participated in the training, meeting for three hours every month.”

The National SEED Project on Inclusive Curricula explores “white privilege,” race, gender (i.e., feminism), class, disability, and sexual orientation. Curiously, in the description of the SEED training for teachers in the District 153 newsletter, there was no mention of “white privilege,” feminism, and sexual orientation–topics that might have led community members to ask some hard questions.

SEED is just one more “social justice” program. It’s the brainchild of Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women. The SEED co-directors are dyed-in-the-wool feminists who promote the very same identity politics theories of Bill Ayers. And they, like Ayers, are disciples of deceased Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is required reading for all authentic “social justice” “educators.”

Brenda Collins Flyswithhawks, national co-director of SEED and community college professor of psychology, espouses quintessential social justice ideas-ideas straight out of Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “I teach you nothing . . . I only facilitate bringing forth that which you already know.”

According to Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Freire and his “social justice” disciples reject “teachers -directed instruction as a misguided ‘banking concept,’ . . . Freire proposes instead that teachers partner with their coequals.”

Stern says this about Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

Pedagogy of the Oppressed mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students-and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.

Flyswithhawks wants her students to stop “manifesting what your parents, coaches, priests, and peers want you to think.” She explains that some of the students “don’t want to listen” because “listening is not honored in the Western world.”

She also shares how she persuades her students that schools and society have kept events in history hidden from them in order to “dupe” and “seduce” them. Apparently, Flyswithhawks doesn’t see her own classroom machinations as manipulative. She doesn’t see the anti-American bias that is woven into “social justice” theory. She fails to recognize that all history courses must, out of necessity, omit some historical events. She fails to acknowledge that some historical events are omitted simply because of time constraints rather than some nefarious desire to “dupe” or “seduce” children.

SEED encourages both teachers and students to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics, which separates the world into groups according to who are the oppressors and who are the oppressed. This requires the stereotyping of people and robs minority students of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives.

But even more troubling, SEED promotes subversive views of the nature and morality of homosexuality. Here are just some of the books SEED has used in its training seminars for teachers:

• ·  Free Your Mind: the Book for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth-and their Allies
• ·  Out and About Campus: Personal Accounts by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgendered College Students
• ·  Stranger at the Gate by homosexual Mel White
• ·  Tackling Gay Issues in Schools
• ·  Two Teenagers in Twenty: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth
• ·  When the Drama Club is Not Enough: Lessons from the Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students

These are just some of the dubious ideas promoted by SEED. For a more in depth analysis of SEED, please read this report by Barbara Anderson of the Minnesota Family Council who participated in a SEED training seminar.

The goal of these publicly subsidized, ideologically biased seminars is to effect “personal transformation” in teachers which they will then take into their classrooms, which is exactly what has happened inHomewood’sChurchillSchool:

Inspired by their own SEED experience, ChurchillSchoolteachers Jeanette Nichols and Melanie Mandisodza developed a student-version of the project. Armed with a grant from the Homewood Foundation for Educational Excellence and encouragement from school administrators, the pair piloted their creation in their classrooms during the 2006-07 school year…. Encouraged by the preliminary results, the school board decided to take the experiment one step further in the 2007-08 school year. Nichols was hired as the district’s SEED facilitator to work with all 3rd- and 7th-grade classrooms each month.

Nichols and Mandisodza developed what they call SEEDkids, which is an apt name in that the SEED curriculum plants the seeds of its own ideology in the minds of young children who too become the seeds of cultural transformation.

District 153 Superintendent Dale Mitchell made the same unsubstantiated claims that many “diversity” devotees in the field of education make. He said “the district views SEEDkids as one tool in the fight against educational ‘achievement gaps.'” Has anyone thought to ask Mr. Mitchell for research supporting his claim that teaching faculty and students about “whiteness,” or “white privilege” or “classism” closes the gap between the test scores of different groups of students?

SEED does precisely nothing to develop the skills or knowledge-base of teachers who were hired to teach math, science, foreign languages, history, literature, writing, art, P.E., or music. Parents in Homewood and every other school district need to ask some direct questions of their local school administrations. Ask about the content of all professional development opportunities that are provided to staff and faculty. Ask because the goals of SEED and other “social justice” programs are to indoctrinate students with leftist, feminist, pro-homosexual, anti-American, anti-capitalist ideologies and to fill the coffers of the organizations that develop these curricula with the hard-earned money of hard-working taxpayers.