The New York State Education Department, and by extension, the New York City Department of Education, are trying to address seemingly intractable achievement gaps among students based on racial demographics. Their solution is to dismantle the existing “oppresive paradigms” that keep “marginalized others” down. The NYSED/DOE refer to this as “culturally responsive-sustaining education,” though detractors refer to it as divisive political indoctrination.
Here are quotes from the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, as well as from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. See if you can tell which is which. Answers are below.
1) A complex system of biases and structural inequities is at play, deeply rooted in our country’s history, culture, and institutions.
2)The history of all past society has consisted in the development of … antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.
3) The responsibility of education is not only to prevent the exclusion of historically silenced, erased, and disenfranchised groups, but also to assist in the promotion and perpetuation of cultures, languages and ways of knowing that have been devalued, suppressed, and imperiled by years of educational, social, political, economic neglect and other forms of oppression.
4) The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
5) The exploitation of one part of society by the other…cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of … antagonisms.
6) This system of inequity — which routinely confers advantage and disadvantage based on linguistic background, gender, skin color, and other characteristics — must be clearly understood, directly challenged, and fundamentally transformed.
7) [We] do but seek … to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
Answers
1) CRSE Framework
2) Communist Manifesto
3) CRSE Framework
4) Communist Manifesto
5) Communist Manifesto
6) CRSE Framework
7) Communist Manifesto
