A cadre of newly hired teachers will report to city schools this week following orientation sessions where they were given a book that includes an essay titled “Dear White Teacher,” The Post has learned.
But unlike the Department of Education’s controversial “implicit bias” training — which, among other lessons, tells teachers that “racial equity” requires favoring black students over whites — the essay’s message is that white instructors should stop being afraid to discipline black students.
Essay author Chrysanthius Lathan blasts white teachers who she says routinely send minority students to “teachers of color” for discipline — because they’re scared of being called racist.
“My strength in the classroom does not come from my racial identity, and neither does yours,” wrote Lathan, a former teacher in Portland, Oregon, who now works as an educational consultant.
“It comes from the way we treat — and what we expect from — kids and families. It is time for you to take back the power in your classroom.”
Lathan also gives blunt advice to the white teachers she says “live in fear of their good faith actions being labeled as racist.”
“You need to find that bone in your body that tends to recoil when it comes time to deal with people of color —- and purposely straighten it back out,” she wrote.
By contrast, the $23 million, “implicit bias” training mandated by schools Chancellor Richard Carranza included consultant Darnisa Amante’s justification that a middle-class black student would “have less access and less opportunities” over the course of a lifetime than a poor white classmate, according to sources who heard her say it.
A veteran Queens teacher said DOE educators were getting “a lot of mixed messages.”
“On the one hand, we’re told that we have these implicit biases that we need to work on to get rid of,” the teacher said.
“And on the other hand, certain teachers are told that race is incredibly important in everything we do. It’s like: don’t focus on race, but focus on race.”
“Dear White Teacher” is among more than 50 essays in “The New Teacher Book,” a 324-page manual published by Rethinking Schools, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit.
Copies of the $24.95 paperback were included in some of the tote bags given to the 2,700 new teachers who attended two days of orientation last week ahead of Thursday’s start of the 2019-20 school year.
Several readings take aim at traditional measures of learning, with titles including “Time to Get Off the Testing Train,” “Beyond Test Scores” and “My Dirty Little Secret: I Don’t Grade Student Papers.”
There are also repeated attacks on charter schools — which purportedly pose a “fundamental threat to the hope of sustaining a multicultural democracy” — and sections that urge new teachers to get involved in their unions and join activist groups.
A veteran city educator who took part in last week’s orientation sessions was outraged that the book was distributed, saying it was “of no practical use.”
A DOE spokesman said the book contained “valuable strategies for new teachers and received positive reviews from several leading educators,” but also maintained that “its views represent the book’s authors, not the DOE.”
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