Is Woke Kindergarten Coming to Your County?

A federally funded program intended to help the country’s lowest-performing schools boost student achievement enabled Glassbrook Elementary School in Hayward, California to spend $250,000 of taxpayer money for teacher training sessions run by “Woke Kindergarten”. The for-profit organization, founded by Akiea “Ki” Gross, who is a self-proclaimed “global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem … supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-black and queer and trans liberation.” The stated goal of the teacher training program is to help students “resist, heal, liberate, and create”, and to teach them that the education system is steeped in racism and oppression and cannot be reformed. 

Woke Kindergarten’s social media pages are not subtle about its beliefs, as evidenced by a TikTok video posted by the founder in which the philosophy of the program is clear. While claiming that the US and Israel are “demons” and “villains”, Gross states “I am anti-Israel...I believe Israel has no right to exist. I believe the United States has no right to exist. I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples, against indigenous people has no right to exist.”

This ideology was no secret to Glassbrook Elementary School when they opted to spend a quarter of a million dollars on the program. Michael Bazeley, spokesperson for the Hayward Unified School District, explained that abolitionist teaching, which is central to Woke Kindergarten, acknowledges “institutional racism and bias exists in the education system, and it seeks to actively dismantle the institutional and cultural barriers” by training teachers to confront white supremacy and disrupt racism and oppression.

Apparently, the district believed this was the answer to low test scores and high absenteeism.

The program offers a “woke word of the day”, described as the “language of resistance” used to “introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”

An example of “woke words of the day” is “ceasefire”, which Gross defined as “an order for people with power in places to stop fighting and using weapons to hurt large groups of people. When people use weapons to hurt others, we call that ‘violence.’ One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire for is in Palestine because they are being occupied, or controlled, by a made-up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing the Palestinian people who have always lived on the land.” Not only is this ideology radically anti-Semitic, but neither does it reflect accurate historical content or context.

The program offers workshops on concepts such as “ways the prison industrial complex manifests in early childhood”, and advises teachers to pose “wonderings” to their students, including “wonderings” such as: “If we challenge the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, how might we transfer power back to the people?” and “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”

Many videos are included in the curriculum, including “Free Palestine: A Visual History Instazine: For Kids”, and “So You Made It to A Protest: A Sensory Guide For Kids.” Along with these videos are book-readings of titles such as “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild”. In this video children are taught about “dismantling respectability politics”, and instructed that respectability means arbitrary laws and rules designed by White people to control people of color. Children are encouraged not to conform to rules, even those as benign as “tucking in your shirt”. Poor grammatical expressions such as “I ain’t wearing no shoes” are scattered throughout this “teaching” video.

Two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, the Hayward Unified School District prematurely terminated the program after finding that student achievement at Glassbrook Elementary had fallen. While students were being taught to disrespect laws and rules, their actual academic test scores declined to less than 4% of students proficient in math and less than 12% proficient in English.

Michael Bazeley claimed that the contract had been scrapped because of “widespread media attention, the mischaracterization of the Woke Kindergarten work, social media posts by the vendor and the public response”. But the reality is that even some of the teachers were questioning whether the money was well spent, given the needs of the predominantly low-income students, 80% of whom are Hispanic or Latino and two-thirds are English language learners.

Records from OpenTheBooks.com revealed that in 2022, when Woke Kindergarten was hired, the Hayward Unified School District spent almost $136 million on payroll, with 60% of district employees earning six-figure salaries. The Superintendent was paid $295,000 that year, $80,000 more than California’s governor.

Despite the decline in achievement, district officials still defend their decision to implement this quarter of a million-dollar program, saying that they have seen improvement in their attendance and suspension rates. They claimed that they were no longer on the state “watch list”, but the San Francisco Chronicle, in reporting on this story, discovered that Glassbrook Elementary School was not only still on the watch list but had even dropped to a lower rating level.

The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten, rather than a literacy or math improvement program was advocated by some educators who believe they “need to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools, and to talk about historic white supremacy, so that students feel safe and supported”. But perhaps $250,000 would be better used to teach first graders to read and write, add, and subtract, instead of tackling global politics. 

Perhaps struggling schools could better serve their students by utilizing research-based literacy and math intervention programs that can provide all students the basic skills to succeed. John Muir Elementary School in San Francisco, for example, adopted a pilot math intervention program using coaching and student-led coursework that led to a more than 50% proficiency rate, up from 15%.

The California Department of Education is required by law to monitor the performance of schools utilizing federal funds. In the case of the Hayward Unified School District, this would mean that the Department of Education either approved the $250,000 Woke Kindergarten contract, with ample evidence of its anti-Semitic and anti-American content, or they were negligent in following proper oversight procedures.

“Woke Kindergarten” is just the latest example of school districts adopting radical teaching agendas that take time away from developing basic skills in reading, writing, and math. Let’s hope that this program does not make its way into more Kindergarten classrooms.

To learn more, read “How to Protect Your Children From Wokeness Ripping Through Schools” and listen to “The Theft of Education”.