Yes! I got mixed grades in Conduct, sometimes stellar, sometimes sending me to detention in lieu of Fun Friday (various schools). I can’t count the number of times I heard “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” Took me decades to learn how to manage that shit.
I can’t answer your question on how things are now, many years later.
I don’t like the way that you posted that! 
Where the debate over the IAT gets much more contested is whether the IAT is good for predicting aggregate behavior — meaning behavior in an overall group.
As the IAT’s supporters admit, the IAT may not tell you much about the biases or behavior of an individual who took the test once. But once you take the results of a much larger population of test takers or an individual who took the test multiple times, supporters argue, you can say with some certainty whether that broader group or that individual is implicitly biased based on the average of all the tests.
Yup. “Reality”
I wonder if this paragraph in the article I’m going to have my students read tomorrow would be acceptible in Florida.
Probably not.
I mean, there are a lot of facts there. Florida schools are no place for facts.
Automatic weapons? Sure.
Bump, for 538’s take:
In fact, in examining the language of these pieces of legislation, we found that more than two-thirds of the pending bills and every single one of the state laws (except for North Dakota’s) contained text essentially identical to an executive order Trump issued in September 2020, entitled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” That executive order didn’t actually mention critical race theory by name, but it has still served as a blueprint for Republican lawmakers trying to ban critical race theory in schools. Indeed, there has been a concerted effort to get Republican legislatures across the country to adopt language from Trump’s executive order in the bills they put forward, as evinced in circulated documents like “Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory,” which was produced by a conservative advocacy group founded by Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
In other words, these bills aren’t concerned with critical race theory as much as they are focused on enshrining Trump’s agenda in law. They’re what political scientists call message bills, or “hopeless legislation constructed not to change public policy but instead to signal desirable attributes of incumbents to constituents.” But as the teacher and principal firings cited earlier suggest, these bills can still result in real harm to teachers and students alike.
The NY Post (yes, I understand the bias there) ran this story
The entire book is here:
The Post quotes a parent who says "“The book itself is fine and a lot of what is said in the book is productive and I think very helpful in a discussion of race. … However, there’s just an excerpt from it that I think is so damaging that it should disqualify the whole book.”
The first half the book is about different colors of skin. It seems fine for ages 5 and younger, although “melanin” is kind of a big word.
As the parent points out, the page that starts “A long time ago, … a group of white people …” is a sudden change in tone from what had been ‘skin color doesn’t mean anything important’.
Either I’m missing the point or the people complaining are missing the point. History is history. I guess they could say “A group of people with northern European ancestry…”
This seems like a joke.
https://thehill.com/news/3482067-desantis-signs-bill-establishing-victims-of-communism-day/
What if it makes communist students feel guilty?
I don’t think either of the teachers or the principal in the opening paragraphs deserve to be fired, and based on what’s written, it doesn’t seem like the TX principal did anything wrong at all.
But I also don’t think “how racially privileged are you” is an appropriate assignment. And calling white privilege “fact” is just unnecessarily divisive IMO. It seems like the kind of lesson specifically designed to rile people up. I’m not familiar with the assigned essay, but the description makes it seem iffy at best.
I don’t think getting people agitated and insinuating that kids’ Trump-voting parents are racist is appropriate.
Teach these topics dispassionately and let kids come to their own conclusions. They’re probably more likely to decide that their parents are racist if they’re not taught as much in school, so it’s probably also counter-productive, but inappropriate regardless.
Desantis is a joke.
Aren’t most of those victims in Russia and China though…?
They don’t vote in Florida. Cuban-Americans do.
Or, they could say “some people”. Why is the skin color of the people important in a book that starts out with “skin color doesn’t matter”?
If we care about history, I don’t think it is true that the only humans who have ever discriminated based on skin color are white people. Or that racists today are that way because they read what these dead white people wrote.
The “for adults” section at the end of the book says that children as young as six months categorize people by skin color and by three might demonstrate racial bias. I think the real science/history here is human tribalism, which generated a survival advantage for our ancestors, and racism is an example of tribalism.
This. It’s not like white people are a monolithic block who all think exactly the same thoughts.
Also, racism is not the sole provenance of white Europeans. India independently came up with the caste system, Egypt had Israelite slaves, throughout much of Asia beauty is equated with lighter skin tones.
I won’t dispute that American slavery was the worst of the lot, but to suggest that white people are uniquely responsible for the entire concept of racism is, in addition to being unnecessarily divisive, also historically inaccurate.
Whatever assuages white guilty.
Hopefully students will at least learn what communism is as the term is so often incorrectly applied. Communism has been a boogeyman for over one hundred years so I can’t imagine it being demonized further than it already has.
Yeah, just went through the whole book. It starts off really strong, and then takes a sharp left turn on the page that people are objecting to.
I think three minor edits would transform it into something that would be really helpful and appropriate for young readers.
The aforementioned “some white people” could be “some people”.
And I’d change “so that white people get more power” to “so that certain groups, often white people, get more power”.
I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge that white people are, by and large, the beneficiaries of racism. But not to outright say that it is exclusively that way or that other forms of racism don’t exist. (Again, think caste system in India… racist with zero white beneficiaries.)
And I’d change one of the examples to not be exclusively about white people. Instead of “if someone says only people with white skin can play” to “if someone says only people with the same skin color can play”.
But I’d leave the example about thinking that princesses only have blonde hair as is. That’s an inherent bias that starts at a very young age.
I think with those three edits this would be a very valuable book.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses. I wasn’t thinking about India, even though I’ve read the book Caste, and heard about the expectations from friends who immigrated.