HAYWARD, Calif. — The contract for a professional development program called “Woke Kindergarten” at Glassbrook Elementary School has been canceled after becoming the source of national media attention that suggested the program lowered test scores. However, nationwide research on post-pandemic academic achievement tells a different story.
In 2022, Glassbrook Elementary School entered into a contract with consultant Woke Kindergarten for a professional development program that included workshops, feedback and coaching for teachers on the prison-industrial complex and how teachers can prevent it from manifesting in their classrooms. The $200,000 contract was set to expire in June but was canceled in February after it became the source of controversy.
Upon learning of the contract, Joe Ramos, a member of the Hayward Unified School District’s Board of Education, raised concerns that the program was run by socialists. During a January 24 board meeting, Ramos said that the administrator he believed to be responsible for allowing it in the school should be strung up.
“Some of these parents here, they should take a rope and string you up,” Ramos told the district’s director of supplemental and concentration services.
Just over a week after the January meeting, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about the Woke Kindergarten program without mentioning the incident between Ramos and the administrator. The article primarily focused on the complaints one district teacher had with the program and linked the program to a decrease in test scores without offering any evidence connecting the two.
The Chronicle did not respond to a request for comment.
The article got picked up by the rightwing media ecosystem and the resultant backlash prompted the district in mid-February to cancel the contract.
Superintendent Jason Reimann said at a Feb. 14 meeting, “The controversy over this program — including the widespread media attention, the mischaracterization of the work Woke Kindergarten did with our teachers, social media posts by the vendor, and the public response — is all distracting the district from doing the important work of supporting our students.”
Part of the reason for canceling the contract was a video of the founder of Woke Kindergarten, Akiea “Ki” Gross, that was circulating on social media. In the video, Gross says Israel and the U.S. do not have a right to exist as settler-colonial states established through removing and marginalizing the indigenous population.
Though the professional development program was not centered around raising test scores, Reimann acknowledged academic scores for both math and English language arts fell from the 2021-2022 academic year to the 2022-2023 academic year. Glassbrook dropped 14.5 points in English to 101.8 points below standard and 15.1 points in math to 124.6 points below standard.
“There were, however, other areas in which the school’s performance improved,” Reimann said. “For example, the suspension rate at Glassbrook dropped substantially in comparison with the 2018-2019 (the last pre-COVID) year. Glassbrook‘s performance on the state indicator for chronic absenteeism has improved from red (the lowest possible rating) to yellow (the third highest possible rating). The school saw a 16 percentage point decrease in chronic absenteeism.”
Academic achievement has fallen across the country since the pandemic
Experts like Jim Soland, an assistant professor of quantitative methods at the University of Virginia who has been studying the impact of COVID-19 on student achievement, noted similar declines in math and reading scores across the country during a 2022 media briefing.
Specifically, Soland looked at how math and reading scores in grades 3 through 8 were impacted by COVID-19. Soland and his colleagues compared test scores from fall 2019, 2020 and 2021 and found that math test scores declined in fall 2020 and declined even more in 2021. With reading, scores held steady and even improved in 2020 before dropping in 2021.
“To put some of these things in context,” Soland said, “some of the declines in achievement we’ve seen, if you compare them to something like study results from kids who are affected by Hurricane Katrina, some of these declines are similar in magnitude.”
The declines in achievement aren’t an indictment of teachers, Soland said, but rather reveal how the pandemic made a tough job even more challenging, particularly because of how it exacerbated staffing shortages.
The pandemic also exacerbated inequality within the education system, Soland said, with kids from schools in lower-income communities falling behind their peers in higher-income communities, particularly for younger students and in math.
Glassbrook has the lowest academic achievement scores in southern Alameda County, but also has one of the highest concentrations of socioeconomically disadvantaged students at 79.5% of the student population.
Yet the roughly 15-point drops it saw in academic achievement mirror similar declines at schools across the region, regardless of socioeconomic disadvantage. Of the 58 elementary schools in southern Alameda County, seven experienced math score drops exceeding 10 points, while 17 had English language arts score declines surpassing 10 points.
The largest academic decline in the region was at Joseph Azevada Elementary School in Fremont, where just under 30% of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Joseph Azevada saw a 34.7 point drop in English language arts achievement and a 32.8 drop in math achievement, though the school remained 39 and 36.6 points above the English and math standards, respectively.
Of the Hayward, Fremont, New Haven and Newark unified school districts, Hayward has the highest concentration of socioeconomically disadvantaged students, an average of 74% of students at its elementary schools, while Fremont has the lowest, an average of 23%.
Fremont’s elementary schools have the highest overall academic achievement scores, many that are well above standard.
“So inequalities,” Soland said, “inequities in the U.S. educational system have certainly gotten worse by all accounts.”
School board censures Ramos
On Feb. 14, the board voted 4-1 to censure Ramos for his comments to the administrator, with Ramos opposed. Two weeks later, the board implemented permanent sanctions against him, including restricting Ramos from being on school campuses.
The decision to permanently sanction Ramos came after an investigation by law firm Oppenheimer Investigations Group found significant evidence Ramos created a hostile work environment beyond the remark at the January meeting. It found Ramos on several occasions made remarks that were intended to humiliate, intimidate or offend students and staff, particularly if they were women or LGBTQ+.
Some of the incidents included Ramos accusing LGBTQ+ teachers of being groomers, suggesting they were predatory toward students, and making a habit of commenting on women’s appearances, making them uncomfortable.
Students, staff and parents thanked the board for taking hasty action but requested it do the same when dealing with other problematic individuals in the district.
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 510-952-7455.
