NEA Touts Radical Multiculturalism In Its New Guide For Teachers

Issue Brief

A new teachers’ guide from the National Education Association (NEA) makes crystal-clear the giant union’s advocacy of an ideology of multiculturalism in the nation’s schools.

The guide purports to present a “multi-themed approach” to closing achievement gaps in education by focusing on “Culture, Abilities, Resilience, and Effort (CARE).” But within that strained construction of an acronym, the multiculturalist agenda clearly rules.

For instance, the 2.7-million-member teacher union urges teachers to give great weight to the “power relationships” among racial/ethnic groups in society. Citing an assortment of multicultural theorists, the guide says teachers should think about children more as members of groups than as individuals.

“Voluntary minorities,” it states, “are those who freely immigrate to the U.S., such as Asian Americans. Involuntary minorities are those who have been conquered, colonized, or subjugated by the U.S., such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and American Indian/Alaska Natives.”

The NEA asserts that there is a “clear parallel” between being a member of an involuntary minority and failing in school. “For involuntary minorities, participation in public institutions (like schools) that value the culture of the dominant group may result in further loss of culture, language, and power. Thus, in the case of involuntary minorities, it is of utmost importance to create a climate that values students’ cultures and that follows culturally responsive pedagogy.”

The NEA thereby is aligning itself with a radical brand of multiculturalism that in concert with bilingual education is encouraging cultural separatism rather than the “diversity” that advocates claim to be celebrating. A century ago, public education served the vital purpose of blending waves of immigrant children into a united nation with a common language and shared values. Today the NEA is among the powerful forces in education mocking the ideal of an American melting pot.

Because 90 percent of the public-school teaching force is white (a reality the guide’s authors lament), the NEA seeks to condition all teachers to value the cultures of the involuntary minorities and to “share power” with them.

As an example, the guide approvingly presents a letter from Kai James, an African-American who had just started in high school. James advocates changing the classroom dynamic so that students are teachers’ equals.

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“By this I mean that students’ opinions should be taken serious {sic} and be valued as much as those of teachers, and that together with the teachers we can shape the way we learn and what we learn. . . .”

Among other things, this student advocates that students have the right to assemble without teachers being present and that teachers “allow us to practice our culture without being ridiculed.”

It’s not clear whether members of the “dominant group” or “voluntary minorities” would also be permitted to practice their cultures – or even what that would entail exactly. But plainly the NEA favors a pedagogy of cultural responsiveness to the so-called involuntary minorities.

Would students really learn more if they were indulged in thinking about themselves as victims instead of being exhorted to work harder? The NEA’s guide provides no evidence of that. But this is far more than just an isolated exercise in pop sociology by some ivory tower types. The guide is wholly consistently with the NEA’s larger agenda in education.

In recent years, the NEA has had a close partnership with the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), an organization that promotes the idea of students being divided into oppressor versus oppressed groups based on skin color and national origin. Workshops at annual NAME conventions have attacked so-called “white privilege” as the source of most problems afflicting public schools, and have argued that the very idea of an inclusive American culture rooted in Western values perpetuates a legacy of European oppression and exploitation of supposedly purer cultures.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America that killed almost 3,000 persons, NAME members laid no blame on the perpetuators but instead adopted a resolution rededicating themselves “to restructuring education to reflect the authentic histories, cultures, and conditions of the global community.” Meanwhile, the NEA produced September 11 lesson plans for teachers that urged classroom discussion of Americans’ intolerant attitudes while avoiding any suggestion that any particular group bore blame for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.