Forum

SCOOP: A Philadelphia elementary school forced fifth-grade students to celebrate "black communism" and simulate a Black Power rally to "free Angela Davis" from prison.

I've obtained exclusive whistleblower documents and photographs from the school. Here's the story. 🧵 

Last year, a fifth-grade teacher at the William D. Kelley School designed a social-studies curriculum to celebrate the political radical Angela Davis, praising the "black communist" for her fight against "inequality" and telling students to "define communist" in favorable terms.

At the end of the unit, the teacher led the ten- and eleven-year-olds into the school auditorium to "simulate" a Black Power rally to "free Angela Davis" from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. The students chanted "Black Power!" and "Free Angela!"

The William D. Kelley School's student population is 94 percent black and 100 percent “economically disadvantaged.” Academically, it is one of the worst-performing schools in the state: by graduation, only 13 percent of Kelley students will have achieved basic literacy.

Despite this abysmal academic performance, administrators have gradually abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of political radicalism. They recently commissioned murals of Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton, who represent the Communist and Black Panther revolutionary movements.

In recent years, the entire Philadelphia public school system has embraced the philosophy of “antiracism.” Last summer, the superintendent released an Antiracism Declaration promising to “[dismantle] systems of racial inequity” and implemented racially-segregated programs.

The local teachers’ union produced a video denouncing the United States as a “settler colony built on white supremacy and capitalism,” which has created a “system that lifts up white people over everyone else.”

The teachers' union openly demands that the United States overthrow the “racist structure of capitalism,” provide “reparations for Black and Indigenous people,” and “uproot white supremacy and plant the seeds for a new world.”

The gap between rhetoric and reality is almost beyond comprehension: the ten-year-olds marching for “black communism” can barely read and write. Rather than come to terms with this failure, educators have shifted the blame to “systemic racism” and promises of “revolution.” 

This should be a crime. The School District of Philadelphia has 18,000 employees and a $3.4 billion annual budget—and fails, year after year, to teach basic literacy. Educators promise to "plant the seeds for a new world," but condemn their students to illiteracy and failure.