EXCLUSIVE — Chicago Public Schools teachers are instructing their eighth graders to ignore Western academic tradition, “decolonize learning,” and become political activists, according to the district’s new English curriculum.
Known as Skyline, the brand new, $135 million universal curriculum introduced by CPS in 2021 is rooted in critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. While the bulk of what teachers are using to instruct children is behind password walls and largely inaccessible to parents on the school district website, a teacher inside CPS shared several of the English units with the Washington Examiner that highlighted the left-wing bent of what students there are learning.
“They want to teach [students] to think ‘correctly.’ They want to set them thinking about things like identity as soon as possible and channel their minds on propaganda,” said the longtime CPS teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. “The idea was that we were, for equity’s sake, going to have this curriculum where every student’s got the same thing, and the same thing was heavily infused with a very far left ideology.”
The extensive curriculums follow major themes such as an anti-Western sentiment focused on “decolonization,” far-left activism, and anti-white messaging.
Many of the eighth grade units introduce and build off the idea of pitting “colonial academia” against indigenous and African knowledge traditions, such as oral storytelling, in order to break down common societal sources for knowledge, which often includes rejecting the scientific method and other Western academic knowledge structures, arguing that those are only the common sources because of “colonialism” and ultimately need to be replaced.
One unit, called “Research Through a Decolonized Lens,” assigns far-left novels, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, La Relación, and We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement That Restores the Planet in order to “capture past and current colonial violence, settler aggression, and activism of Indigenous peoples globally” and “teach students about how alternate (non-Westernized) axiologies can guide the solving of societal problems.”
“Through their learning of Indigenous knowledge systems, including collectivism and intergenerationality, students are introduced to the Decolonized Research Methodology, a framework designed to decolonize research and study, prioritizing students’ learning and knowledge over proving or disproving of theory,” the curriculum states. “Students will begin to think critically about the transfer of knowledge as a form of power and control.”
The Chicago district’s eighth grade curriculum is the latest example of public schools embracing the language of progressive activists in the classroom. The problem exploded into view nationally during the pandemic, when many parents encountered for the first time what their children were being taught thanks to remote learning. In the years since, the debate over how to structure lessons about race, history, and sexuality has only grown more heated.
While CPS assistant press secretary Damen Alexander characterized the curriculum as “optional,” he also told the Washington Examiner that “teachers from nearly 90 percent of all District-managed schools have been using Skyline in School Year 2023-24.” In addition, according to education news organization Chalkbeat Chicago, the district has been pressing schools to adopt Skyline or provide evidence that their curriculum meets Skyline standards.
“Teachers report that their students are engaged with texts and lesson activities and that they are exploring scientific phenomena and challenging math concepts at every grade level. We are encouraged by this feedback and look forward to seeing the adoption of Skyline continue to grow,” Alexander said. However, the longtime teacher who spoke with the Washington Examiner disputed those claims, claiming to have not met a single other teacher who likes the curriculum.
“Equity remains a paramount value for CPS,” Alexander said. “The district’s development of Skyline guarantees that any CPS teacher has free access to a high-quality curriculum that reflects the lived experience of Chicago students.”
At CPS, eighth grade students are presented with alternative theories on family structure and dynamics, where “students may be unsettled by learning that counters the narratives they may have learned in the past. This is part of the process of dismantling colonial narratives,” according to the English curriculum shared with the Washington Examiner.
This curriculum was built specifically for CPS and was introduced in a soft launch in 2021, according to the CPS source. By 2023, CPS began requiring it in every classroom, and the source inside the district told the Washington Examiner that there are very few exceptions to using Skyline now. The teacher said as the curriculum proliferated across the district, workers came with trucks to remove all materials that were not Skyline-approved.
The focus of the curriculum comes as learning statistics from Chicago schools show unsettling results.
Both elementary and middle school reading proficiency levels in the district are at 16%, and their math proficiency is 12%. High school students in Chicago drop to 15% for reading proficiency while doing slightly better in math at 14%. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, CPS eighth graders rank below that of students in most major cities while spending $18,000 per pupil.
“To put it bluntly, 14-year-old children in America’s third-largest city are barely able to read, yet instead of remediating this crisis, CPS chose to spend finite tax dollars to buy new curriculum using politically charged graphic novels,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner. “Students deserve to be inspired by great literature, encouraged to pursue greatness, not to patronizingly cater to the lowest common denominator using childish cartoons.”
Many of the colonialism narratives presented to students in these sections of the eighth grade English unit are sourced from Black Panther graphic novels and movies, which build from developing the colonization premise to pushing an activist mentality rooted in rejecting common Western bases for problem-solving. “The teacher facilitates the gradual introduction of nonfiction supplemental texts that reveal to the reader that [Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet author Ta-Nehisi] Coates’ fictional collective consciousness is, in reality, a beautiful adaptation of West African griot oral tradition around resistance, perseverance, and abolitionism,” the curriculum states.
“Colonized academia frames research as a way to answer predetermined questions, using sources that have been deemed credible by the academy, often leading to a predicted conclusion,” the curriculum adds. “In contrast, decolonized research methodology is the process of engaging with sources of
knowledge and critically evaluating them, which leads to the generation of questions and the development of authentic truths for each student.”
After being told to think using the decolonized methodology, the next unit introduces students to that framework as used in “contemporary youth advocacy” with the goal of “transferring decolonized research and advocacy methodologies to the lives of CPS students.”
Students are introduced to several far-left child activists, including climate activist Greta Thunberg and anti-gun activist Emma González, because “studying youth advocacy provides an emphasis on a key characteristic of decolonized learning: viewing traditionally silenced individuals or groups (in this case, young people) as valid sources of knowledge who have the power to change the world,” the curriculum states.
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“Teaching eighth graders to use a decolonizing lens and mindset to view the world is poisonous and divisive, as well as a harmful rejection of the truth,” Rhyen Staley, a Parents Defending Education researcher and former Illinois public middle school teacher, told the Washington Examiner. “Chicago students deserve better, and parents must demand better of the education establishment.”
CPS did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
The Djalia and Collective Consciousness
Grade 8.2a Unit Plan by web-producers
Griot and Afrofuturism
Grade 8.2c Unit Plan by web-producers
Research Through a Decolonized Lens
Grade 8.3a Unit Plan by web-producers
Decolonization in Contemporary Youth Advocacy
Grade 8.3b Unit Plan by web-producers
