Children are the biggest casualty of California’s culture war

Amid rising poverty, rampant crime and an out-of-control homelessness crisis, California lawmakers have turned their attention to… banning homework. Governor Gavin Newsom is set to sign off the Healthy Homework Act, which would prohibit schools from assigning ‘excessive’ homework to pupils. In some cases, all homework will be banned.

The new law will require all Californian public schools to implement an official ‘homework policy’, taking into account the ‘stress’ that homework places on parents and pupils. It also allows for no homework to be set at all in some cases, on the grounds that it might unfairly disadvantage children who have less parental support or access to technology.

And so a ban on homework joins the long list of things that marks Californian schools out from the rest of the civilised world. As of 2023, discipline has also been effectively outlawed. Teachers are banned from suspending pupils who ‘defy’ teachers’ orders, on the grounds that such punishments disproportionately impact black and Hispanic children.

Unsurprisingly, most of California’s worst school policies are driven by woke identity politics. California recently became the first US state to prohibit schools from requiring teachers to notify parents if their child begins identifying as trans. The state also requires all public schools to provide gender-neutral bathrooms and to teach LGBT history as part of the curriculum – even going as far as to threaten one school district with a $1.5million fine when it refused to.

Gender ideology isn’t the only agenda being imposed on Californian classrooms. Last year, Newsom signed into law a bill requiring schools to teach about the causes and effects of climate change. Presumably, when it comes into force this academic year, such instruction will not involve a healthy debate over what is still a hotly debated scientific and political issue. Rather, if past experience is anything to go by, it will feature brazen green propaganda about a supposedly impending environmental collapse.

Also being added to the curriculum this year are classes on ‘media literacy’. Across all grade levels, kids will be taught how to spot ‘fake news’ and AI-generated images. Needless to say, this will be more about indoctrination than education. One set of resources suggested by the state comes from an organisation called Learning For Justice, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Centre. This readymade curriculum involves a series of lessons on ‘online activism’ and how to spot and report ‘hate speech’.

There’s still more to come, too. From next year, children as young as five will be subjected to Black Lives Matter-inspired ‘ethnic studies’ classes. Here, they’ll be taught about the ‘process and impact of the marginalisation resulting from systems of power’. Teachers will be expected to instruct kids on ‘how to gain political power through activism, organisation and mobilisation’. Clearly, teachers have been tasked with creating the next generation of identitarian scolds.

With so much school time given over to activism, and such rock-bottom expectations placed on pupils, it probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that educational standards have plummeted in recent years. As it stands, only 53 per cent of children were able to meet their grade-level English targets in state-wide, standardised testing in the 2022-23 school year. Among Hispanic pupils, that figure was 36 per cent and among black pupils, just 30 per cent. Overall, California has the second-highest rate of illiteracy in the US, with a shocking 28 per cent of over-15s struggling to read and write.

The picture is no better when it comes to maths. Californian public schools perform well below the national average, with just 34 per cent of kids achieving state standards. As is the case with literacy, black and Hispanic pupils performed particularly poorly. Just 19 per cent of black and 24 per cent of Hispanic pupils had maths skills in line with their grade level. Clearly, all those endless hours of woke indoctrination have done nothing for the very children it purports to be helping.

These truly dismal figures can partly be attributed to the state’s response to Covid-19. California had some of the strictest lockdown policies in the US throughout the pandemic, with schools moving online for the best part of two years. As a result, kids suffered huge learning losses. Around six million pupils were impacted by 10,000 public-school closures. And up to one million of those had little to no digital access, meaning they received practically no education for a year and a half. No wonder a group of parents has successfully managed to sue the state for a whopping $2 billion, to be spent on trying to recover some of that lost learning.

The damage done to education by the lockdowns is now being compounded by woke ideology. What hope do California’s kids have of catching up, when their teachers are obliged to conduct lesson after lesson on critical race theory, praying to Mother Earth and spotting AI-generated Donald Trump memes? Now, they won’t even be getting homework to help them learn outside of school hours.

Tragically, California’s schools have become yet another victim of the woke culture war. The most-disadvantaged children are by far its biggest casualty.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.