A civil rights leader and Virginia parent activists condemned Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe for emphasizing the race of teachers in Virginia’s public school system and lamenting that more teachers are white while roughly half of Virginia public school students are not.
“It is explicitly and implicitly a racist approach to education,” Bob Woodson, a civil rights veteran and president of The Woodson Center, told Fox News on Monday.
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“We got to work hard to diversify our teacher base,” McAuliffe had said at a campaign event in Manassas Sunday. “Fifty percent of our students are students of color; 80% of the teachers are white, so what I’m going to do for you — we’ll be the first state in America. If you go teach in Virginia for five years in a high-demand area — that could be geographic, it could be course work — we will pay room, board, tuition, any college, any university or any HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities] here in Virginia.”
Woodson condemned this idea as insulting and racist.
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“The assumption is that in order to recruit more Black teachers that you’ve got to subsidize candidates in order for them to teach, they’re not offering this to white candidates,” the civil rights veteran said, adding that this assumes that Black students “need subsidies to teach.”
“It’s really insulting, too,” he said. “Why is he talking about providing special assistance to teachers, candidates, and then talking about HBCUs? That’s more than a [racist] dog whistle — that’s a dog megaphone.”
Bob Woodson is the founder and president of The Woodson Center.
McAuliffe has claimed that critical race theory — a framework that involves deconstructing aspects of society to discover systemic racism beneath the surface — is not being taught in public…
Source : foxnews
