Opinion by Hal Brown
Parents furious about pro-slavery Civil War assignment at Waxhaw Elementary
Fourth graders at Waxhaw Elementary wrote tweets with hashtags like "slavery for life" prompting parents to pen letters calling for immediate diversity training.
I was curious about this story which has been covered on multiple websites (here).
Here’s the story from Yahoo! News with a photo illustration of Civil War reenactors that offers a pictorial editorial comment in and of itself even though it was taken in Pennsylvania.
I decided to look into the school and these are some excerpts from what I found on this school rating website.
- This school is rated below average in school quality compared to other schools in North Carolina. Students here are making below average year-over-year academic improvement, this school has below average results in how well it’s serving disadvantaged students, and students perform about average on state tests.
- Disadvantaged students at this school may be falling behind other students in the state, and this school may have significant achievement gaps.
Here are the rankings of how Waxhaw compared to other North Carolina schools from another website.
Click to enlarge image
As you can see it isn't the worst elementary school, but it is far from the best. I can’t help but wonder what it is like in the schools on the very bottom of the ranking list.
Perhaps most troubling of all is how the black and other minority group children felt about this assignment.
I can only imagine what they felt when they saw things from anonymous classmates like this posted in the hallway: