Politics often present voters with poor choices among candidates for office. That is the case for Orange Unified School District voters when it comes to their choice in Area 7 between appointed Trustee Stephen Glass and former OUSD Trustee Steve Rocco.
This probably doesn’t strike most as a tough choice. Glass is an experienced school administrator and currently a faculty member of Cal State Long Beach’s Educational Leadership Department. Rocco looks and acts like is a conspiratorial loon. His chaotic four-year tenure on the OUSD Board from 2004 to 2008 was characterized by conspiratorial rants about “The Partnership” and culminating in his September 2008 arrest for stealing a bottle of ketchup from the Chapman University cafeteria (yes, in this era of mass retail theft, it is difficult to imagine someone being prosecuted for purloining ketchup).
Regarding Glass, there is more than meets the eye. Elected officials’ actions and votes are guided by their political worldviews. And this matters in school board races, which have become ground zero in the struggle between parents who rightly believe they should be in charge of their children, and an educational establishment focused on preserving its power and increasingly dominated by ideologues who seem to believe child-raring is too important to be left to parents.
Many of Glass’s posts on Facebook reveal an educator who views the world through the prism of racial identity politics and place him well outside the mainstream of public opinion.
Supports Racial Preferences In Hiring
In this April 22, 2021 post, Glass explicitly endorses using racial preferences in teacher hiring – in this case, giving preference to hiring Blacks for teaching posts so that teachers “look” more like their students.
Here is the petition in question:
For many years, public opinion polling has demonstrated large majorities of Americans consistently opposed to the use of racial preferences in hiring.
Endorses The Pseudo-Science of Implicit Bias Training
According to a February 4, 2020 post on Facebook, Glass is a believer in “implicit bias training” – a pervasive tool in DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) training programs. It’s support tout its ability to ferret out unconscious racial biases, primarily in white people (naturally), and predict which employees are likely to engage in unconscious racial discrimination.
The problem is the tool upon which implicit bias training relies is unreliable. It fails to meet the basic standard to qualify as an acceptable psychological assessment tool. Even Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, creators of the implicit association test that implicit bias training relies upon, admit it does not predict biased behavior in a laboratory setting, let alone in the real world.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has noted, “The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT make it “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” according to a article co-written by Greenwald, Banajii and a third author in 2015.
Yet the article about which Glass is so enthusiastic that he “cannot wait to share this information with staff” doubles down on implicit bias training, advocating its continued use in combination with other “anti-bias” tools like racial preferences in hiring and more thorough indoctrination in order to address hidden racism lurking in the minds of employees.
Even Scientific American – hardly a bastion of right-wing thought – acknowledges “We just don’t have the evidence yet that implicit bias training actually works.”
As an OUSD trustee, Glass is in a position to act upon this belief in implicit bias training. Will OUSD staff be subjected to this thinly-veiled thought-policing? Will there be adverse outcomes for OUSD employees who refuse to subject themselves to this pseudo-scientific examination of their mental landscape?
Praises Pro-Soviet, Pro-Castro Communist Angela Davis
In this February 17, 2021 post, Glass salutes “the strength and sacrifice” of Angela Davis, a tenured UC professor, unrepentant Communist and apologist for violent totalitarian regimes such as Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the old Soviet Union – the latter of which gave her one of its highest accolades, the Lenin Peace Prize, prompting Davis to praise the “glorious name” of the monstrous Vladimir Lenin and the “great October Revolution” of 1917 that led to decades of oppression and the death of tens of millions of people.
In 1972, Davis traveled to another of her favorite Communist regimes, East Germany, to honor Communist border guards, whose job it was to prevent their fellow citizens from escaping to freedom in the West – with lethal force, if necessary. Davis praised this form of political violence as necessary “for the protection of their socialist homeland.”
Does Glass really believe Davis – a Communist and a shining example of what Lenin called a “useful idiot” – to be a person of “strength” whom we should celebrate”? Keep in mind that as a trustee, he has a say in the curriculum being taught to OUSD students.
Glass himself states on his campaign website that his Number One priority as an OUSD Trustee is “Equity and Inclusion in Education.” We are far enough long in education culture wars to understand that this is progressive-speak for ideological, “narrative”-based education and race-conscious policies.
Drinks Deeply of the George Floyd Anti-Police Movement
Judging from his social media, Glass has thoroughly imbibed the spirit of hostility to law enforcement at the core of the Georg Floyd zeitgeist. On May 29, 2020, he shared this cartoon that was making the rounds of social media in 2020 – the clear implication being that encounters with law enforcement are a leading cause of death for Black people, which is a wildly inaccurate and destructive belief.
In another post, Glass shared this list of Black people who had been killed
The implication is these individuals all met an unjust end at the hands of police. Some clearly did, such as George Floyd. In other cases, the circumstances are murkier. In still others, the manner in which the individuals died had nothing to do with contact with law enforcement. Left unremarked is the vastly greater number of individuals – disproportionately people of color – who were (and still are) killed by violent criminals. Don’t they also deserve our consideration when casting our ballots?
Supports Shunning Of Pro-Trump Americans
In a July 7, 2020 post, Glass posted this advice on how to interact with fellow Americans who support Donald Trump and his policies. It’s a classic exercise in what progressives like Glass would call “othering” when applied to anyone else – stereotyping Trump voters as “angry” and “fearful” supporters of “dark policies.”
Glass apparently thinks the views of fellow citizens who voted for Trump should be ignored since engaging them in a discussion “doesn’t work” – and that Black conservatives like Candace Owens are a “distraction” whose views should also be ignored.
Considering that nearly half of OUSD voters – Glass’s constituents – voted twice to Trump for president, it’s problematic for an OUSD trustee to be so dismissive and hostile to them. Perhaps Glass has re-considered regarding his fellow citizens who happen to support President Trump as barbarians to be silenced and ignored.
Not very “inclusive.”
Supports Radical “Anti-Racist” Group Center for Racial Justice in Education
In a January 25, 2021 post, Glass recommended the Center for Racial Justice in Education as a good resource for Black History Month educational materials.
The link takes one to a cornucopia of literature suffused with (Marxist) Critical Theory ideology and its offshoots like the Black Lives Matter movement, pushing as normative, radical ideas such as slavery reparations, defunding the police, that the U.S. Constitution is pro-slavery – indeed, that the nation was built on slavery – and even a guide on talking to young children about “police brutality” and “guiding principles” of the “Black Lives Matter movement.”
Students should learn the history of their country – warts and all. That is what real history is. The resources Glass is recommending are ideological indoctrination masquerading as “real” history, designed to bias young minds against the foundational principles of this Republic.
It’s alarming that an educator would recommend the Center for Racial Justice in Education as a resource. The controversial CRJE is a highly political organization whose mission is to re-organize public education around the radical “anti-racist” ideology to which it adheres. It contracts with school districts to come in an indoctrinate teachers, staff, students and even parents into finding their identity in externals like the color of their skin and membership in racial and ethnic groups.
Elected officials are guided by their ideologies and world views when making decisions at the dais, and in the policies thy advocate to district leadership. Which brings us back to the unenviable position in which OUSD voters find themselves: to choose between a known kook and a career education bureaucrat with a radical progressive ideology that it out of step with most voters. It’s unfortunate OUSD voters have not been given a better choice in Trustee Area 7.
