Does Pursuing ‘Racial Equity’ Help Minority Students? Check Out this Shocking Story from Seattle

Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak, writing over at The Daily Wire, has posted a horrifying exposé of ethnic studies education – and the former director of the program – in Seattle Public Schools (SPS), titled: “Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester.”

Rosiak documents how the former director of ethnic studies at SPS, Tracy Castro-Gill, misrepresented herself and analyzes how her “racialized version of education,” including “math ethnic studies,” failed students – especially minorities – in Seattle schools. The district is responsible for educating 54,000 children.

The story comes from his forthcoming book, Race To The Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Education.

According to Rosiak, Tracy Castro-Gill, the former director of ethnic studies at SPS, “represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.”

But Castro-Gill’s family denied that portrayal. Her father, Rick Castro, said, “Everything since [Tracy] moved to Seattle has been one big lie. It hurts to be the subject of a complete fabrication … She never said a word about any of this racial stuff back then.”

He said she did not grow up in poverty, but that he and her stay-at-home mom provided a “conventional, stable, middle-class upbringing.” He added that only one of her four grandparents was Hispanic – a grandfather born in Long Beach – and that “she’s basically white” and can’t speak Spanish. Castro compared her to “Rachel Dolezal, that lady a few years ago who pretended to be black.”

Rosiak writes that Castro-Gill “married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him.” Her ex-husband said that “she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.”

Castro-Gill, who uses the plural pronouns “they/them,” earned a master’s degree in education and became a substitute teacher in 2013. She eventually rose to a position as ethnic studies program manager in SPS, with the district “paying her $93,000 a year to convey to children the pervasiveness of racism.”

Rosiak writes, “Under her leadership, the Seattle school system – located in an area with two of America’s largest high-tech companies, Amazon and Microsoft – decided to partially replace the math curriculum of every grade with “math ethnic studies.”

Even the Marxist World Socialist Web Site thinks “ethnomathematics” curriculum is a bad idea, saying, “it is not math that oppresses, but capitalism” and “that it is economic class, not race, which constitutes the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed.”

Math ethnic studies was piloted in six schools, “to decrease the achievement gap” between minority students and white students. But at John Muir Elementary the program failed, as the black passing rate dropped “from 28% to under 18% the next school year.”

We’ve previously written about John Muir Elementary at The Daily Citizen, explaining the school pushed radical ideology: Teachers encouraged children to be “queer affirming” and “trans affirming.”

Children were also taught about “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”; diversity, collectivism and globalism; finding freedom from “patriarchal practices”; and “centering black women and femmes.”

“At another pilot school,” Rosiak writes, “69% white and with only seven black students, the white students’ pass rates also plunged, from 60% to 36%.”

Despite those failures, SPS said it would “help integrate ethnic studies into all curriculum, content areas, and grade levels.” Castro-Gill said that she never intended to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority students, believing they “are a good thing, because they ensure that we focus on race.” She called the focus on achievement gaps “a Western way of thinking about education.”

Over time, Castro-Gill grew more aggressive in her push of ethnic studies, claiming victim status and bullying and shaming colleagues, who then filed complaints. Eventually, she ran afoul of “high-level executives” within SPS, when she signed their names to a letter where “they had not approved the language.”

The superintendent placed her on paid leave and finally wrote, “I conclude that it is in the best interest of the District that you get placed back into . . . a teaching position.”

That’s right. Castro-Gill doesn’t really care about helping minority students learn math, and she bullies and shames her colleagues, so put her back in the classroom.

Castro-Gill was forced to leave her position at SPS because of her misconduct. So now, naturally, she is offering professional development training in ethnic studies and “anti-racist education” for teachers and other school districts – with prices ranging up to $70,000.