Long Beach Unified pays kids $1,400 to be leftist agitators

Enhancing students' skills in reading and math — or training students in progressive activism?

Long Beach Unified School District seems to favor the latter, paying high school students $1,400 each in taxpayer money to become left-wing social justice warriors. And we wouldn't even know about it if not for an investigative report from The Free Press highlighting the urgent need for transparency in public schools so that parents can find out what's happening to their children.

According to The Free Press, the district paid students to join a club run by Californians for Justice, a nonprofit that claims to be a “youth-powered organization fighting for racial justice.”

These stipends for students engaging in activism were just one of the many payments that the district made to the progressive special interest group. Between 2019 and 2023, the district paid Californians for Justice nearly $2 million for various programs, including training sessions for teachers and students. According to the Free Press report, these sessions involved Californians for Justice-trained students lecturing their teachers on such topics as “implicit bias,” “student voice” and “antiblack racism.”

One teacher in the district said the students in these trainings were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don't know how to say ... it just feels like indoctrination and not information.” Another teacher observed, “They're teaching them parroting, which is the exact opposite of how you empower children.”

The district shelled out heaps of taxpayer money to Californians for Justice despite persistent shortcomings in student academic performance. In the 2022-23 school year, less than half of the students in the district met the California state standard in assessments for English. Only one-third of