by WorldTribune Staff, August 2, 2023

Mark Zuckerberg convinced educators that Facebook and Big Tech were necessary ingredients to making America’s schoolchildren go woke, according to a new book.

In his new book “School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them”, author Kenny Xu details the role Zuckerberg, Big Tech, and leftist political elites played in getting Critical Race Theory established in schools across the country.

In the book, Xu explains in a July 29 New York Post op-ed, Alexander “Xan” Tanner — a Zuckerberg acolyte, and the husband of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter — co-founded Panorama Education, which bills itself as a software company, but is actually an educational technology company.

Its business model is actually data, specifically data about children.

Tanner and his fellow Yale graduates Aaron Feuer and David Carel, hooked up to create a student-surveying platform focused on the concept of “social-emotional learning,”

Xu writes:

There’s nothing technologically savvy about Tanner’s product, which could have been created on SurveyMonkey. But strangely, Zuckerberg chose Tanner out of many potential investment opportunities and elected to fund him. Tanner ended up raising more than $16 million personally from the tech billionaire and $76 million from others by using Zuckerberg’s name between the years 2017 and 2021, as Forbes reported.

Zuckerberg had a very intense interest in “fixing” public schools, and his $1 billion Startup: Education fund, which he established in 2012, was actively looking to invest in educational do-gooders like Tanner. The fund was made to “[improve] education for the nation’s most underserved children.” Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, believed that they could “solve” education in America by leveraging what he knew best — the power of big business. But the Facebook CEO needed loyal servants for his cause.

Xu notes that, once Tanner took the job, Zuckerberg assigned him his first task:

Zuckerberg asked him to tackle what had previously been an intractable problem: how to persuade America’s public-school boards to give the fund access to private data about their children. After all, the last time Zuckerberg spent big money on education — in a widely publicized takeover of the Newark, NJ, public schools, in 2012 — he watched his $200 million disappear into a black hole of mismanagement and graft.

Xu noted that Tanner discovered the best way to get on the good side of America’s schools was to go woke. Tanner targeted the most progressive school districts in the country and ended up convincing schools that they needed data on “racism” in order to help children with their “social-emotional health.”

Xu writes:

Promising that the districts would gain insights into the state of racism among local fourth graders, Panorama secured the contracts, which ranged in value from the hundreds of thousands to the millions of dollars, by asking questions such as “How clearly do you see your culture and history reflected in your school?” and “How often do you feel that you are treated poorly by other students because of your race, ethnicity, gender, family’s income, religion, disability, or sexual orientation?”

Xu concluded by stating his book “is about the complex interweaving of radical activists, school‑system bureaucrats, and social justice-oriented businesses such as Tanner’s as they form a symbiotic economy propped up by the racism narrative in the United States. The activists get their ideology. The school systems get power over children. The businesses get profit. It’s a neat arrangement for everybody — except the children themselves.”

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  Book: In bid to ‘fix’ public schools, Kenny Xu, Meta, School of Woke, WorldTribune.com, Zuckerberg used woke crusade to reap children’s data