A Manhattan math teacher has been “relieved of his teaching duties” after speaking out against what he’s rightly characterized as the critical race theory “indoctrination” students at the private school are being subjected to.
Paul Rossi had been engaged in a rather public dispute with Grace Church High School over his criticism of the decidedly progressive “anti-racism” pedagogy that has recently gained such prominence on the national stage — and appears to be deeply embedded in the academic culture of the elite private school.
Last week, Rossi penned a lengthy rebuke of the ideology being pushed at the school for center-right ex-New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’ Substack newsletter, “Common Sense,” in which he defended the title declaration “I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated.”
The piece was inspired by a fateful “self-care” whites-only Zoom meeting for faculty and students (such segregated meetings, Rossi noted, have become “commonplace” at the institution) in which he had pushed back against the idea that things like “objectivity” and “individualism” were “characteristics of white supremacy.”
Rossi explained in his piece that while he had felt obligated to provide the students with a different perspective than what, by his account, they were being forced to affirm by the school even to the point of signing a “Student Life Agreement” that stated that “the world as we understand it can be hard and extremely biased,” and committing to “recognize and acknowledge their biases when we come to school, and interrupt those biases,” else they would be “held accountable should they fall short of the agreement.”
“I wanted to be a voice for the many students of different backgrounds who have approached me over the course of the past several years to express their frustration with indoctrination at our school, but are afraid to speak up,” Rossi wrote.
“It seemed like my questions broke the ice. Students and even a few teachers offered a broad range of questions and observations. Many students said it was a more productive and substantive discussion than they expected,” he explained of the Zoom meeting.
