Two months after the admittedly bleary-eyed Novato Unified School District voted down an Anti-Defamation League-authored tolerance program in a pre-dawn vote, the panel approved it in a tally undertaken at a more reasonable hour.
The board voted 4-1 Tuesday to approve the ADL’s “A World of Difference” program, which is utilized in thousands of schools nationwide to promote diversity and tolerance. The program was turned back, 5-2, in August as the board gave the nod to five other diversity-based curricula.
“Clearly there was confusion at 1:30 in the morning [about] whether it was getting tabled, whether it was getting voted down, whether the staff recommended voting for it or against it,” recalled school board President Ross Millerick of the August vote. Millerick said he voted against adopting “A World of Difference” at the first meeting, but put the item back on the board’s agenda after reviewing the material more closely.
While members of the school board hadn’t read the lengthy “A World of Difference” materials back in August, Bob Koch, a Novato physician, had. And he didn’t like it, characterizing it to the board as a leftist, anti-white male and anti-Christian exercise in victimology.
“It finds everybody but white, male Christians to be victims, and that gets pretty old after 850 pages,” said Koch, who spoke at the August meeting and met with the school board prior to this month’s vote.
“If you read through it, you’ll think America is the most dreadful place imaginable. I don’t think it’s a good time in our history to be hammering on America as being this awful place.”
Millerick and several other board members have since read the 850-odd pages of material, and don’t see things Koch’s way.
“I don’t think it addresses whites or Christians or males, I think it addresses American history with a critical eye. The Chinese Exclusion Act stated that anyone of Chinese ancestry couldn’t own property, and that was the law of the land,” said Millerick, citing an example of one of America’s less-proud moments, which is covered in “A World of Difference.”
“I don’t think this is too dark. I think it’s a frank discussion. Our children need to hear multiple points of view. If they’re growing up in a democratic society, they need to hear more than one voice and decide for themselves.”
Nina Grotch, the ADL’s regional education coordinator in San Francisco, said complaints coming out of Novato about “A World of Difference” are not the norm.
“The stuff I hear from Novato, that it’s anti-Christian and anti-white, I’ve never heard that. I’ve shared [these complaints] with people all over the country, and they’re all really surprised,” she said.
“Certainly, the people who’ve gone through the program haven’t said that. We have a training program in pretty much every county in the region and something like 300,000 teachers have used our programs.”
Grotch added that one Novato complainant was upset that the program’s treatment of the Holocaust “made the Germans look bad.”
Jonathan Bernstein, the ADL’s regional director, acknowledged that some diversity programs would be worthy of complaints along the line of Koch’s, but he doesn’t feel “A World of Difference” is one of them.
“I think there are diversity education programs out there that do give the others a bad name, essentially white male-bashing. This, clearly, is not,” he said.
“We go overboard to make sure no one is targeted, and everyone feels safe and comfortable in our workshops.”