2 months ago

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TOO WHITE TO BE A TEACHER

TEACHER HAD TO TAKE A TEST
RATING THEIR LEVEL OF WHITENESS

How Red Tape and Politics Drove
One Teacher Out of the Classroom

The first ten years Mangiapane spent as a teacher in the Plymouth Canton Community School District, she told IW Features, was a really exciting time.

But around 2008, she noticed that things were starting to change.

In 2008, Mangiapane said that Plymouth Canton asked her to participate in a new credit recovery program called Education 2020.

“OUTLANDISH”

Hundreds of kids would sit in the gymnasium and use their phones to take a prescriptive test meant to determine what subject matter they needed help with.

But these students didn’t even have a pencil or paper to do their math with.

When Mangiapane complained to the administration, she said she got in trouble.

This was only one of the first nails in the proverbial coffin.

Mangiapane also served as a credit recovery instructor after school, and at one point had a student who needed 10 credit recovery classes to graduate on time.

The student, under the assistant principal’s supervision, allegedly cheated using Google to complete all her homework assignments and even take tests, so she finished her course in seven hours and earned an A.

Then came the rise of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or DEI.

Mangiapane said that school suddenly

“became very divisive.”

She recalled one incident when the school was hiring a math teacher and allegedly hired one who did not know how to find the slope of a line, solely because she was a black woman.

At one point, Mangiapane was called into an all-staff meeting to take a test rating her

“level of whiteness,”

and then was asked to stand in a circle in order of privilege.
Reluctantly, Mangiapane said she took her number and stood in the circle.

She said she felt perceived as a less effective teacher because of her whiteness and due to her number of referrals and tardies.

“I was told to decrease the number of detentions that were issued for a certain
race that showed up late, because culturally it’s acceptable for them, and that just boggled my brain,”

“So I should not teach them what professionalism is––showing up on time?”

Mangiapane felt sickened by the excuses, since she said she had always tried to teach teenagers how to be communicative, successful American citizens. But patriotism had also started falling by the wayside.

Mangiapane sent her eldest son to Plymouth High School, and within the first two weeks of his freshman year, she said he came back to her discontented.

“Three of his six classes had huge gay pride flags and BLM flags, and there’s many classrooms that didn’t have the American flag even shown,”
she said.

Her son told her he felt discouraged from talking about potentially triggering issues in his debate class.
As a young history buff deep in late-night studying, he would wake his mom up to show her his AP World History textbook, telling her, “Mom, mom, they’re changing history.”