(Natural News) If you were preparing students to be productive, skilled citizens who can succeed in the 21st-century workplace, would social justice be elevated to the top of the curriculum? That is, of course, a rhetorical question for Natural News readers, and anyone else with common sense for that matter.

It's been well documented on the Natural News website and by many other news outlets how political correctness has wrecked many college campuses. It is now filtering down to some taxpayer-funded K-12 public school systems.

For example, the upscale Minneapolis suburb of Edina appears to have gone off the rails with an emphasis on identity politics at the expense of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with the indoctrination even starting in kindergarten with something called the Melanin Project.

Five years ago, the Edina school district switched from the traditional mission of striving for academic excellence to one of "racial equity" and "uprooting white privilege," the Weekly Standard reported on what it called Edina's "social justice factory."

District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina's racial achievement gap, which they attributed to "barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings."

Beyond just teachers, the school district requires every employee, including bus drivers, to be re-educated about racial equity through mandatory training in social justice.

For students, a 10th-grade English course that focuses on colonization, immigration, and race, class, and gender rather than literature or writing is said to be the primary means of indoctrination.

PJMedia observed that the sweeping initiative has minimally contributed to classroom achievement.

All of this might not be so bad if things were getting better in Edina academically. However, by almost every metric, black student performance has dropped.