If You Believe Anything the Daily Wire Publishes, You Deserve Nothing But Ridicule; A response to Luke Rosiak’s irresponsible “journalism”

by Dr. Tracy Castro-Gill

Part Two: Rosiak

This is the second installment of a 3-part series that breaks down the bullshit that Luke Rosiak tries to pass off as journalism. Part two directly contradicts his “reporting” of my work as the Ethnic Studies Program Manager in Seattle Public Schools. I think what’s most embarrassing for Rosiak is that most of this information is easy to find with a Google search, making these claims the most fact-checkable, but, from what I can tell, Rosiak did most of his “investigating” on the feeds of Twitter trolls.

---

Claim #1: ” . . . [Tracy] was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct.”

“Pushed out” is actually the term I use to describe my exit from Seattle Public Schools (SPS), but it wasn’t for misconduct. In all the “investigations” conducted on my actions, nothing was ever substantiated except one instance where I was accused of “bullying” an elementary teacher who called the police on a 5^th grade Black student. An SPS investigator found I was “untruthful,” because when asked if I contacted any “agency” about the 911 call, I said, “No,” because, in my mind, an agency is like the IRS or detective agency or something. The “investigator” then asked, “So, you didn’t contact the Seattle Police Department about the call?” My response was, “Oh, yeah. I did do that,” because they had clarified which agency they were asking about, but they used that as an opportunity to “prove” I was dishonest. Similarly, when asked about why I did a public records request for the 911 call, I told them it was because I was interested in what was actually said in the call. They came to a conclusion that I had also lied about that since I shared the recording with other people, and they believed that was my original intent. My original intent was to find out what was actually said, and when it was as bad as I thought, I shared it with people. Really, they were grasping at straws, because they could not find any evidence that I bullied or harassed the teacher who made the 911 call.

In the write up then Superintendent Juneau used to argue for my removal, that singular piece of “evidence” was used as proof that I was a liar. The final investigation of my actions involving an email, which I will address later, was never completed, because Superintendent Juneau decided to recommend my removal before it was ever completed.

Claim #2: “ . . . Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders [went] on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 . . .”

Facts. My colleagues and I took various leaves of absence during this time for mental health because we were being actively targeted by administrators for our antiracist work – the same work that SPS now loves to brag about.

Claim #3: “ . . . she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on ‘power and oppression’.”

This is patently false. There has never been a math course on power and oppression in SPS.

Claim #4: “Under her leadership, the Seattle school system . . . decided to partially replace the math curriculum of every grade with ‘ethnic studies math‘.”

Patently false. It never happened. If it did, I’d be bragging about it, because that would be awesome.

Claim #5: “In spring 2018, the math ethnic studies program was piloted in six schools.”

Patently false. The Math Ethnic Studies Framework wasn’t even written until summer of 2019 and never got past the initial draft phase. I wasn’t hired as the Ethnic Studies Program Manager until August of 2018, as evidenced by this employment timeline created by Superintendent Juneau in her letter recommending I be removed from my position. In the spring of 2018, I was teaching 6^th grade and was named as a regional teacher of the year.

Claim #6: “On the next state math exam, the performance of Black students at those schools plummeted.”

See Claim #5. Even if Ethnic Studies math was piloted in the spring of 2018 as Rosiak claimed, that would have been during testing season, when students are taking state tests, and would have had no impact on testing whatsoever.

Claim #7: “Confronted with these results, Castro-Gill replied that she never had any intention of narrowing the achievement gap.”

First, I was never “confronted” with these mythical Ethnic Studies math test results. Second, this section of the piece relies entirely on tweets from one of my personal Twitter trolls, Steven Welliever. At the time, he regularly tweeted a quote from a blog post I wrote on ontological distance based on the scholarship of Dr. Michael Dominguez. In the post I argued that we should never fully close the ontological distance, as defined by Dominguez, because it provides opportunities for educators to grow their practice. Welliever intentionally cropped and mispresented the quote, which is easily searchable on the web, but interestingly left the language of ontological distance, likely because he has no idea what it means. Trolls usually aren’t that bright, but Rosiak believes investigative journalism means quoting ignorant trolls.

Claim #8: “While she was employed by the school system, Castro-Gill also led an activist group called Washington Ethnic Studies Now . . . A handful of Seattle students associated with this organization created the NAACP Youth Coalition.”

WAESN was founded in 2020 after I had been put on leave by Superintendent Juneau. The NAACP Youth Council was formed in 2017 by Rita Green and Jon Greenberg.

Claim #9: “Even as her power grew, Castro-Gill routinely accused colleagues and superiors of racism.”

100% true, because they were 100% racist. He goes on to say that I “reported the IT guys for racism.” Actually, it was the female chief of communications I accused of racism, but it was because she unilateral chose to shelve a web design made entirely by staff of color while I was on vacation without consulting anyone, not even my supervisor, a Japanese American man.

Claim #10: “In October 2019, Lindsey Berger . . . considered elevating Castro-Gill’s teacher trainings to an even more prominent role. Castro-Gill responded by accusing her of ‘appropriation’.”

There was no “elevating.” There was appropriating. The HR department wanted to fold my work into their department without acknowledging the racism they were actively committing against myself and my colleagues.

Claim #11: “Castro-Gill fired off an email to the principal claiming his school was ‘in violation of the Equity Policy #0030’ due to ‘explicit acts of Whiteness’ . . .”

Yes, I sent an email with those quotes in it. It had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day. It was about the racist treatment of a Black educator who was doing professional development for Ethnic Studies in that school. It was this email that was used as a reason to push me out by Superintendent Juneau. As I said earlier, the “investigation” around that email was incomplete when Juneau made her recommendation to remove me.

Contrary to claims made by Rosiak, he never attempted to contact me to verify any of his intel. He did try to contact me after I published my initial response. I ignored him. Some might call him a lazy journalist. That’s generous. In today’s popular discourse, it only takes one unsubstantiated claim to plant doubt in people’s minds, because people like Rosiak know most consumers are too lazy to check for themselves. I believe he intentionally published false information banking on the fact that consumers of his bullshit are lazy, hence the name of this blog series.