What actual (positive?) outcomes do you expect from giving K-5 reading-challenged black kids a 60-year-old depiction of an ugly challenging time in race relations? What are the teachers' instructions on how to answer questions and deal with trauma & feelings of being socially outcast?

“Our teachers are reporting to us that our students are reading like they’ve never read before,” Allen stated during the education committee meeting in May. “I’ve received a flood of emails recently that said, ‘Don’t do anything with the curriculum. My kid’s loving it.'”

Will "my kid's loving it" encourage those students to read Steinbeck and Camus and Kazantzakis and Kobo Abe and Amos Tutuola and Doris Lessing and Garcia-Marquez and Pearl S. Buck and Virginia Woolf, even Alan Paton? Or might it foster resentment and stratification and alienation in the classroom? Will there be any perspective of the positive shift that occurred in the last 60 years, with black education now wholly open but sadly often not up to par with the goals & aspirations of the community, with a goal of completing that unresolved arc? Will students of this curriculum become gentrified & ghettoized in the "we of the hopeless South" community, or will it allow them to go global, including both world race developments (US racial evolution, the steadily more heterogenous UK, the move of African nations from colonies + once economic disaster zones like Uganda to modern economies and inspirational cultures, the huge efforts most nations have made the last 60 years towards more tolerance and acceptance of other races...)? What is the emotional and psychological maturity of 7- or 8-year-olds to put these event in larger perspective so they don't feel still attacked and marginalized in the ways accepted in 1960 that were no longer even accepted in 1970, 50 years ago?