A California elementary school is paying $250,000 to an organisation called Woke Kindergarten for a program to train teachers which includes asking students if the US military should be defunded to rebuild Palestine.

The San Francisco Chronicle revealed that Glassbrook Elementary is paying the group through a federal programme aimed at helping low-performing schools boost achievement. However, two years into the contract, student achievement has fallen further.

Some Glassbrook teachers told the San Francisco Chronicle that Woke Kindergarten is rooted in progressive politics and activism with anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Israel messages

The Woke Kindergarten curriculum asks teachers to pose questions for students such as: “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”

Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school.

He said he was temporarily banned from training sessions after asking for clarification about what disrupting whiteness means.

“What does that mean?” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I just want to know, what does that mean for a third-grade classroom?”

Woke Kindergarten also teaches the kids a 'woke word of the day' such as 'ceasefire' in order to educate them with 'language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.'