Woke radicals administrating our nation's schools want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to indoctrinating their students into the deceptive, destructive ideology known as critical race theory. Leftists routinely deny this, from the White House on down, insisting that conservatives are making it all up to score political points. Yet occasionally the truth leaks out. Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which insisted "Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools," invited the Director of UCLA's Center for Critical Race Studies in Education to give a presentation as they discuss curriculum for a class on Ethnic Studies. Or, as Superintendent Nikolai Vitti of the Detroit Public School Community District said last month:
"Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you'll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines we made. We were very intentional about creating a curriculum, infusing materials and embedding critical race theory within our curriculum, as was stated by many speakers."
The Left is asserting that CRT is simultaneously taught, and not taught. It's just like Schrodinger's cat, or should I say, Schrodinger's CRT. Quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger created a thought experiment about a cat that was simultaneously alive and dead to illustrate a problem in quantum mechanics. The obvious absurdity is those are mutually exclusive possibilities. Teachers pushing CRT have really pushed themselves into a logical contradiction. But it's not likely that they care, as woke academics have already decided logic is racist.
Nor do they care what parents think, and they are paying the price. Certainly it's not being taught with a neon light says, "critical race theory," but it's been infused into every aspect. And parents know it's there. The silver lining of the COVID lockdowns was making parents wise to filth taught in schools. It's encouraging to see that parents are stepping up, taking on the issue of public education. This was a critical issue in the 2021 Virginia elections and other races around America. Many parents ran for and won local school board races to offer a dissenting voice to push back against this Leftist indoctrination.
"The way you go about getting rid of critical race theory in the school system," said FRC's Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon, is by reforming teacher training programs. Those programs must "start focusing on content, on subject matter, and on pedagogy -- and not on theories like critical race theory and Queer Theory." Particularly in Democratic-run urban centers like Detroit, "most students are performing under the national average on national and standardized tests," Kilgannon noted. "I don't think critical race theory is going to help them do better." The woke Left calls standardized testing racist, too.
Combatting the influence of CRT in public school classrooms will remain an ongoing fight. The Biden administration's department of education just extended by $1.5 million a 2016 program to offer CRT training in historically black colleges and universities (instead of using it in a way that would actually help HBCUs). Of course, after conservative pushback, the grant omitted the term "critical race theory," but university websites still promote it as if it teaches CRT.
CRT is only the tip of the iceberg of the harmful materials children are exposed to at school. Parents have reported over 80 pornographic books in school libraries, which some districts refuse to remove. Parents have sued a Wisconsin school district for a pronoun policy undermining their authority. School officials are usurping parental authority while harming children. We must stop them.
