By Daniel Buck & Anthony Kinnett
Saturday, November 06, 2021
The media need a fact check. When asked about
whether or not CRT was taught in schools, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
said simply that “It’s not.” After Glenn Youngkin’s win, Joy Reid spent a
segment asserting that critical race theory is not “actually
taught” in any public school.
We’re both educators. These assertions are patently
false.
In most cases of such assertions, we assume naïveté. In
others, however, schools have outright lied to parents about the issue.
Indianapolis Public Schools advised their
principals to tell parents that CRT is not taught in their schools while
offering professional development for their teachers that explicitly outlines
the tenets of CRT, recommends strategies for incorporating it, and suggests
further reading — including Ibram X. Kendi.
The genesis of CRT in education is arguably Gloria
Ladson-Billings’s seminal essay “Just what is critical race theory and what is it doing in a
nice field like education?” In it, she repudiates the slow progress of the
civil-rights movement and concludes that liberalism is insufficient due to its
lack of sweeping changes. Since its publication, Ladson-Billings has been
ranked as one of the country’s most influential scholars of education.
Critical race theory is but one branch of a larger
approach to instruction called critical pedagogy, which includes CRT,
deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, and other progressive approaches to
teaching. Critical pedagogy forms the basis of many teacher-training programs —
Ladson-Billings and other critical pedagogues, like bell hooks and Paulo
Freire, are canon at these institutions — and these ideas then leak onto K–12
schools.
There are plenty of examples of critical race theory manifesting
itself in public education: fifth graders told to celebrate Communism and brought through a mock
black-power rally, or third graders mapping their racial identity and ranking themselves
according to privilege. Even in Seattle’s math curriculum, concepts such as geometry and algebraic
equations play second fiddle to identity, power, liberation, and activism. The
guiding questions encourage students to consider “How can we use math to
measure the impact of activism?” One common textbook encourages teachers to, if they must
read literature, do so through a Marxist or critical-race lens.
Deniers are correct in one narrow sense: Few if any
students read the scholarly texts of Kimberlé Crenshaw or Richard Delgado in
their classes. But even so, the language, the theory, the application, the
ideas, the instructional practices, the arguments, and the policies of these
scholars permeate almost every sphere of K–12 education. To draw from Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave: CRT is the light that casts the shadows on the wall, even
if those looking at it are unaware of the source.
In many cases, denials come from naïveté. In others, when
administrators or pundits say that schools are not teaching CRT, they are
lying.
To combat the spread of critical pedagogy requires
exposure and pressure. Sending examples of activities or curricular documents
to news outlets to demonstrate yet more of its ubiquity and apply pressure on
school boards or even individual buildings can force their focus back to the
content of education. Electorally, Virginia shows that if conservatives run on
a platform of returning education to its actual purpose — reading, writing, and
arithmetic over activism — they can win even tight elections and implement
sensible policies.
Finally, so long as the universities and bureaucracies
produce the curricular materials and professional development, these ideas will
continue to flourish. Decoupling the university from schools by loosening
teacher licensing and breaking the bureaucratic hold by empowering parents with
choice would allow teachers to get back to basics.
Education has become a winning issue for conservatives.
It’s time to start supporting conservative teachers, holding schools
responsible, and doing the diligent work of providing agency and transparency
for our families and communities.
No comments:
Post a Comment