By Stanley Kurtz
Monday, February 02, 2026
James Traub, a frequent contributor to the New York
Times Magazine and author of respected books on topics such as the career
of Hubert Humphrey, has just published The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our
Democracy, a book about our wars over the teaching of American history
and civics. Conservatives, including me, come under heavy criticism from Traub
throughout the book.
Traub’s no fan of President Trump, whose “make America
great again” promise Traub takes as a not-so-subtle pledge to restore an
America “ruled by white men.” Traub distinguishes between the “reflective
patriotism” favored by liberal educators and the supposedly “unthinking,
intolerant” patriotism of the conservative half of the country. Although Traub
blames Trump for legitimizing hostility to “immigrants, the poor, and gay and
trans people,” and for making American history a “battleground” of “the ‘patriotic’
against the ‘woke,’” Traub’s real target is conservatives more broadly.
In addition to swipes at Trump’s supporters, Traub
attacks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as well as Virginia Governor Glenn
Youngkin — who, despite his purple-state constraints, is judged guilty of
trying to join DeSantis in the “red-state anti-woke pantheon.” Traub treats
even Barry Goldwater as “a danger to democracy.”
Yet Traub portrays himself throughout Cradle of
Citizenship as a champion of bipartisanship. That’s because he lavishes
praise on the tiny sprinkling of conservatives who’ve agreed to join the
allegedly bipartisan Educating for American Democracy (EAD) project, a venture
in which, Traub concedes, conservatives are “vastly outnumbered.” EAD has been roundly
criticized by a slew of conservatives.
(I took it on here, here, here, and here.) To Traub, EAD is the way to settle and ultimately
exit our education culture wars. In reality, EAD simply freezes in place the
education world’s current progressive bias.
Traub knows that the education establishment’s default
setting is progressive, that many blue states have adopted left-radical
education standards, and that critical race theory and its cousin, culturally
responsive teaching, are widely promoted in schools of education. Yet while
Traub concedes all this, his claim is that none of it much matters.
That’s because Traub spent parts of 2023 and 2024 sitting
in on K–12 U.S. history and civics classes. In Traub’s telling, teachers are
largely committed to political neutrality. They set their personal politics
aside and often ignore even the most explicit and directive politicized state
standards. Conservatives, he claims, have worked themselves up into an
unnecessary lather by reading the (as he admits) sometimes alarmingly
politicized edicts and laws produced by America’s progressive education establishment.
What conservatives ignore, Traub insists, is the largely apolitical reality of
the classroom. Using his schoolhouse experience to expose the supposed alarmism
of conservatives, Traub hopes to stamp out the culture wars and stampede states
toward the faux bipartisan EAD standards.
Traub, however, labors under some misconceptions. First,
he sees divergent treatments of American history as symptoms of civil decay.
Yet he does little to distinguish dangerous divisiveness from the benign
variation we’d expect to see among states and localities in a well-functioning
federalist system.
A big problem with American history and civics nowadays
is that there’s mostly only a single version available, in public schools at
least. The textbooks out there are 50 shades of progressive. Only recently has
a new traditionalist U.S. history textbook such as Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope appeared. Red states and red school
districts should have the ability to choose standards and curricula built
around texts like that one instead of being force-fed progressive ideology by a
monolithic education establishment. True curricular choice would actually
mitigate resentment against progressive elites. And real competition among
providers would force erstwhile monopolies such as the College Board to
moderate their offerings to protect their consumer base. Projects that aspire
to national application, like EAD, only stymie federalist solutions, especially
since EAD is just another progressive variant.
Second, Traub’s classroom accounts do not show what he
takes them to. Instead, Traub uses a variety of devices to turn away from — or
simply unsee — what’s right before his eyes. Between what Traub admits, omits,
and covers over, his classroom tales actually confirm conservative concerns.
Consider Minneapolis, so much in today’s news. While
Traub’s account of Minneapolis does much to validate conservatives’ warnings of
classroom radicalism, he lavishes attention on examples that supposedly
mitigate that conservative critique. Only they don’t.
The first of the two Minneapolis schools Traub visited
was Washburn High School. Washburn’s principal, Emily Palmer, is a committed
follower of critical race educators like Ibram X. Kendi. Palmer tells Traub
that “the school spent so much time on the issue of racial justice that the
kids had complained that they were feeling exhausted by the subject.” Following
Kendi, Palmer rejects political neutrality in the public schools, saying,
“neutral sides with the oppressor.” Palmer is also determined to eliminate
racial discrepancies in grading “by assigning the same fraction of letter
grades to each racial group.” Teachers at Washburn, Traub affirms, are broadly
committed to Palmer’s vision of racial justice. They ponder “the question of
whiteness,” for example, and insert units into literature classes on topics
like prison abolition.
Yet classroom reality is less extreme than all this
suggests, says Traub. His favorite teacher is a political moderate appalled by
Trump. This teacher doesn’t seek to impose his own moderate views on his many
leftist students, but he does try to get them thinking by having them debate
topics such as, “Che Guevara: Revolutionary Hero or Pedantic Thug?” And Traub
sees several faculty members push back on Palmer’s scheme for grading by racial
quota. One teacher even complains to Traub about the textbook, penned by Kendi,
forced on him by the district. In general, Traub says, Washburn’s faculty is
divided over the optimum way to achieve equity and affirm anti-racism.
Washburn’s faculty may divide over absurd proposals like
grading by racial quota, but even Traub affirms their largely sincere assent to
Principal Palmer’s perspective. And while a teacher or two may grouse about
Kendi’s textbook, that only shows that the district’s far-left curriculum
preferences override dissenting faculty. In general, Washburn is at the mercy
of an education Ph.D. — Principal Palmer — and the district’s textbook choices.
Traub’s protestations notwithstanding, the education establishment rules. And
we know that despite some limited divergence within the faculty, Palmer’s
hard-left, race-focused approach reached the students — so much so that they’re
sick of it.
So far, Traub’s mitigating considerations are
unimpressive. But consider Northeast Middle School, Traub’s other Minneapolis
location. In Traub’s telling, Northeast is a far cry from Washburn. Vernon
Rowe, Northeast’s principal, is no ideologue, says Traub, but an eminently
practical man. True, Traub concedes, Rowe considers Northeast a victim of
institutional racism and has Ethnic Studies taught throughout the school. Yet
Rowe sees Ethnic Studies as a kind of pragmatic bridge-building, says Traub, an
effort to foster intergroup understanding so as to prevent the flight of white
families from the school.
Principal Rowe worked with the University of Minnesota to
devise an ethnic studies curriculum suitable for sixth-graders, then added a
class on action civics as well. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Minnesota’s
Department of Education has farmed out to the U of M the development of lesson
plans applying the state’s controversial new ethnic studies standards to the
classroom. Those curricula aren’t vague state guidelines (which Traub says are
often ignored by teachers) but concrete lesson plans. And Northeast’s principal
clearly means to use the new university-produced curriculum. That could reveal
plenty about how state standards are translated into classroom practice. So,
what does Traub tell us about the content of Northeast’s Ethnic Studies lesson
plans? Well . . . nothing. He is entirely uncurious about this critically important
evidence.
Fortunately, Katherine Kersten of the Center of the
American Experiment has obtained and described some of the University of Minnesota’s new lesson
plans. Here’s one for sixth grade: “Protest Art and the Movement for Black
Life.” This unit is typical, she says: “Sixth graders will study the Black
Lives Matter movement’s ‘13 guiding principles’ and ‘the role of protest art in
mediating power in the city,’ and ‘create their own protest art.’ In the
process, they will learn that being ‘Unapologetically Black’ ‘requires the
dismantling of multiple systems of oppression: capitalism, patriarchy,
anti-Blackness and white supremacy.’”
No doubt, Principal Rowe is as friendly and caring a
fellow as Traub makes him out to be. Rowe may not waste his time formulating
doctrines on institutional racism, as Traub says. But that’s because the
University of Minnesota is formulating doctrine for him. And while Traub
insists that Ethnic Studies at Northeast is just pragmatic “bridge-building,”
Rowe’s new, university-supplied curriculum seems likely to prompt communal
bridge-burning instead. Traub, however, is more interested in describing Rowe’s
friendly fist bumps than in studying his lesson plans.
Rowe also introduced Traub to an eighth-grade science
teacher, Miss Huster, one of the school’s stars. Traub admits that Huster
refuses to practice the political neutrality he says he often saw elsewhere.
The walls of her science classroom are decorated with gay Pride banners and
Black Lives Matter posters. (Such practices are now ubiquitous in California.)
After a lesson on “urban heat islands,” Huster got 161 of
her students to write Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey about the issue. When Frey
bragged of plans to plant 15,000 trees to allay the problem, the students wrote
back implying that Frey was lying. This drove the mayor into a fury. He
demanded that the school board fire Huster. She, however, was protected by
Principal Rowe, who claimed that the students, not the teacher, were to blame.
Traub says he can’t “find it in his heart” to condemn
Huster’s exercise in action civics. True, he says, “schools really shouldn’t
encourage students to accuse their mayor of lying.” But for children of
immigrants, many of whom come from places where criticizing officials gets you
thrown in jail, says Traub, the ability to safely call out a mayor is “a lesson
in democracy we should be proud to teach.”
Traub misses the point. It’s silly to pretend that 161
students decided on their own to berate the mayor for not doing more to
eliminate heat islands in poor urban neighborhoods. Miss Huster is recruiting
students to the global warming crusade. We could ask why she doesn’t enroll
them in a campaign for nuclear power instead, but we know why. Action civics
licenses an overwhelmingly progressive teacher corps to recruit students into
leftist activism. Traub is silent on this, the real issue.
Traub also dismisses politically charged position
statements by teachers’ unions as irrelevant to the controversy over classroom
indoctrination. Yet recent calls by leadership at a Minnesota teachers’ union for anti-ICE
teacher walkouts and displays cannot be dismissed, since they’re specifically
designed to send a political message to students and parents and even to
encourage student walkouts. (Student walkouts, abetted by teachers, are a variant of action civics that Traub fails to address.)
There have been repeated student walkouts in Minneapolis
in recent weeks, and Renee Nicole Good was recruited to the ranks of ICE
harassers through her child’s public charter school, which is organized around the explicitly leftist practice of action
civics. The concept of “resistance” is also central to Minnesota’s
controversial new social studies standards. Traub treats school-sponsored
radicalism as something unseen since the 1970s. Yet he’s just witnessed a
rebirth of that era in Minnesota, even while pretending otherwise.
Traub at least concedes that Minneapolis schools lean
left. His ace in the hole, however, is Illinois, a state with left-leaning
standards and laws, where Traub claims classrooms are less politicized than
those of Minnesota. His technique remains the same: call out an example or two
of explicit leftism, then show how much more complicated — even apolitical —
other classrooms are. Yet Traub is no more convincing on Illinois than
Minnesota.
Traub visited various Illinois “Democracy Schools,” a
network committed to action civics. At Turner Elementary School, Traub met
Principal Maurice McDavid, who helped write the new state standards on
“culturally responsive teaching.”
McDavid is an acolyte of Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally
Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which holds that children of color,
coming from collectivist cultures where group storytelling and chants are
common, need to learn through oral and auditory pathways rather than simply
write essays. Traub is put off by this “cultural and cognitive relativism,”
going so far as to liken Hammond’s “racial essentialism” to overt racism. It’s
a startling comparison, since earlier in the book Traub professes outrage when
Matthew Spalding, executive director of Trump’s 1776 Commission, dares to
compare progressive doctrines of group rights to classic racism. Apparently,
the point is only a problem when conservatives make it.
Traub is flummoxed by the radicalism of culturally
responsive teaching. “I don’t know how widespread this pedagogy is,” he says,
although he admits that “the younger high school teachers I spoke to in
Illinois said that they had been taught in ed school to incorporate it into
their practice.” But he insists, “I hadn’t actually seen it deployed in a
classroom.” Yet immediately afterward, Traub describes a classroom at Turner
where culturally responsive teaching is applied.
Traub’s account of his visit to Georgetown Elementary is
designed to show that not all classes are as left-doctrinaire as those he
encountered at Turner. Traub describes a class taught by Dr. Mahmoud, a teacher
with a Jewish mother, Hindu father, and a Pakistani Muslim husband. Mahmoud
runs Georgetown’s Social Justice Club and considers herself the protector of
the school’s Muslim students.
Mahmoud’s class begins with a few good words for George
Washington and the American Revolution but quickly emphasizes that the
delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence were all “rich white men.”
She then reads to her students from a rhyming picture book called Equality’s
Call, eliciting rhymed responses: “White men with property went
to the polls / but the rest of the people were left off the roles.” Traub
confesses some discomfort at the idea that eleven-year-olds “need to be fed
their civic education in the form of rhythmic chants.” Yet he insists that the
theme of Equality’s Call is the “mainstream” narrative of American
history, “the idea of the perpetually widening circle of inclusion that brings
the full measure of citizenship to formerly marginalized groups.”
That is a legitimately mainstream narrative, yet Equality’s
Call is 95 percent about marginalized groups, and 5 percent about the
breakthrough nature of America’s constitutional republic. That deficiency might
be remedied by greater focus on the achievements of the Declaration and
Constitution, but that is not what we get. Mahmoud says that the Constitution
at first conferred full citizenship only on “white male Christians.” Not so.
The Constitution imposed no religious test for office, and George Washington
swiftly affirmed full citizenship rights for Jews. True, some
states retained religious tests for voting past Washington’s inauguration, but
the Constitution and Washington set ultimately controlling precedents for
religious freedom. Mahmoud constructs a narrative of aggrievement that
shortchanges both Washington and the Constitution. Not only is her treatment of
Washington nothing like the veneration Traub claims it is, Mahmoud complains
about the textbook she’s forced to use because it “centers the dominant group.”
Above all, Traub cannot see that Mahmoud’s class is yet
another application of Zaretta Hammond. Equality’s Call was written for
preschool through the third grade. It is at least two years behind the level of
Mahmoud’s fifth-graders. Yet it’s precisely the kind of low-expectation pitch
to “orality” (call-and-response rhyming) that Hammond recommends and that Traub
condemns. Yet Traub presents Mahmoud’s class as proof that his experience at
Turner Elementary was atypical. He proves precisely the opposite.
Ah, but after an earlier visit to the Illinois Democracy
Network, Traub proclaimed that he “never encountered talk about culturally
relevant anything” and “never heard any preaching [of left identitarian]
doctrine of any kind from any teacher.” Moreover, he says, “their professional
ethos overrode whatever personal politics they had.” This alleged absence may
be the strongest claim offered by Traub. Yet it’s unconvincing.
Although Traub seems not to know it, the Illinois
Democracy Initiative maintains a collaborative relationship with Loyola
University, whose education experts are as left-doctrinaire as you’ll find at
any education school. Teachers from various Democracy Schools enroll in
Loyola’s “professional development” program, whose purpose is to train
teacher-emissaries for culturally relevant instruction.
You can see a Loyola webinar showing off graduates of the
program here. It’s thick with race-based thinking. One teacher,
Jason Janczak, studied Zaretta Hammond at Loyola, then recruited a large number
of teachers at his own school to join an intensive seminar on Hammond’s book.
Janczak and his fellow teachers then transformed curriculum and pedagogy along
Hammond’s lines. For this, Janczak received the annual Civic Leadership Award from the
Democracy Schools Network in 2023, just as Traub was visiting. Another graduate
of Loyola’s “professional development” program takes the book Grading for
Equity as his guide, pushing practices no less radical than those of
Principal Palmer in Minneapolis.
I don’t doubt Traub when he says that not all teachers
buy into identity politics. But Traub is not allowing himself to recognize the
deep politicization all around him. He’s too committed to debunking
conservatives for that. Traub also sets up a straw man when he says that he
heard little identitarian “preaching” in the classroom. Some teachers do
preach. Yet others transform their curriculum and pedagogy in more subtle ways.
You can grade by race quite stealthily. And in Illinois, as in Minnesota, the
leftism of the education establishment is far from irrelevant.
There’s more to say about Traub’s book, but I’ve
concentrated on his key claim: that conservatives are wrong to worry about
leftism in the schools, because teachers are politically neutral. Traub’s case
on that score fails.
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