But despite initial momentum, three now-familiar letters stopped the bill in its tracks: C-R-T.

A mostly unknown conservative scholar writing in the National Review that month claimed the bill would “allow the Biden administration to push Critical Race Theory (CRT) on every public school in the country,” calling the Republican co-sponsors “naive” victims of a hidden leftist agenda. Critical race theory, which posits that racism permeates American institutions, has become right-wing shorthand for any classroom discussion of race.

Cornyn, who proposed the legislation and is the former GOP majority whip, dismissed the allegations, writing on Twitter that “the false, hysterical claims are untrue and worthy of a Russian active measures campaign, not a serious discussion of our bill.”

But truthful or not, the criticisms spread like wildfire. The National Review op-ed racked up thousands of interactions on social media and, within 24 hours, 1776 Action and America First Policy Institute, groups that support what’s known as “patriotic education,” had published dire reports pulling directly from the article. 

Then, just days later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mimicked the message, stating in a press release the $1 billion federal civics bill would “award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like Critical Race Theory.”

Soon after, far-right Breitbart News ran an article whose headline pulled word-for-word from the National Review editorial and targeted Cornyn as the bill’s key backer. High-profile commentators took to social media urging their followers to call their lawmakers opposing what they described as “Trojan horse garbage” sponsored by RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only.

The senators’ “Civics Secures Democracy Act” went no further.

How did this firestorm start and who wrote the op-ed that lit the match?

The story begins years prior and revolves around Stanley Kurtz, a little-noticed power player shaping the right’s recent offensives in the education culture wars.

An enemy of ‘action civics’

Though his writings are regularly shared by GOP heavy hitters including Fox News analysts, groups like Parents Defending Education and sitting U.S. senators, Kurtz has flown mostly under the radar.

“Nobody’s talking about his role at all,” said Jeremy Young, a senior manager for the free expression advocacy group, PEN America.

Kurtz, a 69-year-old former university instructor and longtime conservative commentator, has spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls “woke civics.”

“He certainly has a fairly large megaphone among conservatives,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

In Young’s estimation, only two figures have had a wider national influence on anti-CRT legislation than Kurtz: Christopher Rufo, the man who brought the lightning-rod term into the right’s vernacular, and Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, who has fought to add teeth to the bills. 

But Kurtz has made his mark in a niche way. 

He “goes after specific things like civics education that are not as central for some of the other [figures],” Young said.

At least eight bills proposed in five states have pulled from Kurtz’s 2021 “Partisanship Out of Civics” model legislation, according to a PEN America report, making the scholar one of the key thought leaders driving the recent surge in classroom censorship bills. And his advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers.

At the core of Kurtz’s activism is a central idea: That hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to “school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions.”

The scholar, who draws a roughly $172,000 yearly salary from a think tank and lists an apartment address in Washington D.C.’s affluent Forest Hills neighborhood in tax records, declined a phone interview, saying he “prefer[s] to comment by email.” In written messages, he explained he believes hands-on civics projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.”

“Any sort of political protest or lobbying done by students is subject to undue pressure from the biases of teachers, peers and non-profits working with schools. Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said.

Kurtz’s arguments amount to a fabricated “boogeyman,” said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor. 

Nonetheless, the idea that “frothing-at-the-mouth Democratic teachers [could] create little warrior bands of students to go out and fight their political wars for them” has become a captivating concern for some on the right, Black said, largely thanks to Kurtz.

It’s a worry that traces back to 2017 when the National Association of Scholars’s David Randall, who told The 74 he’s a “personal friend” of Kurtz’s, published a report warning of the proliferation of a “New Civics” that teaches students “a good citizen is a radical activist.”

At issue for Kurtz was a type of programming known as “action civics” popularized by the nonprofit Generation Citizen. In the approach, celebrated by several academic researchers, students learn to navigate local government by picking an issue they care about, studying it and presenting their findings to officials. 

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

The 74 reviewed over three dozen student projects from Texas and found that the vast majority dealt with apolitical local issues, such as reducing texting while driving in school zones. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin did lean left, such as on gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

McCluskey, at the Cato Institute, has documented over 3,400 ideological “battles” in public schooling for more than a decade and said he has yet to see “compelling evidence” that liberal bias in civics classes has become a widespread problem. A 74 review of McCluskey’s tracker revealed that only a handful of incidents concerned civics.

Accurate or not, Kurtz’s depiction of “woke civics” is now being felt in America’s classrooms. 

A bill with ‘wonderful’ uptake

When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for “lobbying” or “advocacy” at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced. The response was thanks, in part, to impeccable timing: Kurtz published just a few months before policies to restrict lessons related to race and gender began to crop up in dozens of state legislatures nationwide.

The Manhattan Institute, where Rufo now works, included the bill’s anti-lobbying provisions in its own model bill that author James Copland said he presented at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, an annual forum to swap right-wing law-making proposals.

And Linda Bennett, a recently retired GOP South Carolina state representative, introduced a 2021 bill by the exact same name as Kurtz’s “Partisanship Out of Civics Act.”

“No need to reinvent the wheel if somebody’s got it right,” she told The 74.

Bennett insisted that her office had become flooded with young students, coerced by their educators, demanding that she “please support allowing teachers to teach critical race theory.” But neither she nor Copland could name a specific school or teacher that had distorted their civics lessons in such a way or influenced students to take an activist stance.

In Texas, where a piece of Kurtz’s model legislation on civics became law, the result was an unprecedented restriction on students’ civic engagement. Legislators tucked a clause into the eighth page of their classroom censorship bill outlawing all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials.

In the two years since passage, Texas educators say they have been forced to abandon time-honored assignments such as having students attend a school board meeting or advocate for local causes like a stop sign at an intersection near campus.

“There are all sorts of other civics education that’s getting rolled up here,” PEN America’s Young said, adding that it’s a byproduct of what he calls “shockingly vague” legislation.

Sarai Paez, a recent high school graduate from a suburb outside Austin, said the new law is “a step backwards.” Students in her ninth-grade civics class passed a 2018 city ordinance calling for youth representation in their local government — advocacy that would now be outlawed. 

“There’s no need to take away something that has affected … a group of people in a positive way,” she said.

Though Kurtz said by email he has “a policy of not commenting on any consultations by office holders or policy experts,” Texas state Rep. Steve Toth, the bill’s Republican sponsor, acknowledged to The Texas Tribune that he “conferred” with Kurtz in drafting the legislation.

Toth and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP sponsor in the other chamber, did not respond to requests for comment.

In Ohio and South Dakota, where proposed legislation also pulled from Kurtz’s bill, Kurtz himself testified on behalf of the policies in 2021 and 2022, respectively, though neither proposal passed.

Randall, research director at the National Association of Scholars, where Kurtz published the model legislation, said he’s been quite pleased with the bill’s uptake.

“If you had asked me when this was published, ‘Would you be happy if, several years from now, it had been turned into law in Texas?’ … I would have said that was a wonderful result.”

Money trail

Kurtz and the right-wing lawmakers and advocates who have helped translate his policy agenda into practice are linked by more than just shared philosophy. They’re also connected by money.

His employer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” has a dozen funders in common with the Manhattan Institute, tax filings reveal, including mega-donors like the Charles Koch Foundation.

Copland, at the Manhattan Institute, said he did not consult with Kurtz while putting together his anti-CRT model legislation, but acknowledged some of his colleagues may have.

Toth, in Texas, also receives campaign funds from the Koch Foundation. And Gov. DeSantis, in Florida, shares at least one donor, Fidelity Investments, in common with Kurtz’s think tank. 

On more than one occasion, the issues Kurtz speaks out on have soon found their way to DeSantis’s bully pulpit. The governor recently doubled down on civics education rooted in “patriotism” and his rejection earlier this year of the College Board’s AP African American Studies curriculum came just a few months after Kurtz began writing critically about the issue. Kurtz named two authors specifically in his September article, Robin Kelley and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who the Florida Department of Education later objected to.

Education department press secretary Cassie Palelis said Florida’s concerns with the course were the “result of a thorough review,” and that its correspondence with the College Board had begun in early 2022. When asked whether officials referenced Kurtz’s work during that process and, if so, what role it played, Palelis did not address the question.

Kurtz’s work drew one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s more sizable recent donations, according to the most recently available tax records. In 2019, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation donated $150,000 to support one of his projects. The foundation funds a variety of causes including instilling “America’s founding values in the next generation of citizens.”

The Ethics and Public Policy Center did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the overlapping web of donors, Young, who has tracked the nationwide spread of anti-CRT laws, does not see a coordinated campaign.

“There are some people who look at this and sort of see a conspiracy,” he said. “I just see a bunch of people talking to each other who have aligned interests.”

Lawmakers tend to pull from legislation circulating in other states and “it just snowballs,” he added. 

As for the Kurtz model legislation, its influence continues to spread. Randall, at the National Association of Scholars, which shares nine funders in common with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the organization’s work in advancing the bill continues, particularly at the local level.

In January, a district outside of Colorado Springs voted to adopt a new “Birthright” social studies curriculum developed by Randall’s Civics Alliance that bans awarding course credit for service learning or action civics.

“We are in it for the long haul,” Randall said. “Our mission is to inspire as many Americans as possible to join this work.”

Disclosure: The Stand Together Trust, which was founded by Charles Koch, provides financial support to The 74, which also participates in the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

Since state legislators in 2021 passed a ban on lessons teaching that any one group is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” one unprecedented provision tucked into the bill has triggered a massive fallout for civics education statewide.

A brief clause on Page 8 of the legislation outlawed all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials. Educators could no longer ask students to get involved in the political process, even if they let youth decide for themselves what side of an issue to advocate for — short-circuiting the training young Texans receive to participate in democracy itself.

Zamora-Garcia’s 2017 project to add student advisors to the City Council, and others like it involving research and meetings with elected representatives, would stand in direct violation.

Since 2021, 18 states have passed laws restricting teachings on race and gender. But Texas is the only one nationwide to suppress students’ interactions with elected officials in class projects, according to researchers at the free expression advocacy group PEN America.

Practically overnight, a growing movement to engage Texas students in real-world civics lessons evaporated. Teachers canceled time-honored assignments, districts reversed expansion plans with a celebrated civics education provider and a bill promoting student civics projects that received bipartisan support in 2019 was suddenly dead in the water.

“By the time we got to 2021, civics was the latest weapon in the culture wars,” state Rep. James Talarico, sponsor of that now-defunct bill, told The 74.

Texas does require high schoolers to take a semester of government and a semester of economics, and is one of 38 states nationwide that mandates at least a semester of civics. But students told The 74 the courses typically rely on book learning and memorization.

Talarico, a former middle school teacher and the Texas legislature’s youngest member, came into office during a statewide surge in momentum to deepen civics education. A 2018 study out of the University of Texas highlighted dismal levels of political participation — the state was 44th in voter registration and 47th in voter turnout — and Democrats and Republicans alike were motivated to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, academic research found lessons directly involving students in government could activate future civic engagement. 

So when the freshman legislator proposed that all high schoolers in the state learn civics with a project-based component addressing “an issue that is relevant to the students,” colleagues on both sides of the aisle stamped their approval as the bill sailed through the House. Although the legislation then stalled in the Senate, Talarico said he came away “very optimistic” the policy would become law next session.

But in the two years before the next legislative session, he watched as the political tides turned. Flashpoint issues like George Floyd’s murder and the Jan. 6  insurrection brought on a “disagreement over democracy itself,” he said. And when his conservative colleagues passed a 2021 bill limiting school lessons on race and gender, he mourned as a few brief clauses dashed all his hopes for project-based civics.

“Students are now banned from advocating for something like a stop sign in front of their school,” Talarico said.

A battle over civics

The sections of the 2021 law limiting civic engagement pull directly from model legislation authored by the conservative scholar Stanley Kurtz, whose extensive writings seek to link an approach called “action civics” — what he calls “woke civics” — with leftist activism and critical race theory.  Critical race theory is a scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in America’s legal and social institutions, but became a right-wing catch-all term for teachings on race in early 2021. 

Kurtz argues the practice is a form of political “indoctrination” under the “deceptively soothing” heading of civics, a cause long celebrated on both the right and the left. 

The action civics model was popularized by the nonprofit Generation Citizen and is used in over a thousand classrooms across at least eight states. It teaches students about government by having them pick a local issue, research it and present their findings to officials.

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

Generation Citizen’s method has been studied by several academic researchers who found participants experienced boosted civic knowledge and improvements in related academic areas like history and English.

Kurtz, however, contends the projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.” 

“Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said in an email to The 74.

Civics experts, however, argued otherwise.

The notion that “it’s activism happening in classrooms … that’s just so far from the truth,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Boston.

Rep. Steve Toth and Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP lawmakers who sponsored the 2021 anti-CRT legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.

The 74 reviewed over three dozen action civics projects in Texas from before the 2021 legislation and found that the vast majority dealt with hyperlocal, nonpartisan issues.

Students most often took up causes like bullying, youth vaping, movie nights in the park or bringing back student newspapers. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin could be considered progressive, including projects dealing with gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

Under the 2021 law, all of those projects now must avoid contact with elected officials. The restrictions have resulted in initiatives more contained to schools themselves like advocacy for less-crowded hallways or longer lunch periods, educators said.

“This particular legislation … ties [students’] hands as to how involved they can get while in high school,” said Armando Orduña, the Houston executive director of Latinos for Education.

His own political awakening, he said, came three decades ago growing up in Texas when a teacher assigned him 10 hours of volunteering on a political campaign of his choice. He opted to work on the 1991 Houston mayoral campaign of Sylvester Turner, then a young state representative who lost his bid that year but went on to become the city’s mayor in 2016.

“Back then, the attitude was how to fight teenage apathy regarding politics and now it’s quite the other way around,” Orduña said. Now politicians are working to “tamp down the next generation of leaders.”

Young progressives have become a considerable force in American politics, fueling recent electoral wins in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Chicago mayoral race and a base-rousing standoff in the Tennessee legislature. In the eyes of some members of the GOP, their activism is seen as a threat.

‘Everything got turned upside down’

Though some project-based civics lessons in Texas continue with a pared-down scope, others have disappeared altogether.

One school district north of Dallas decided “out of an abundance of caution” to reverse years of precedent and stop offering course credit to students involved in a well-regarded national civic engagement program, The Texas Tribune first reported.

And Generation Citizen, too, has seen its footprint in Texas dwindle. 

After a 2017 launch in the state, the organization underwent several years of steady growth, with more than a half dozen districts using its programming or curricula. At the time, districts in San Antonio, north Texas, the Rio Grande Valley and several rural regions had expressed interest in beginning programming, former regional director Meredith Stefos Norris said. She spent most of her days criss-crossing the sprawling state meeting with interested school leaders. Austin schools expanded their contract with the nonprofit to $58,000, according to records The 74 obtained from the district through a Freedom of Information request. And Dallas said it wanted to bring Generation Citizen programming to every high schooler in its 153,000-student district, Norris said.

“It felt at the time that we were just going to keep going and keep growing and there was no reason that we weren’t going to be a statewide organization,” the former Texas director said.

Then came the 2021 legislative session and “everything got turned upside down,” said Megan Brandon, Generation Citizen’s current Texas program director. It zapped their efforts and districts backed out of partnerships.

The organization now primarily works with just three Texas districts, including an updated contract with Austin schools for $3,000 — a tiny sliver of the sum from a few years prior. The other two are Bastrop Independent School District and Elgin Independent School District.

Meanwhile, across the state’s northern border in Oklahoma, where Generation Citizen also operates, lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill around issues of race and gender, but one that did not limit students’ contact with elected officials. The organization has been able to maintain all its programs while “following the letter of the law,” Oklahoma director Amy Curran said.

“This isn’t organizing about big culture wars, national stuff,” she said. “This is, literally, the sidewalks are unsafe around our school.”

Brandon, a former social studies teacher herself, grieves not just for the Texas branch of her organization, where the nature of the projects are similar, but for the youth in her state. Her former students in Bastrop ISD outside Austin, most of whom did not have parents who attended college, never had access to civic engagement opportunities before her class, she said.

“Students in Texas need civics more than students in many other states,” she said. “It feels like we’re going backwards in time.”

Opportunity cost

Zamora-Garcia remembers striding to the dais of the Bastrop City Council in 2017 with seven of his peers — the boys clad in too-big blazers and bow ties, the girls in dresses and laced-up heels. For a project they began in Brandon’s civics class, the team sought to boost youth voices in their local government. After meeting with officials, researching models and drawing up bylaws, the students eventually made history by passing a city ordinance in the Austin suburb to add student advisors to the City Council.

“It made me feel more important and more involved, actually being able to have a voice that can make a change,” said Zamora-Garcia, now a junior at Texas State University studying business. 

The course activated his potential in class and in the community, he said. Before the experience, school had felt more like being a “cog in a machine,” he said. 

Mabel Zhu, who took the same class two years later, said the experience was “life-changing,” igniting her passion for civic engagement for years to come.

After the class, she began working with a local nonprofit, then organized a youth summit bringing awareness to the issues of mental health and substance abuse. She eventually joined the Youth Advisory Council that Zamora-Garcia and his classmates helped launch and worked with the Cultural Arts Board to put up a new mural that will define her city’s downtown space for years to come. A waving flag on the painting proclaims, “The future is ours!”

“Without [the class], I wouldn’t have been able to make such an impact within my community,” Zhu said.

The loss of such opportunities are what Rep. Talarico calls the unseen “opportunity cost” of the culture wars. 

“What are we missing out on that we could be doing if we weren’t playing political games with our students’ education?” the Democratic lawmaker asked.

Many students in Texas either learn how to engage with the political system in school or not at all, teachers said. Kyle Olson, an educator at an East Austin high school that serves predominantly immigrant families, taught his students that, as constituents, they could write letters to their elected representatives.

“They didn’t know that that was even something that was possible,” he said. 

Neutering those lessons flies in the face of American democracy itself, argues Alexander Pope, who leads the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Maryland’s Salisbury University.

“Part of the job that schools have in this country is to help prepare people for democracy,” he said. “The idea that, in a representative democracy, you’re going to literally ban … people from writing their elected representatives is just backward.”

The risk, believes ​​Tufts’s Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that a generation of Texans may grow up with a stunted sense of citizenship.

“It’s going to really damage their idea of what democracy is,” she said.

After days of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Missouri Senate gave initial approval Wednesday to legislation that included a watered-down version of the GOP-backed ban on so-called “critical race theory.”

But the changes weren’t enough to win over Democrats, who allege the bill still runs the risk of being a “tool to bludgeon public schools that are already struggling.”

“The only people who benefit are those who have an interest in dismantling public schools,” said Sen. Lauren Arthur, D-Kansas City, during Wednesday’s debate.

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The legislation seeks to create a statewide portal to house curriculum and school financials, enshrine parental rights, ban some lessons on race and form a patriotism course for teachers.

Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, introduced a new version of the legislation on Wednesday, adding provisions that would open transportation funding to magnet schools and prohibit students from accessing inappropriate material on school-issued devices.

Despite her reservations about the overall bill, Arthur praised a 4% increase in the funding the state allocates for impoverished students that Koenig included in the newest version.

The legislation would also establish a 15% increase per homeless child in a district. Arthur noted that homeless kids require more “wraparound services.”

She did, however, have concerns that some of the bill’s provisions will put additional administrative burdens on teachers, who in the face of massive shortages in districts around the state are “just trying to find 10 minutes to go to the bathroom.”

As part of the so-called “Parents Bill of Rights,” teachers would have to make educational materials available to parents, upon request, within two days if a document is not copyrighted.

School staff would have to upload details of professional development, third-party speakers and list online all books required in its courses.

Sen. Karla May, D-St. Louis, worried about the bill’s provision prohibiting certain lessons about race. She was among the Black senators who last week blocked passage of the bill when it first came up for debate in the chamber.

“You’re still hindering the dialogue and restricting a teacher’s ability to freely educate students on history and things like that,” she said Wednesday.

The section seeks to bar educators from demanding teachers or students affirm certain ideas about race. New additions to the provision clarify that it would not inhibit teachers from “discussing current events in a historical context” or bar discussion of the ideas, so long as teachers clarify the school doesn’t endorse the opinions.

One such viewpoint the bill says would violate the policy is: “That individuals of any race, ethnicity, color or national origin are inherently superior or inferior.”

Koenig said his bill would not prohibit teaching that individuals have labeled others as inferior in the past. He just doesn’t want people proclaiming that today.

May said the bill was “teetering” on a “fine line.” She worried about the “unintended consequences.”

“If a teacher is teaching something, and a student goes home to their parents and tells them it and misinterpreted what the teacher said, are we now going to have recorders in the classroom? How do we deal with that situation?” May said.

“You don’t see a lot of lawsuits coming out of this?” she asked.

Koenig said teachers can appeal when parents allege that they taught something out of compliance with the policy.

According to the bill, parents who catch a teacher in violation of this section are granted money to an educational expense account for their student, paid out by the violating district.

Only a handful of senators were present as they gave a voice vote to grant initial approval to the bill. The legislation still requires a a roll-call vote to head to the House.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and Twitter.

Teachers said they had to skip over classic texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and avoid historical figures like famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass out of concern for parental complaints and possible legal blowback. One high school science teacher who the study quoted anonymously described an atmosphere of “fear and paranoia” around simply covering the content laid out within state standards.

The report, which was published by the Rand Corporation on Wednesday, surveyed over 8,000 educators from across the country. It asked whether officials had passed policies limiting the teaching of topics related to race and gender and, if so, how those rules had impacted their instructional decisions.

Confusion was so widespread, researchers found, that roughly one-quarter of teachers said they didn’t know whether they were subject to restrictions. Among teachers working in states that had enacted classroom censorship bills, less than a third actually knew that the laws were in place.

“At times there is that confusion about, ‘What am I allowed to say in the classroom, what am I not allowed to say?’ ” lead researcher Ashley Woo explained.

In Florida, where the state’s censorship bill also extends to higher education and the workplace, and where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently blocked a forthcoming Advanced Placement course on African American studies, the state Department of Education rejected the idea that their law might be unclear to teachers.

“If educators are confused about what can and cannot be taught in Florida schools, the blame lies solely on media activists and union clowns who purposefully sow confusion and mislead the public,” spokesperson Alex Lanfranconi wrote in an email to The 74.

Classroom censorship bills began to proliferate in 2021 as right-wing politicians advocated that schools overstepped in the measures they enacted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As some districts added more books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors to their curricula and educated staff about how racism operates in society, predominantly white parents in many districts pushed back on the changes, calling them critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic framework used to examine systematic racism and is taught mostly in graduate school rather than K-12 classrooms. The term has become a GOP catch-all for lessons related to race. Americans largely support teachings that address racism, but support wanes drastically when the critical race theory label is applied, research shows.

Since 2021, legislation has been proposed in 42 states to curtail race- and gender-related teachings. In 18 states, the measures have passed into law, according to an Education Week tracker. In at least six states, the rules include penalties for educators or schools that do not comply.

Terrance Anfield teaches English as a second language in Kennesaw, Georgia, where a state law bans teachers from covering “divisive concepts.” 

“The very concepts that will allow the development of our students to become well-rounded, inclusive members of society are being omitted from the classroom for fear of offending the wrong person or committee. This should not be an issue that has involved the districts of Georgia because CRT is typically taught at the collegiate level,” he wrote in an email to The 74.

In the aftermath of those changes, 1 in 4 teachers nationally said their school or district leaders told them to limit discussions of political or social issues in class, a previous Rand study found in August.

The non-partisan think tank’s most recent report now shows that a similar proportion of teachers, 24%, have altered their curricular materials in response to the controversy — regardless of whether or not they live in states that have classroom censorship laws on the books. Even in states with no rules limiting teachings on race and gender, 22% of instructors said the nationwide pushback influenced their selection of books and worksheets. 

“The limitations are not just originating from state policies, they’re also coming from other places,” said Woo, the Rand researcher, explaining that educators frequently reported re-designing their offerings because of complaints from parents or “implicit” and “unspoken” messages from district leaders directing them to sanitize lessons.

Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, emphasized that parents do have a right to transparency over what their students are learning. But at the same time, districts should avoid policies that have a “chilling effect” on educators, which can make schools “not a healthy place for learning,” he said.

In the face of pushback, some teachers still expressed resistance to censorship policies. The survey included a free response section completed by about 1,450 educators. Nearly 1 in 5 said they are continuing to include lessons related to race and gender, and made no mention of efforts to make the teachings less contentious. 

“My students are more important than any board policy. If I get in trouble, then it would be worth it,” one educator wrote.

In a profession whose stress levels are paralleled only by doctors and nurses, navigating the supercharged climate has made educators’ jobs “even more difficult and less attractive,” in the words of one survey respondent, who teaches elementary school.

School staff may have their hands tied, caught between what is legal and what they think is right. A middle school science teacher said the school’s LGBTQ students are “knowingly suffering and there is nothing I can do about it without risking my job.”

In some cases, districts now require teachers to search for new classroom materials, go through cumbersome approval processes for new curricula or even run lessons by parents before leading them in the classroom, Woo explained. All those steps represent more work for teachers at a time when staff shortages already plague many states and districts across the country, she said.

“All of these things are potentially adding more to teachers’ plates in a time when we know teachers have already experienced a lot of stress,” she said.

Moms for Liberty, a national organization that supports school board candidates pushing for limitations on race- and gender-related lessons, did not respond to requests for comment on whether these policies could worsen teacher burnout.

To district leaders, Woo said, one clear takeaway from the study should be that educators need additional support to comply with a changing legal and political landscape.

“Teachers cannot and should not have to shoulder these challenges on their own.”

His biblical invocation was overheated for the topic: Critical Race Theory, the now-familiar academic concept conservatives have appropriated as a slur to attack lessons they deem too critical of American political institutions. His anger wasn’t unique. Controversies at school board meetings have unspooled into national news for much of the past year. The pandemic has been awful for our social cohesion, deepening divisions that were already well frayed. 

And yet, schools are sadly appropriate forums for these flare-ups. The educational divisions we’ve tolerated for so long — segregated schools that facilitate inequitable underfunding of campuses with large shares of children of color, wide variance in school safety and quality, and the like — aren’t just terrible for kids, they’re deadly for American democracy. These systemic biases reveal the substantive rot in what our country professes to offer all members of its community. 

On the one hand, schools exemplify the universal promises of American society. Long-time teachers union leader Al Shanker once explained public schools as “created for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing and arithmetic and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.” Schools are perhaps the country’s most visible public investment in its citizens — a clear contribution of collective resources to ensure that each of us gathers the knowledge and skills necessary to make a career in the economy, to practice learning and living together with our peers, and to participate in the various systems shaping American life. 

But schools are also where the country perjures those promises, where many of the biases of American life are systematically transmitted and enshrined. The country says, “Work hard here, succeed here and you’ll rise up through American society.” But when children of color, when children from low-income families arrive on campuses, academic rigor is too often scarce, harsh and exclusionary discipline is abundant, and real opportunities for advancement are largely missing. And then, years later, their children arrive at these same campuses, only to find much the same conditions. 

When researchers write about “historically marginalized” children and communities, these are the cruel mechanics that define the people they mean. These are the means of marginalization. So, is it any wonder that kids from these schools, from these backgrounds, grow into jaded skeptics of American society and its economy? It’s hard to believe in, let alone support, let alone trust, a system that promises meritocracy while delivering gilt-edged opportunities by the truckload to the privileged — and repeatedly consigning children to dysfunctional, under-resourced campuses. The inequities of our school system make a mockery of the gauzy rhetoric of the American Dream. 

Worse, the pandemic further sharpened divisions between those for whom the system has historically worked and those whom the system has historically failed to serve. English learners (ELs), who are disproportionately likely to attend socioeconomically segregated, high-poverty schools, were often left out of local pandemic-learning plans and became more likely to be chronically absent from school. Students in high-poverty schools made less academic progress during the pandemic than peers in wealthier schools. Children of color were, on aggregate, not served well during schools’ many months of scrambling through virtual and/or hybrid learning plans. 

As my colleague Kevin Mahnken put it in a recent article summarizing new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, “At all performance levels across [math and reading], 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.”

Incidentally, what is the core claim underlying critical race theory? It goes something like this: Racism can be detected in public systems, and the design and structure of social policies contribute to social disparities. In other words, it charges that the laws, regulations and institutions shaping public life perpetuate and entrench racial divisions across generations. Seemingly neutral systems are rigged — and they’re rigged in ways that substantially harm particular communities of people. 

So whether you like the term “critical race theory” or not, it offers a pretty accurate description of the unjust reality of U.S. public education. The pandemic is a universal experience that imposed roughly equivalent risks and constraints on all U.S. schools. But in our country, public schools and communities are not universally alike, universally supported, or of universally high quality. So the impacts of the pandemic weren’t equally felt; COVID-19 took a public education system that was already unfairly tilted against historically marginalized children — and heightened its inequities. 

So now, more than ever, these divides are driving the broader culture wars invading American education debates today. People for whom the system — the broader American socioeconomic system, its markets, schools and beyond — has generally worked are defensive about the notion that it isn’t, in fact, wholly fair and meritocratic. It’s intuitive to them that the system must be defended from books and curricula that suggest otherwise. Things worked out fine for them, after all! 

And yet, the past two years have provided tragic, predictable proof that American public education remains systemically unfair for families of color, low-income families, English learners, and other historically marginalized groups. Members of these groups have ample evidence that they should not, at base, trust that U.S. schools — or society — will routinely prioritize their best interests. 

So here we sit, from Brainerd to Florida, from Maryland to Orange County, arguing over whether or not it should be legal to discuss this fact. We have mostly white, mostly privileged people anxiously demanding that schools not talk about the ways that the country’s public institutions have unfairly served marginalized communities through history — instead of directly addressing the consequences of the unfair treatment marginalized communities received during the pandemic. We’re not only debating how U.S. schools teach the sins of the American past. We’re deciding whether we, as communities, are ready to address the facts of America’s unequal present. 

For years, Americans have struggled to pull together in common cause — to solve political problems, to face public health crises, to respond to injustices in our collective community. Our separate, divided society derives in part from our separated, segregated schools. The pandemic made clear that educational inequities linked to these divisions are why we’re not — whatever the particular collective challenge — all in any of this together. How could we be? Americans learn from the start that we are not actually in community with those other citizens. 

There’s no short-term fix. But the long-term solution to our incohesion isn’t about requiring kids to chant the Pledge of Allegiance or read fables extolling George Washington’s virtues and excising his slaveholding from the public record. It’s about rebuilding our schools in a way that treats all children with the care and respect they deserve, in a way that enrolls all children into schools that resemble the diverse society they’ll someday inhabit as adults.

Long considered a swing state, Florida voters fell decisively to the right this year, including in Miami-Dade County, which has long been a Democratic enclave. Just this summer at an education conference in Orlando, former Miami-Dade schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho joked about the state of Florida politics: “The further south you go in Florida, the more north you find yourself.”

But this year, in a political climate defined by social and economic anxiety, DeSantis skated past Crist in Miami-Dade to become the first GOP gubernatorial candidate to secure the county since 2002. In doing so, he positioned himself for a possible 2024 presidential run and a looming showdown for control of the GOP with former President Donald Trump.

“We not only won election,” DeSantis said during his victory speech Tuesday night. “We have rewritten the political map.” 

DeSantis — who rose to national prominence for banning schools from enforcing mask mandates, prohibiting transgender students from participating in girls’ athletics and cracking down on classroom discussions about race and sexuality — secured nearly 60% of votes. During his victory speech, he boasted about his response to the pandemic, which has hit the state hard, and grievances about schools.

“We chose facts over fear, we chose education over indoctrination, we chose law and order over rioting and disorder,” said DeSantis, who first squeaked into office in 2018. “We fight the woke in the legislature, we fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

The extent to which DeSantis leaned into education as a political motivator was seen in his decision to endorse 30 candidates in local school board races this year. All six of the DeSantis-backed school board contenders won their runoffs Tuesday, meaning 24 of the 30 candidates the governor supported were victorious, Politico reported.

The Florida governor’s growing stature hasn’t been lost on Trump, who could announce his third presidential bid as early as next week. During a Pennsylvania rally just three days before the midterms, Trump highlighted favorable poll numbers that showed him at the head of the pack in a race for the GOP nomination in 2024. 

“There it is, Trump at 71,” the former president said before laying into the governor with a jab. “Ron De-Sanctimonious at 10%.”

Trump’s name was never invoked by DeSantis on Tuesday who hinted at his larger political ambitions. 

“I believe the survival of the American experiment requires a revival of true American principles,” he said. “Florida has proved that it can be done. We offer a ray of hope that better days still lie ahead.”

As political races go, candidates for the Texas State Board of Education are often overlooked, making their races a perennial wallflower in Texas politics.

But this year, after a seismic conservative shift erupted in local school board races in suburbs across the state, more eyes are on who will be elected to the board that dictates what should be in teachers’ lesson plans in Texas’ 1,200 public school districts. Parents in some of these districts have become a vocal force coming out of the pandemic, questioning everything from why and when schools should close to what books are appropriate to be in school libraries to how thorough history lessons should be.

“One thing that strikes me is that it mirrors what we’re seeing in local school board elections,” said Rebecca Deen, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

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And thanks to redistricting — the post-U.S. census exercise in which boundaries for State Board of Education districts, along with legislative and congressional districts, are redrawn every decade — all 15 seats on the education board are up for grabs.

While nine incumbents — six Republicans and three Democrats — are seeking reelection, many close observers of these often-ignored races are watching to see if the board moves further to the right or whether incumbents will be able to win back their seats. A total of 33 candidates — 14 Republicans, 11 Democrats, two independents and three Libertarians — are vying for those 15 seats.

Deen said that like local school board elections, state education board races are low turnout, so candidates try to focus on hot-button issues.

“The State Board of Education is not new to social movements,” Deen said. “What has come back again is the intensity of the debate in this education space.”

And if there’s anything to help challengers stand out, it’s a new Texas that went into effect last year and bars teachers from subjecting students to anything that makes them “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” based on their race or sex. The measure was designed to counter what conservatives term “critical race theory” — a broad term used to describe what they see as indoctrination: attempts by a school to offer a more comprehensive look at American history.

In truth, critical race theory is a college-level discipline that examines why racism continues in American law and culture decades after the civil rights movement in the United States. It is not taught in elementary or secondary schools in Texas.

But that hasn’t stopped conservative candidates from keeping an “anti-CRT” plank from their state education board campaign literature.

Two Republican incumbents on the state board lost their primaries to candidates promising to get critical race theory out of classrooms. Jay Johnson lost his primary in District 15, in the Panhandle, and Sue Melton-Malone lost hers in District 14, covering parts of North Texas..

The case of a third Republican board member, Matt Robinson, also highlights this more conservative push. Robinson did not seek reelection in District 7, which covers part of the Gulf Coast, because he didn’t think he could beat challenger Julie Pickren, who has made so-called critical race theory a central part of her campaign. Robinson has endorsed the Democrat in the race, Dan Hochman. Pickren did not respond to a request for comment.

“I could tell that I wasn’t gonna win reelection in the Republican primary,” Robinson said in September. “The State Board of Education moved quite a bit to the right in the last two or three years, and it’s just responded to how the Republican Party in Texas is.”

Many Republicans running for places on the board won their primaries in March by touting as a top priority how they will prevent the teaching of “critical race theory.” Conservatives at local school boards spent an unprecedented amount of money and won elections this spring based on their opposition to districts offering a more inclusive curriculum to students.

The issue over what conservatives call critical race theory has been in play up and down the ballot — and outside of Texas, including a GOP victory for the Virginia governor, who campaigned on a pledge to ban the teaching of critical race theory.

Hochman, the Democratic candidate in the District 7 race, said he fears that the board will shift more to the right if someone like Pickren gets elected. As someone with 25 years of education experience, he believes it’s his duty to do something about it.

“I need to block those attempts at ruining public education in this state,” he said.

The new board will have a large influence over potential changes to the social studies curriculum in the state’s more than 8,000 public schools. Before the elections, the State Board of Education decided to delay updating the statewide social studies curriculum standards until at least 2025.

The board’s decision came after conservative lawmakers and parents testified that the proposed updates were influenced by critical race theory and didn’t include enough “American exceptionalism” or Christianity.

Board members like Republicans Will Hickman and Pam Little deny that they were pressured to delay the overhaul of the social studies curriculum. Instead, they said they felt some of the content proposed was not age-appropriate and they wanted to keep the current course schedule of requiring Texas history in the fourth and seventh grades. The proposals before the board this summer would have eliminated the current schedule. Hickman is seeking reelection in District 6, covering parts of the Houston area, and Little is running in District 12, covering parts of North Texas.

The board updates the statewide standards for the state’s 5.5 million students of all grades about once every decade.

For decades, conservative Christians have monitored and lobbied against more diverse or comprehensive classroom instruction both as advocates before the board and as elected members. Most recently, between 2006 and 2010, a Christian conservative bloc on the state board, led by then-board member Don McLeroy, inserted its ideals into history standards, such as questioning evolution and including the biblical figure Moses in history classes.

“We are likely to see an even more conservative State Board of Education next year,” said Carisa Lopez, senior political director at the Texas Freedom Network, which has fought for more inclusive classroom materials since the group’s inception in 1995.

But conservative organizations like Texas Values celebrated the delay of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, describing it as a vote to “reject Critical Race Theory.”

“Now, the State Board of Education has time to get it right and consider better TEKS that will continue to teach about patriotic historical values and Judeo-Christian heritage in American and Texas History,” said Mary Elizabeth Castle, senior policy adviser for Texas Values, in a statement following the vote to delay.

Because the 15 races are tied to specific districts, Deen said for Republicans, it’s not about getting people motivated to vote, but making sure the candidates appeal to the voters.

In this case, being firmly against critical race theory, however they define it, is something conservatives value, she said.

In District 15, Republican challenger Aaron Kinsey ousted GOP incumbent Johnson in the March primary. Kinsey was endorsed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and former Gov. Rick Perry. Kinsey also received a donation from conservative megadonor Tim Dunn and large donations from the Charter Schools Now political action committee, the political arm of the Texas Public Charter Schools Association.

Kinsey has said that critical race theory is taught under different guises and that Texas needs teachers who can identify how it is being rebranded. He is running unopposed.

In District 2, which covers part of the Gulf Coast, Republican LJ Francis won the Republican primary for the open seat and based his campaign on banning critical race theory from schools, claiming that “woke liberals” are pushing a critical race theory agenda. He faces Democrat Victor Perez.

In District 11, which covers parts of Tarrant and Parker counties, Republican incumbent Pat Hardy won the nomination. She was first elected in 2002. Going into the primaries, Hardy made it a priority to get critical race theory and the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” out of classrooms. Texas law already prohibits teaching about “The 1619 Project.”

Disclosure: Texas Freedom Network, Texas Public Charter Schools Association, New York Times and University of Texas – Arlington have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Despite headlines about anti-CRT protests and legislation, the poll’s findings “suggest a vacuum of knowledge — especially among lower-income individuals and those with lower levels of education — into which partisans on either side may be able to influence people’s understandings and beliefs about what CRT is,” the researchers state. “Additionally, it calls into question what exactly Americans are reflecting on when they express their beliefs about the role of CRT in public schools.” 

Acceptance of some elements of the theory, they also found, cleaves along party lines: “The idea that racism is central and fundamental to the U.S. experience, perhaps the most central tenet of CRT, was highly divisive by political identification, with 69% of Democrats in agreement, compared to just 24% of Republicans.” 

The poll was administered by researchers at the university’s Rossier School of Education and Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research in August and September to 3,751 individuals as part of the Understanding America Study, a decade-long effort tracking economic and social conditions and children’s COVID-era educational experiences. The USC team, which includes curriculum expert Morgan Polikoff, designed the survey to test how representative the “loud voices — and the news coverage amplifying them” are of parents and voters.

The poll found broad agreement that students should be taught controversial topics involving race, gun control, gun ownership rights and abortion in high school, but not elementary grades. Majorities also favored teaching high schoolers about LGBTQ rights and culture, albeit in lower numbers and more likely along partisan divides. Depending on the specific topic, as many as 86% of Democrats supported high school students learning about LGBTQ topics, compared with 30% to 39% of Republicans. 

Support for exposing students to topics involving sexual orientation and gender identity was much lower than for other subjects, states the report: “Despite substantial gains in social acceptance and rights for LGBTQ individuals, these results indicate the fragility of those gains and the precarious place in American schools of LGBTQ students and teachers as well as students with LGBTQ parents.” 

There is little appetite for teaching younger students about sex or sexuality, gender or violence. Eighty-six percent of respondents said elementary pupils should be taught about the Founding Fathers; 85%, patriotism and the contributions of women and people of color; 84%, critical thinking; 75%, the history of slavery; and 61%, racial inequality. Those polled were evenly divided on immigrant and voter rights.

In general, however, respondents do not think elementary students actually are being taught about the subjects they oppose. And most acknowledged they don’t know which topics are, in fact, taught — a finding that held true regardless of whether a household had school-aged children. 

“On most topics, Republicans and Democrats agree about whether students should learn/read about them or not,” the researchers write. “These findings suggest that efforts by Republicans to target the early-grades curriculum are politically shrewd, given the widespread belief that young children should be sheltered from these issues.”

Those polled differed on which books should be assigned by teachers versus which should simply be made available. Most Americans oppose students of any age being assigned books with LGBTQ topics, profanity and depictions of violence or sex, though there is broad support for high school students having access to books on almost all the topics surveyed. 

“Considering these findings, recent laws stifling the teaching of controversial topics in high school run counter to the overwhelming views of Americans of both parties that these topics should be taught in balanced ways,” the researchers note. 

There is widespread agreement that parents should have more control over the curriculum than they currently do, and high support among Republicans that parents should be able to opt their children out of content with which they disagree. 

“Majorities of Americans from all racial/ethnic, income and education groups support parents opting their children out of lessons with content they disagree with (as do just under half of Democrats),” says the report. “Should this level of opting-out materialize, it would be a logistical nightmare for already overburdened teachers and schools.”

In Jim Crow’s Pink Slip, scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”

While Black students now represent about 15 percent of K-12 enrollment, just 7 percent of teachers and 11 percent of principals are Black. Research shows that this dearth of Black educators has consequences: One 2018 study, for instance, found that Black students who had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

What’s more, Fenwick says, current threats over issues such as Critical Race Theory are cut from the same cloth as the threats that Black educators faced post-Brown.

74 contributor Greg Toppo spoke with Fenwick, an education policy professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at Howard University, about the Senate hearings, the backlash to Brown and ways to bring Black teachers back into the classroom.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Can you take us back to the moment when you first learned about this history?

Leslie T. Fenwick: I learned this history on my own as part of my disgust with a Politics of Education class that I was taking as a doctoral student. The professor decided that the class on the politics of education would not discuss Brown! Instead, we were going to start at a different point, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision [the 1971 decision that upheld busing to achieve integrated schools]. And I remember being outraged by that. If there’s any place where we should be unpacking Brown, it should be in that class. Additionally, the faculty member opened the class with this roster of statistics reflecting disparities in education between Blacks and whites, but I was concerned that there was no framing for these statistics, and that without the framing, there was kind of a tacit reinforcement of some racist assumptions about Blacks and intellectual and academic underachievement. So after class I marched to the library, almost in protest, saying to myself that I was going to bring back some statistics and facts to inform this faculty member about education disparities and also to make the case for why we should be discussing Brown. And as I’m looking for resources in the library — I’m literally in the stacks because this is before the Internet — I come across these Senate hearings on the displacement of Black principals. And I start reading them. And that’s where I learned about this history. I carried those transcripts around for quite some time, looking for someone to write the book that I ended up writing.

Those 1971 Senate hearings feel like a hidden history. Why are they not more widely known?

These [Senate hearing] transcripts have been cited at least 100 times in work by scholars and journalists, but no one has written in depth about the most prominent focus of the transcripts, which was Black educators’ superior academic credentials and professional experiences, and how they were replaced by lesser-qualified whites. I wasn’t expecting to find that. … This is the thrust of the hearings. And yet in all the work that cites the hearings, there’s not a focus on these Black educators’ exceptional academic credentials.

You paraphrase testimony from the hearings, writing that as school desegregation slowly played out post-Brown, “White principals and teachers became its direct beneficiaries, while Black educators were its primary prey.” Reading that, I wondered, “Who were the hunters?”

We’re talking about life in the 17 dual-system states, although outside of those states, there are jurisdictions that also have racially segregated schools. And we see, even in the North, this is happening too. But en masse, it’s happening in the 17 racially segregated states, from Delaware down to Florida, over to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, etc. And the hunters become governors, mayors, state legislatures — not individual legislators, but legislatures — and also locally elected officials: mayors, but also school superintendents and school boards. Remember, this is a time still after Brown of a lot of racial constriction. The customs of racism and Jim Crow are alive and well, which means that Blacks experience difficulty and barriers to voting. So that means local officials, school board members, superintendents in the states and jurisdictions where they are elected — and certainly state legislatures and governors [are involved]. And so without full voting rights extended to Blacks, those controlling the state and local levers of power and policy are almost all white and mainly committed to maintaining the segregationist hold on schools. And these are the individuals and entities that facilitate, through the use of state budgets and the use of state codes and statutes, the firing, dismissal and demotion of Black principals and teachers.

You write that Thurgood Marshall in 1955 noted that Black educators’ jobs needed to be protected. Did he and the legal team go into Brown with this possibility on their minds?

There was a series of cases that led up to Brown that were about disparities in paying Black and white teachers. Again, Black teachers with more credentials would make less money in the 17 dual-system states than white teachers with certificates. Thurgood Marshall and many of his team litigated those cases … Marshall and his team knew Black educator displacement was likely to happen. Remember, prior to Brown they’re going to Southern and border states, and they’re litigating all the cases around pay inequalities and voter registration. They knew the parameters of Jim Crow very well. In fact, early on, Marshall establishes the Teacher Information and Security Department of the NAACP to provide funding for legal support to the Black principals and teachers whom he thought would be illegally targeted and lose their jobs as a result of white backlash to Brown.

Do you give Marshall’s legal team any culpability for being naive in their strategy?

I don’t hold the Brown decision, nor the men who were the geniuses behind that decision, culpable. But what I do hold culpable is white resistance and the ability of local and state leaders to, in a swoop, use state statutes and budgets to support their segregationist agenda in the face of Brown, which would become the law of the land. Brown was right: There is no place in an American democracy for segregation. There is no reason Black citizens should not be able to access tax-supported institutions. There is no reason we should have, in this great country, racially segregated customs and laws. Brown was a great and brilliant decision. But there was powerful backlash to the decision that continued for at least 25 years. Sadly, I think it’s still continuing. In fact, the current death threats against superintendents who have initiated race equity initiatives, the physical intimidation of school board members, the threats against teachers and to burn books — when I was writing Jim Crow’s Pink Slip and then looking at the current news, it’s the same script, and that really shocks me.

You’ve anticipated my next question: Reading your book, I felt like the conversations we’re seeing now about CRT and pushing students away from subjects that make them uncomfortable are a direct result of this history. Can you reflect on that?

I wrote the book to push against this myth that there are not enough Black teachers, because after Brown, Blacks fled the profession to pursue fields and careers that were previously unavailable. Well, the history doesn’t say that, nor do U.S. Labor Department statistics show that. And we’re still living with this history: Of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, about 7 percent are Black. About 11 percent of the nation’s 93,000 principals are Black. And less than 3 percent of the nation’s almost 14,000 superintendents are Black. And so I ask myself, and I ask the reader: Where would we be if these generations of Black educators, who were more credentialed than their white peers who replaced them, who had a personal commitment to end anti-Black racism, who had put their lives on the line to lead voter-rights campaigns in their communities, who were committed to a representative democracy — what if they hadn’t been fired? What if they had been in place during a critical time in our nation’s history and were part of building integrated schools? Where might we be as a nation now?

As you write, they weren’t just teaching, they were also politically active.

Many of these principals and teachers were establishing voting-rights campaigns in their locales. They were establishing NAACP chapters. This was their activism. And in other literature, they’re called community activists and community leaders. But more specifically, their community activism was devoted to helping Blacks get registered to vote and working with the NAACP on lots of equality issues. And so they were threats. These Black educators were cornerstones of political activism even in the face of threats to their own lives.

So in 2022, if the dearth of Black teachers isn’t a recruitment issue, what’s the solution?

When the Nixon administration was pressured about this as a result of the Senate hearings in the ‘70s, the response of the administration was not pro-integration. They designated $3.2 million to the retraining of Black educators for integrated schools. Well, Black educators didn’t need retraining. On a near one-to-one basis, they were more credentialed than the white educators who replaced them. So, the Nixon administration’s retraining investment is literally used to usher Black principals and teachers out of the profession. I go into great, great detail and cite the federal documents that show how they were ushered out of the field. So we need a counter-investment, and particularly in institutions that produce large percentages or numbers of Black and other educators of color. I always say that even in 2022, HBCUs, which are 3 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, are producing 50 percent of the nation’s Black teachers — and two HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions), one in Texas and one in Florida, produce 90 percent of the nation’s Latinx teachers. So we do need some financial investment in the institutions that are producing teachers of color. And we need to examine, I think, any other structural barriers preventing Black and other teachers of color from entering the profession, either as teacher education students or novice teachers.

It strikes me that it’s such a vicious cycle: If you’re a Black student and don’t see Black teachers, your incentive to do this work, to see yourself in this job, just gets reduced. And that feeds into an ongoing cycle.

We know that academic and social benefits accrue to African-American, Hispanic/Latinx students when they’re in highly diverse-staffed schools. They’re less likely to be expelled, less likely to be misplaced in special education, more likely to graduate high school, more likely to apply for college, have reading and math achievement that’s excellent in certain grades. And so we are losing out on some academic achievement, not just for Black and brown students, but possibly for all students. I say in the book, over and over again, that all children benefit from having diverse models of intellectual authority.

See previous 74 Interviews: professor Daryl Scott on teaching the history of race in America; author Amanda Ripley on losing trust in schools; professor Seth Gershenson on the importance of teacher diversity; author Paul Tough on higher education myths; and the full archive of 74 interviews.

A spate of policies banning books and tamping down teachings on race and gender proliferated nationwide in 2021 and 2022 — but are those rules actually legal? The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a multi-state effort to find out by challenging them in court.

The approach includes a mixture of lawsuits, public records requests and legal letters alleging the right-wing rules violate the First Amendment and other constitutional protections.

In Mississippi, a letter from the organization helped reverse a mayor’s decision to withhold $110,000 in funding from a local library until librarians removed LGBTQ literature. In Virginia, the ACLU urged a state court to dismiss a ban on the sale and distribution of the books Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury — which it did. And in Florida, a lawsuit litigated by the organization seeks to throw out provisions of the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” law that infringe on college and university instructors’ long-established academic freedoms.

“These laws have absolutely no relationship to any legitimate pedagogical interest and, in fact, are purely partisan political tools,” said Emerson Sykes, ACLU staff attorney. “We focus on challenging these laws in court.”

To date, legislation limiting classroom discussion of race and gender has been proposed in 42 states and adopted in 17, according to an Education Week tracker. Many outlaw “divisive” topics and lessons that cause students to “​​feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” on account of their race or gender. Some explicitly ban the teaching of critical race theory, a graduate-level scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in American institutions. The term has become a catch-all many Republicans use to describe teachings about systemic racism.

Right-wing, mostly white parent groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have pushed for the bills, which have been supported almost exclusively by conservative politicians. Those who favor the restrictions broadly argue that classroom teachings about race can serve to divide students and give them a pessimistic view of the country’s history. They contend LGBTQ material can make students vulnerable to sexual predation, though those claims have not been substantiated, and should be under the purview of parents, not schools.

Simultaneous moves to ban books have also spread in response to parent activism. With more than 680 attempts to remove or restrict literature in schools and libraries from January through August, 2022 is on track to surpass 2021’s count, which was already “the highest number of attempted book bans since we began compiling these lists 20 years ago,” ALA President Patricia Wong said in an April press release.

So far, the ACLU has challenged classroom censorship efforts in 10 states, including three lawsuits against rules limiting teachings on race and gender. In its more than 100 years of operation, the organization’s free speech battles have extended across all political ideologies, including defending the rights of the KKK and Nazis to express their views peacefully. 

The number of challenges to anti-CRT laws could soon increase, said Sykes,

“We are actively tracking and considering litigation in multiple states at the moment.”

Here’s a nationwide look at what has played out so far:

Oklahoma

In October 2021, the ACLU and affiliate organizations filed a lawsuit, BERT v. O’Connor, challenging a statewide bill that restricts public school instruction on race and gender. As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

The court’s decision will have ramifications for Tulsa, the state’s second-largest school district, which received a demotion in its accreditation status after the State Board of Education found an implicit bias training it administered was in violation of the state anti-CRT law. The city, which was the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that left hundreds of Black residents dead and over 1,250 homes destroyed, had recently doubled down on teaching the dreadful, long-buried episode. The demotion does not prevent teachers from covering that history, but some fear may lead teachers and school leaders to feel as if they are on thin ice.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is among the 17 states that have passed laws restricting lessons on race and gender. The ACLU’s lawsuit, Mejia v. Edelblut, alleges that the Granite State’s legislation is so vague that it violates the 14th Amendment, because teachers’ innocent misunderstandings can place their jobs in jeopardy. The state chapter of the National Education Association, one of the plaintiffs, said teachers repeatedly voiced they were confused about what they could and could not teach, and were scared of the repercussions for guessing wrong. Letters to the state asking for clarification, the ACLU says, went unanswered.

Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act in April, tamping down on teachers’ and employers’ ability to hold discussions related to race and gender. “We will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces,” DeSantis said.

But the law has already run into legal difficulties. In August, a federal judge placed an injunction on the provisions that apply to the workplace. Now, a group of seven professors and one undergraduate student, represented by the ACLU, have also challenged the law’s restrictions on colleges and universities.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

Tennessee

In February, after the McMinn County Board of Education decided to remove the graphic novel Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, the ACLU of Tennessee filed an open records request calling for the board to share the parent complaints it received over the book.

Virginia

After Virginia initiated proceedings to block the sale and distribution of two books, Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury, the ACLU and ACLU of Virginia filed a joint motion alongside several independent bookstores urging a state court to dismiss the obscenity proceedings against the two works. On Aug. 30, the court followed that recommendation and dismissed the attempted ban.

“The First Amendment is clear — disliking the contents of a book doesn’t mean the government can ban it,” the ACLU wrote on Twitter.

Missouri

A Trump-appointed federal judge denied an ACLU motion for a preliminary injunction against the Wentzville School District’s book ban. The ACLU of Missouri originally filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Wentzville students after the school district pulled several books with Black, Hispanic, Asian and LGBTQ main characters from the shelves of its libraries. The lawsuit sought to temporarily halt the district’s book review policy. A trial on whether to permanently ban the district from enforcing that policy is set for October 2023.

Montana

The ACLU of Montana in February filed a public records request after officials in Kalispell, Montana held meetings over whether to ban Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. The board dismissed the first potential ban and has delayed a decision regarding the second. 

Meanwhile, books peppered with bullet holes were left in the Kalispell book drop in early August. Local police investigated and concluded that the books — none of them controversial titles — were mistakenly donated after being used for target practice, but the unnerving incident spurred the resignation of at least two librarians.

Nebraska

In late May, a Nebraska school district shut down its award-winning student-run Viking Saga newspaper three days after the 54-year-old outlet published an LGBTQ-themed edition. The superintendent of Northwest Public Schools, in Grand Island, Nebraska, said the paper’s final issue was not the sole reason for its elimination. But school board Vice President Zach Mader was quoted in the Grand Island Independent, saying, “If (taxpayers) read that (issue), they would have been like, ‘Holy cow. What is going on at our school?’”

In response, the ACLU of Nebraska submitted a public records request for all documents and communication records related to the decision scrapping the publication. The district’s legal representatives have said they are currently working to put those materials together. The ACLU also sent a letter to the superintendent warning that the move violated students’ constitutional rights and other federal protections.

“The District’s unlawful attempts to quash student journalism and student opinions violate students’ rights to freedom of speech and equal protection under the Nebraska and United States Constitutions,” said the letter. “We urge the District to immediately remedy these violations [by] reinstat[ing] both the school paper and the journalism program.”

Mississippi

In January, Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee withheld $110,000 from the town’s public library, giving librarians an ultimatum: get rid of LGBTQ literature or lose operational funds that had been slated for the building. The ACLU of Mississippi in February responded with a warning letter to McGee. “You have no authority to undertake such measures, and your actions are unconstitutional,” staff attorney McKenna Raney-Gray wrote. Following the letter, the funding was delivered to Ridgeland Public Library.

Idaho

In May, the Nampa School District banned 22 books from libraries and classrooms, including The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Concerned over a potential First Amendment violation and the possibility of bias in the board members’ decision, the ACLU of Idaho in July filed a public records request for all communications related to the board’s adoption of the policy.

New polling on the American education system shows widespread approval of local schools — along with ominous signs of dissatisfaction among both parents and the public at large.

In a report published today by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever been recorded in the survey’s 48-year history, with 54% giving them an A or B. That figure represents an 11-point increase from 2018 and a robust show of support given the extraordinary challenges of post-COVID learning recovery.

But respondents also showed only modest trust in educators to deliver capable instruction on potentially controversial subjects like race, gender and sexuality. In keeping with other recent public opinion data, that result was split across partisan and ideological lines, with Democrats showing greater trust than Republicans. And the percentage of respondents saying they would want their own children to become teachers fell to just 37%, a record low.

Teresa Preston, PDK’s director of publications, said the perceived desirability of the teaching profession had been declining in recent years and that its current low might reflect public recognition of the hardships inflicted by COVID.

Observed Preston, “2018 was the first year when we had a majority of respondents say that they would not want their child to become a teacher, and now it’s an even higher percentage. It suggests continued awareness of how tough teaching is, especially during the pandemic, and all the pressures that teachers have been under.”

Poor compensation was the most commonly listed reason for the negative reaction (cited by 29% of respondents), followed by workplace demands and stress (26%) and lack of respect (23%). Across 13 previous polls that included a version of that question, an average of 60% of respondents favored the idea of their children working in classrooms.

Perhaps more concerning was the low confidence in educators to teach sensitive subjects. Although fully 72% of public school parents said they had faith in their community’s teachers, compared with 63% of the full adult sample, far fewer members of the general public trusted teachers to “appropriately” handle politically contentious issues. 

Only in the case of U.S. history and civics did bare majorities believe teachers could do this (56% and 50%, respectively); in five other areas — social-emotional growth (48%), racial and ethnic diversity (46%), media literacy (46%), gender and sexuality (38%), and how the history of racism affects America today (44%) — fewer than half of respondents said the same. Among parents, who generally thought more highly of teachers’ capacity to navigate dicey subjects, just 44% said teachers would handle gender and sexuality appropriately.

Those figures dovetail with findings from other recent surveys. An Ipsos poll from October showed a six-point dip in trust for teachers between 2019 and 2021. More recently, a survey released this week by the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education found a majority of state residents wanted parents to be able to opt students out of content that they found objectionable.

Notably, stark divisions existed in which demographic groups trusted teachers in their community most (though margins of error were higher for these subgroups, given their smaller sample sizes). Black respondents in particular said they trusted teachers less than their white counterparts with respect to every controversial subject. Just one-third said they believed teachers would handle gender, sexuality or racial diversity appropriately.

A partisan disparity prevailed as well. While Democrats said they trusted local teachers by a nearly 50-point margin (73%, versus 27% who said they did not), the spread among Republicans was less than half that (60%/40%). Just 58% of independents said they had confidence in local teachers, compared with 42% who didn’t. 

Preston noted that respondents did not list reasons for their assessment of teachers — it is possible, for instance, that African-Americans want much more intensive instruction in racial diversity than is currently offered, she said.

“I think it does speak to the fact that Americans have a lot of questions about what’s going on in their local schools and schools across the nation,” said Preston.

That view was shared by others in the education community.

Shannon Holston, the chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that favors strengthening teacher preparation and classroom standards, said it was “heartening” that parents and the public gave high marks to their local schools. Still, she added, the declining prestige of the profession was a major concern that could be driven by the perception that “teaching doesn’t require specialized skills and knowledge.” 

“The significant increase in the number of people who wouldn’t want their child to become a teacher is concerning,” Holston said in a statement. “To elevate the status of teaching so that we can attract and retain the strong, diverse teacher workforce our children need, we must set a high bar for entry into the classroom and provide teachers with comprehensive support and the competitive salaries they deserve.” 

The poll’s full sample was 1,008 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

Correction: Shannon Holston is chief of policy and programs at the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Late Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in a suit challenging the employer portion of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, suspending enforcement of the law in the workplace. The Obama-nominated judge wrote in his Honeyfund v. DeSantis opinion: 

“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”

A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning challenges the portion of the law that applies to colleges and universities.

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday charges that a Florida law designed to “fight back against woke indoctrination” by limiting classroom discussions of race and gender violates the constitutional free speech rights of college students and professors.

Florida’s Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (Stop W.O.K.E.) Act took effect July 1. It prohibits workplaces and schools from requiring training or instruction that may make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, gender or national origin.

But Jerry Edwards, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, one of the legal organizations behind the case, said the law unconstitutionally censors the free expression of higher education students and educators.

“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act is a shameful result of propaganda and fearmongering,” he said in a statement. “A free state does not seek to curtail the inalienable right to free expression in its college and university classrooms.”

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Florida is one of 17 states that have sought to restrict how educators cover topics related to race and gender, according to a tracker maintained by EdWeek. 

However, it’s the only state that applies its censorship law to higher education, said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” she told The 74. 

Seven Florida professors and one undergraduate are named as plaintiffs, represented by the national ACLU, ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the law firm of Ballard Spahr. The suit names the state university system’s board of governors and several other officials as defendants. It requests an injunction seeking an immediate halt to enforcement of the bill in colleges and universities.

Plaintiff Russell Almond is an associate professor teaching statistics at Florida State University and covers how to use race as a variable in empirical research. Provisions in the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that prohibit educators from presenting “colorblind” ideologies as racist put his teachings in jeopardy, the lawsuit charges.

Another professor, Dana Thompson Dorsey, will teach a course in “Critical Race Studies: Research, Policy and Praxis” at the University of South Florida this school year. She fears that explaining how racism is embedded in American institutions — a central aspect of the scholarly framework — could put her in violation of the law. While the Sunshine State does not explicitly ban Critical Race Theory, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office has said the law is intended to prevent CRT from showing up in classrooms.

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said after he signed the bill into law in April.

The act forces many educators to present foundational principles of their disciplines in a “false light,” presenting them as “disputed when it’s honestly not,” said Watson. 

Plaintiff Johana Dauphin, a senior at Florida State University, worries that she will be ill prepared for graduate school if the law interferes with her professors’ ability to convey key understandings that students in other states receive.

“I fear that this law will cause my professors to avoid discussing race and gender altogether, which will result in my perspective and lived experience as a Black, female student being effectively minimized and erased in the classroom,” said Dauphin. “As a student, I deserve to see myself and the issues that impact me — including issues around race and gender — reflected in my classroom discussions.”

Thursday’s filing marks the third lawsuit the ACLU has brought against a statewide censorship law. Similar cases in Oklahoma and New Hampshire have yet to be decided.

A previous legal challenge seeking to prevent the Stop W.O.K.E. Act from taking effect was dismissed by a federal judge in June. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker clarified in a 23-page order that he was not “determining whether the challenged regulations are constitutional, morally correct or good policy.” Rather, the four plaintiffs — two professors, a student and a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant — did not provide sufficient evidence of personal injury.

Other lawsuits challenging the Florida law remain undecided. At an early August hearing, Walker appeared sympathetic to arguments leveled against the state by several businesses, including a Ben & Jerry’s franchise. The federal judge emphasized the vagueness of a particular section that labels training discriminatory if it causes an employee to believe a person of “one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex or national origin.”

“Apparently, I’m a person of below-average intelligence, because I have no idea what that means,” said Walker.

John Ohlendorf, an attorney representing the state, defended the provisions: “The state of Florida has a compelling interest in preventing employers from forcing employees to listen to speech that suggests one race is inherently superior to another.”

The case brought Thursday is “framed differently” than prior challenges, Watson said. It has yet to be assigned, but it’s possible Walker could be the one to review it. Should that happen, the ACLU hopes for a speedy ruling, as he has moved in a matter of weeks on previous decisions around the bill. 

“We’re confident the Stop W.O.K.E. Act unconstitutionally infringes upon academic freedom and students’ right to learn,” said Watson. “I’m not able to comment predicting what the court may say.”

For the past year, Texas educators have struggled with a new law targeting how history and race are taught in the state’s public schools.

Some administrators thought it meant they needed to teach an opposing view of the Holocaust. For other school officials, the pressure of adhering to new restrictions about how to teach social studies was too much and for some it was the last straw: They quit. In one district, a Black principal was put on paid leave after being accused of teaching critical race theory, which he denied doing. He eventually reached a settlement with the district and resigned.

Now, eight months after the enactment of a law designed to de-emphasize the role of slavery and racism in American history in Texas social studies classes, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, the author of the state’s so-called “critical race theory” law, appeared before the State Board of Education in an attempt to offer better guidance about the law he helped craft.

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“That bill is not an attempt to sanitize or to teach our history in any other way than the truth — the good, the bad and the ugly — and those difficult things that we’ve been through and those things we’ve overcome,” Hughes said. “No one is saying that we don’t have systemic racism. But what we’re saying is, we’ve made a lot of progress. We have a long way to go. But the way to get there is to come together as Americans.”

His testimony came as the board was considering how to update the state’s social studies curriculum standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or the TEKS. It’s a process done every eight years for the state’s 5.5 million public school students.

The drafts of the updated curriculum are available online. Some changes being considered include the addition of a course on personal financial literacy and separate courses that focus on Asian and Native Americans. The SBOE will have a final vote on adopting the drafts in November and can choose to amend them.

Hughes’ appearance before the 15-member board was the first before the group since the law went into effect last December. He clarified that the intent of the law, also known as Senate Bill 3, was to make sure that no student comes away from class feeling guilty about the roles of their ancestors.

“We still teach that really bad things were done by people of particular races, and it may be that in teaching those things, students may feel guilty about that,” Hughes said. “What we’re saying is you don’t say, ‘Little Johnny, little Jimmy, you should feel bad because of what your forebears did.’”

Over the past year, conservative lawmakers have been focused on critical race theory, a university-level approach that examines how racism is embedded in all aspects of society. The term used by conservatives as a catch-all phrase to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools even though it is not taught in Texas schools.

The law — and the political rhetoric — has resulted in calls for greater scrutiny not only on what is taught but what information students should have access to when it comes to sex, gender and race. Last year, state Rep. Matt Krause asked that an investigation be conducted into which schools had books from a list of 850 titles that were mostly about race and LGBTQ issues.

SB 3 was the state’s second attempt in a year to curb how social studies classes are conducted in Texas. It replaced an earlier bill, House Bill 3979, which was passed in June 2021. At the time, Gov. Greg Abbott said more needed to be done to “abolish” critical race theory in Texas classrooms, and lawmakers went to work to craft a more restrictive measure. The result was SB 3.

Hughes backed education board chair Keven Ellis, a Republican, when Ellis said that it’s the job of the state board to determine what is taught, not the law.

Board member Aicha Davis, a Democrat, told Hughes that his law had already caused damage to the public school system and questioned if the lawmaker consulted with teachers and teacher groups before authoring the bill.

“We always talk about teachers leaving in droves and this was one of the reasons,” Davis said. “Teachers were literally scared to teach even the TEKS that existed because of this.”

During public comments, response to the board’s proposed standards were overall positive. There was one suggestion to change the term “internment” to “incarceration” when talking about how Japanese Americans were forced from their homes after the Pearl Harbor attack and detained by the federal government. There was also a call from some for more inclusion of Asian Americans in Texas social studies curriculum.

“I’m a Muslim American student,” said Ayaan Moledina, who testified on Monday. “Every year in school, we watched the same video about 9/11. Never ever has one of my teachers talked about the hate that has been directed towards Muslim Americans after 9/11. It is beyond me how this would be so controversial. Is having empathy controversial?”

Over the last year, there has been debate over whether SB 3 would affect the revision process, and until now, the drafts are pretty inclusive, said Chloe Latham Sikes, deputy director of policy at the Intercultural Development Research Association.

“This was a really good foundation for [the board] to start adopting standards,” Sikes said.

Carisa Lopez, senior political director at the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning watchdog group often involved in public education issues, said she likes the direction so far the board is taking. But she and others want to see whether board members make later additions before November.

There were some against the proposed curriculum, because they viewed them as anti-American.

“The changes I have seen so far, they’re anti-America and anti-Christian,” said Jackie Basinger, chair for the chapter of Moms for Liberty in Travis County. “Inequalities will exist as long as there are lazy people.”

Disclosure: Texas Freedom Network has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

A school board in southeastern Wisconsin has rejected a book recommended for use in a 10th-grade accelerated English class due in part to concerns that it lacked “balance” regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Curriculum Planning Committee for the Muskego-Norway district, which serves about 5,000 students in Waukesha and Racine counties, had selected “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a  2002 historical novel by Julie Otsuka based on her own family’s experiences. The book, winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Asian American Literary Award, tells in varying perspectives the story of a Japanese American family uprooted from its home in Berkeley, California, and sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert.

But on June 13, the board’s Educational Services Committee, made up of three of its seven members, sent the book back to the curriculum committee, from which it is not expected to return. 

At that meeting, committee and school board member Laurie Kontney complained that “When the Emperor Was Divine” was selected as a “diverse” book, according to detailed notes taken by Ann Zielke, a school district resident and parent. Corrie Prunuske, a Muskego resident and parent, confirms hearing this: “I think she said, ‘They only looked at diverse books.’ ”

“I asked why that would be an issue,” Zielke recounts in her notes. “[Kontney] said it can’t be chosen on that basis and I asked again if she had proof of that. Which they don’t. She said it can’t be all about ‘oppression.’ ” Committee member Boyer, by this account, said the selection committee needed to pick a book that was “without restriction”—that is, not intended to promote diversity. 

Kontney is the board’s newest member, having been elected in April on a platform that included, “CRITICAL THINKING NOT CRITICAL RACE THEORY.” 

Zielke also says she was told, in conversations with school board president Chris Buckmaster and board member Terri Boyer, who serves on the Educational Service Committee, that using the book would created a problem with “balance,” in part because the accelerated English class curriculum already includes a 10-page excerpt from a nonfiction book about the internment camps.

“So their claim is that having two texts in this class from what they’re terming is one perspective — meaning it’s the perspective of the Japanese who were interned — creates a balance issue,” Zielke says in an interview. The feeling was that “we need to have more perspective from the American government about why they did this.” 

Buckmaster, she says, explained to her that the kind of balance he has in mind would include discussion of the Rape of Nanjing, the mass killing of Chinese civilians committed by the Japanese that began on Dec. 13, 1937 and continued for six weeks. “So what he’s saying is, what you would need in this class is some sort of historical context of how horrible the Japanese were during World War II in order to understand the viewpoint of the American government in interning the Japanese.”

‘False balance’

Zielke, for her part, sees “no need for this type of false balance or both-sides-ism in telling the story of Japanese internment. The American government was wrong and has apologized for the racism that led to Japanese internment.” 

David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, a national nonprofit with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., agrees. 

“The call for a ‘balanced’ viewpoint in the context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans is deeply problematic, and racist, and plays into the same fallacies the United States Army used to justify the incarceration,” he wrote in a letter to the Muskego-Norway School Board. “We urge you to reconsider your position on the book’s use, understanding that while not every book and story can be told, to deny the use of one such as this under the pretenses you’ve given is wrong.”

Zielke says both Buckmaster and Boyer, in their conversations with her, said the district’s Curriculum Planning Committee may have been given a directive — it’s not clear from whom — to select a book by a non-white author. According to Zielke, “the board is saying that that somehow negates the process, because that is akin to some type of discrimination.”

After the June 13 committee meeting, Buckmaster got into a heated exchange with Hapeman, who works for the district as an educational assistant. She says he told her, regarding the board’s action, “This is why they were elected. This is what they ran on.” Emily Sorensen, a community member who was sitting nearby, says she heard him make this comment.

Buckmaster, Boyer, Kontney, and Tracy Blair, the third board member who serves on the Educational Resources Committee, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Kelly Thomspon, the district superintendent.

Absent from ‘banned books’ lists

Across the country, the MAGA crowd has gone on a rampage against educational materials deemed inappropriate for young minds. 

PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, tracked 1,585 instances of books being banned from schools between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, involving 1,145 unique titles. 

“When the Emperor Was Divine” is not among them.

In a letter to the Muskego-Norway board, Jordan Pavlin, editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf and Otsuka’s editor at the publishing house, noted that “When the Emperor Was Divine” “has been course adopted in hundreds of schools throughout the country, where it has become a staple of high school English classes.” 

She added that historical fiction “has the power not only to edify but to transform and deepen our perspectives; it enables us to look outward, beyond the confines of our circumscribed lives, with greater sympathy and understanding.”

In the 2020 presidential election, the city of Muskego, which makes up the majority of the Muskego-Norway School District, voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by a margin of two to one. That’s even higher than the margin that voted for Trump in all of deep red Waukesha County, in which Muskego resides. 

Yet all of the objections to “When the Emperor Was Divine” have come from school board members, not the community at large. 

“I am not aware of any opposition to the use of the Otsuka book from any parents, students, teachers, or community members,” Hapeman says. “The only opposition to the book I am aware of is from school board members.”

Parents show support

Indeed, in advance of the June 13 meetings, more than 130 parents and community members, many of them alumni of the Muskego-Norway School District, signed a petition supporting the book’s selection. Written by Lawrence Hapeman, Allison’s son and a 2021 graduate of district schools, the 1800-word petition takes issue with the various objections to “When the Emperor Was Divine.”

These included a claim, purportedly made by more than one school board member, that the book is “too sad.” The petition calls this argument “fundamentally nonsensical,” noting that other books approved for classroom use in the district include Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” “in which most characters die by the end of the novel in often brutal and graphic ways.”

The petition also argues that the educational staff involved in the selection of “When the Emperor Was Divine” deserve to have their decisions supported. It cites a June 10 article in the Wisconsin Examiner about how the school district of Waukesha “has received at least 54 resignations from employees between April 1 and June 5 of this year, as compared to 28 resignations last year during that same time period—a 93% increase.” 

“Many of these resignations come from teachers who have cited a lack of respect and acceptance from their school board as primary causes for their departure,” states the petition. It anonymously quotes two district teachers about a perceived lack of support.

“I’ve never felt so under attack for just doing my job or doing my duty to teach kids about others and their world,” one teacher says. “I feel like I have to defend every book that has a person of color in it.” Another teacher says, “The anti-diversity and lack of pushback against that from district leaders has left me actively seeking other positions in districts that support diversity.”

As for the argument that “this book should not be approved because the selection committee was non-negotiably set on picking a work by an author who is a woman of color,” the petition links to a district directive, issued in 2020, to seek ways “to support understanding of the history of marginalization and the positive impact we can have on a daily basis when we use an equity focused mindset that addresses disparities.” 

The petition states: “As residents of the world and heirs of its history, we must be given the opportunity to reflect on the past and point out the pain and suffering caused in the past. This reflection is meant to prepare ourselves to create a stronger country and world by rejecting outright the mistakes of the past.”

Or, as Inoue put it in his letter to the school board, “The story of what happened to the Japanese American community is an American story, one that balances the challenges of injustice, but also the patriotic stories of service and resistance. If anything, these are stories that need to be told more in our schools.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

When the news broke that Florida had rejected math textbooks that it said could be used to “indoctrinate students,” I got several calls from reporters trying to make sense of the situation.

As someone who has spent more time than I’d care to admit reviewing mathematics textbooks, I was more than a little suspicious of the claim that these materials contained anything that could even be confused for critical race theory. And now that I’ve seen the evidence, I realize the conclusions are just as specious as I imagined. But this laughable episode does speak to several aspects of the current curriculum-related controversies roiling the nation’s schools and how they could impact student learning.

“Florida rejects publishers’ attempts to indoctrinate students,” hissed the state Department of Education’s press release in April, quoting Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as saying, “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.”

A couple weeks later, the state released the results of its analysis of the textbooks, basically revealing that the whole thing was made up. It turns out that only a few ultra-conservative reviewers — primarily a member of the conservative Moms for Liberty and a “civics education specialist” at conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan — identified any problems with the materials.

And the material they objected to was factually accurate, including a statement that the U.S. has not eradicated poverty or racism and word problems referencing the nation’s gender pay gap, racial profiling and racial disparities in magnet-school admissions. Among other instances was an allusion to so-called social-emotional learning concepts such as how to interact with classmates, instruction now banned in Florida.

Regardless of whether one believes that SEL-related ideas should appear in mathematics materials (the skills and behaviors at their core, including self-discipline, certainly contribute to students’ success and are qualities conservatives tend to promote), the examples highlighted in the reviews have nothing to do with indoctrination or critical race theory. The fact is that Florida’s (mostly Republican) education officials wanted such content in instructional materials until conservative activists in recent years decided to taint the SEL terminology with a racial tinge. Parents also want this sort of content, even more so since the pandemic isolated students and disrupted their learning.

What are the larger takeaways from the Florida tempest?

First, the fact that only the most strident partisans can find things to object to in school textbooks points to how hard publishers work to avoid objectionable content, lest they lose money by alienating potential customers. There is no critical race theory in K-12 textbooks from mainstream publishers, period. Similarly, only the most strident reviewers on the left will find anything so conservative in them as to be objectionable.

Second, conservative textbook backlash is likely to spread beyond the Sunshine State. With the way partisanship is tied up in, well, everything these days, and with the transparent attempts of conservative activists to turn school curriculum into a partisan wedge issue, I expect this nonsense to metastasize to other red states. If that happens, we may end up with red-state and blue-state versions of certain curriculum materials, or SEL-included and SEL-excluded versions.

Will this matter for children? Not necessarily — textbooks are just one source that teachers use to guide their instruction, and it’s likely that teachers’ own political views matter as much or more than whatever is in the textbook. A teacher who wants to include SEL in math lessons can go on TeachersPayTeachers.com and find thousands of resources in two minutes of searching.

But things might get a bit hairier when it comes to English language arts, social studies or science. Just last month, the Florida Department of Education issued guidance on social studies textbooks advising publishers to avoid “critical race theory, social justice, culturally responsive teaching, social and emotional learning, and any other unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination.” Research is clear that students benefit in both the immediate and long term when their curriculum is relevant to them and their backgrounds.

Will curriculum reviewers in red states throw out reading passages that center Black families and their experiences because of made-up concerns about CRT? Will authors of color find their books stricken from the materials? Will students in red states be taught scientifically inaccurate information about climate change or evolution? These are real concerns that may worsen and do real harm to public schoolchildren.

For the most part, the Florida situation was a transparently manufactured controversy that allowed DeSantis to score points with his conservative base for being aggressively anti-woke. But it does portend increasing partisan involvement in the curriculum, and that could be troublesome, despite the fact that parents and teachers want accurate, high-quality curriculum materials and, thanks to the work of a number of national initiatives, more and better materials are flowing to educators than ever before.

An erroneous outcry around critical race theory created more red tape for Akeem Brown, complicating the opening of Essence Preparatory, a school designed to celebrate the Black and brown communities who partnered with Brown to co-create it.

BES identifies and prepares excellent leaders to transform education in their communities. Brown is a 2020 BES Fellow, and we are proud to have walked alongside him in his remarkable journey to found Essence Prep, set to open in August 2022 serving students in kindergarten through second grade. 

Building and leading a locally responsive public charter school is the ultimate exercise in community organizing and engagement for school leaders. BES understands how to do this, and we believe Brown did it very successfully in designing Essence Prep.

While Essence Prep will deliver a high-quality education to any and all students, Brown intentionally co-created a public charter school with a predominantly Black and Latino community; a community who expressed a desire for a public educational option designed to meet the unique needs they face every day in San Antonio’s Eastside and beyond. The charter application he submitted in 2021 promised high academic standards, culturally responsive teaching, social-emotional learning and a focus on learning about public policy. 

At first, the Texas Education Agency enthusiastically recommended the school be granted a charter with an 11-3 vote. Days later, TEA leadership received feedback from an elected official citing unfounded concerns that Essence Prep was promoting critical race theory. Though this criticism inaccurately lumped together the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices with critical race theory, it effectively influenced TEA to request that Brown and his team remove anti-racist language from their website and from the charter application, unnecessarily lengthening the authorization process. Not only did this delay cost Essence Prep energy, time and money, it forced them to rewrite parts of the application that were important to the founding of the school — a process they had worked on together with the community.

To be clear, Essence Prep never promised to teach critical race theory; critical race theory was not mentioned in any part of the application, its curriculum, or its website. What Essence Prep promises is an inclusive learning environment that celebrates students’ cultures; ensures a psychologically safe environment for students of all backgrounds, needs and abilities; and teaches students to examine and interrupt the inequality they see in their own lives. Preventing anti-racism is inherently racist, and it is wrong.

Under the new Texas law, a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” Charter schools are public schools, held to the same accountability standards as any district-operated school and the curriculum taught in public charters must uphold state law. Unfounded claims about Essence Prep’s charter application created more work for a team made up entirely of people of color, forcing them to compromise on authentically representing the voices of the community, one of the hallmarks of their school model that parents stated they couldn’t find in other schools. Using these laws to limit opportunity for people of color is rooted in white supremacy. It is racist, and it is wrong.

Essence Prep was pressured to abandon its equity vision statement, which called for its school community to focus on “educational reform to achieve social, cultural, environmental, economic, and racial justice.“ All references to “Black and brown students,” and all references to anti-racism were dropped from their website and marketing materials. We at BES believe this pressure was driven by the fear that children might be taught to critically examine the world around them and create pathways to help all people overcome oppression. Those who fought against Essence Prep’s anti-racist design argued that such an educational experience would be uncomfortable for the school’s white students. This claim is baseless, and it is wrong. 

Families have a right to high-quality educational options that are intentionally designed to celebrate their communities and cultures and meet the unique needs of their students. Brown and his team spoke with nearly 500 families when designing Essence Prep; families who want their students to be able to interrupt the injustice they experience, develop knowledge of themselves and be agents of change in their communities and beyond. Essence Prep has promised to do this and more.

 Just as privileged, often white, communities have the opportunity to create and choose school options that meet the needs of their children, communities of color have the right to help design public school options that are aimed at creating safe, inclusive and anti-racist spaces for all students. Essence Prep will be that school when it opens its doors in a few months.

A significant share of respondents report being happy with the status quo regarding these hot-button subjects: 37% of Americans believe schools focus “about the right amount” on racism and 40% said the same about sex and sexuality, according to the survey released last week by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“I would think elected officials already know, but it might be useful to be reminded of the fact that their constituents’ political opinions may not be so easy to know and may not be so clear from what they’re seeing in the press or from who happens to show up at school board meetings,” said Adam Zelizer, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who helped write the survey.

Efforts to ban books about Black and LGBTQ people and limits on classroom instruction about racism and gender have become staples of conservative electoral politics. Despite a surge in book bans, the move is wildly unpopular — at least in theory. Among respondents, just 12%, including 18% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats, supported policies prohibiting books about divisive topics from being taught in schools. Yet Zelizer cautioned the finding could be misleading. 

“In the abstract, no one really supports banning a book from the library or preventing teachers from teaching,” he said. “It’s just when you get to specific examples that almost anyone can be convinced that some books are not appropriate.” 

Stark differences do exist across party lines on a range of contentious education issues. Slightly less than half of Republicans — 47% — said that schools focus too much on racism in the U.S., compared with just 9% of Democrats. Similarly, 42% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats said schools focus too much on issues around sex and sexuality. Slightly more than half of Democrats support policies that allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity compared to just 9% of Republicans. 

On another topic that has dominated school politics, the question of who should control what is taught in the classroom, half of respondents, including a plurality of both Republicans and Democrats, said that parents and educators had too little influence on classroom curriculum. Yet for GOP respondents, that meant parents lacked adequate influence while Democrats were more likely to say that teachers had too little voice in classroom curriculum decisions. 

Local and federal governments fared far worse. Nearly half of respondents — 45% — said that state governments maintain too much influence over curriculum and 43% said the same about federal entities. The largest share of respondents — 44% — said that local school board members maintain about the right amount of influence over curriculum decisions. A fifth of respondents said that school boards had too little power over curriculum and a third said they have too much. 

Overall, a minority of respondents support COVID-19 precautions in public schools. While 43% favor vaccine mandates, just over a third support mask mandates for students attending school in-person. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poll identified partisan differences for COVID-related questions, but also found a discrepancy between parents and those without school-age children. In fact, parents were less likely to support COVID-19 mitigation measures than those without kids. A third of parents with children in K-12 schools support vaccine mandates compared to 46% of those who are not parents of school-age children. Similarly, just 29% of parents support mask mandates for students attending school in-person compared to 39% of those without kids in school. 

“Parents want their kids in schools and apparently they’re willing to put up with some spread of COVID,” Zelizer said. “Meanwhile nonparents, everyone else in the public, are maybe only concerned with the spread of COVID and don’t care quite as much about whether kids are in schools or being homeschooled because it doesn’t affect them.”

Scenes of irate people at school board meetings have played out across the country over the last year as they protested COVID-19 mitigation measures like mask mandates and so-called critical race theory, an academic framework about systemic racism in legal systems that has become a catch-all for classroom instruction about race. 

Yet few Americans are actively engaged with their local school boards, the poll found. Just 12% of Americans said they attended a local school board meeting in the last five years and 15% communicated directly with a school board member. Fewer than half — 43% — reported following news about their local school boards. 

In some places, school board members have faced significant public scrutiny and in some cases, threats of physical violence. In the poll, however, about two-thirds of Americans said they’re at least somewhat confident in their local school board. Zelizer noted that Republicans and Democrats held similar confidence levels on their local school boards. 

“It’s not like all of this activism and advocacy and policymaking activity has led to one of the parties being more angry at school boards than the other, at least in our sample among regular voters,” he said. “The scenes of rowdy attendees at school boards to the point of harassing school board members or experts who are working with school boards doesn’t seem to be indicative of the broader population.”

Despite all of the partisanship, Zelizer said he was most surprised that many issues remained far less polarized. For example, just 38% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans support standardized testing to measure student achievement. While 64% of Republicans support a full-time police presence in schools, nearly half — 49% — of Democrats agreed. 

The national survey was conducted in mid-March using telephones and the web to conduct interviews with 1,030 adults for the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. 

“From kindergarten right through the total school system, it almost seems as if classroom textbooks are designed to negate what philosophies previously had been taught,” the conservative leader lamented. “[M]any textbooks are actually perverting the minds of literally millions of students.”

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A teachers organization shot back, saying the underlying motive for some attacks against books has “unquestionably been racial.”

This might sound like a back-and-forth from recent debates over removing books from school classrooms and libraries. Often, critical race theory — an academic framework for understanding racism — has been at the center of these debates. But in reality, both quotes are more than 40 years old.

Religious influence on politics

The first quote came from a 1981 book by the Rev. Jerry Falwell titled “Listen, America!” Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, was one of the leaders of the book-banning efforts of the 1980s. It was during this period – with Ronald Reagan in the White House – that Christian fundamentalists became a growing influence in conservative American politics.

The second quote comes from a 1981 publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, “The Students’ Right to Read.” The council was one of the major groups opposing Falwell and other conservatives.

The attacks on books in the 1980s bear similarities to the current attacks. Both object to the critical teaching about race and racism, historical as well as contemporary. Both accuse schools of tearing down America and weakening patriotism. Both object to teaching about gender roles, sexual orientation and alternative models of the family. Conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation have been involved in both periods.

There are also important differences between the two periods. The 1980s bogeyman was secular humanism, because it argued that human beings can define their own morality without the use of religion. Falwell and others claimed that public schools were anti-Christian because they taught students that they didn’t have to use the Bible as a standard for right and wrong. Chaos would result, the Christian fundamentalists asserted, if everyone had to determine their own morality.

In a way reminiscent of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, conservatives objected to the teaching of evolution as a fact, rather than a theory. Instead, they wanted biology textbooks to give equal space to the so-called scientific theory of creationism, which holds that God created the universe.

A new bogeyman

In 2022, of course, the bogeyman is critical race theory. Emerging from critical legal theory taught in law schools, critical race theory argues that white supremacy has been embedded in American legal and educational institutions since the time of slavery.

Right-wing critics have made a number of erroneous allegations about critical race theory: that it is taught in public schools; that it is Marxist; that it is intended to make whites feel guilty; and more. The Heritage Foundation has published “How to Identify Critical Race Theory” as a guide to help parents evaluate books and curricula by looking for words like “systemic racism,” “white privilege” and “social construction or race.”

In fact, these concepts predated critical race theory, which came on the scene in the late 1970s and 1980s. Activist Stokely Carmichael – also known as Kwame Ture – and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton discussed institutional racism in “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America” in 1967. “Institutional racism” and “structural racism” are very similar to “systemic racism.”

“White privilege” was discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois in the early 20th century and by civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. Another term associated with critical race theory, “the social construction of race,” was used by anthropologists like Franz Boas back in the 1950s.

New interpretations

Critical race theorists took these and other concepts, reinterpreted them and applied them to the American legal system. Scholars in education have done the same in trying to understand education as an institution. After 40-plus years of teaching and writing about race and diversity, I know that it is impossible to accurately discuss American racial conflict without using these concepts. But that’s what many lawmakers would have American educators do.

According to a Pen America report, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression in literature, 156 “educational gag order” bills in 39 states have been introduced since January 2021. Twelve have become law in 10 states, and 113 are pending in 35 states. As of March 2022, at least seven states specifically ban the teaching of critical race theory. “Cumulatively,” says the Pen report, “they represent a national assault on our education system, censoring both what teachers can say and what students may learn.”

Of course, some white students – and other students, too, for that matter – will feel uncomfortable upon learning not only about the history of American racism but also its present manifestations. Reality is sometimes uncomfortable.

That’s where good teaching comes in. Good teaching means taking the students’ age into account. It also means being supportive of students who may feel uncomfortable or guilty about certain events in American history.

I always tell students: “You are not responsible for what happened in the past. You are responsible to decide what you plan to do in the present and the future.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Originally published by The 19th

An Indiana bill sought to stop schools from teaching divisive concepts, create parental curriculum committees and permit families to sue if their children were exposed to banned lessons.

It made it through the state House at the start of the year. But then Republican supporters objected to tweaks, saying they watered down the “divisive concepts” bill, and last month joined with Democrats to deprive it of the votes it needed in the state Senate.

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In a state with a Republican supermajority, it was a stunning defeat — one that Jennifer Smith-Margraf, vice president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, attributes to community members mobilizing against it.

“Parent organizations and community organizations from across the state came together and spoke out forcefully against this bill,” said Smith-Margraf, a Spanish teacher and instructional coach at Oakland Academy in Lafayette, Indiana. “It was presented as representing parents, but it’s clear from our interactions with parents and the parent organizations that joined us that that was simply not the case. They want to see honesty in education and want us to be able to teach what we’ve been teaching in our curriculum according to the standards.”

Similar “parental rights” and “curriculum transparency” legislation has died or stalled in at least eight states, including Indiana, often in the face of opposition by teachers. In Utah, a legislator in January pulled a bill requiring teachers to post lesson plans and learning materials each day for parental review. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed a nearly identical bill, and, in Colorado, Democrats voted down a curriculum transparency bill in early March. Wyoming and South Dakota have also killed such bills, while an Iowa bill that would’ve allowed parents to sue if teachers exposed their children to “obscene” materials died as well. In neighboring Illinois, curriculum transparency legislation has stalled.

Educators are still pushing back against more of these bills, which have been pre-filed or introduced in about 35 states over the past year. Teachers and their unions say the legislation would place an undue burden on educators who are overextended during the coronavirus pandemic. Parents already have ample opportunity to weigh in on learning materials and review classwork, they say, with the chance to provide feedback when school boards vote to adopt curricula or see their children’s assignments via the learning management systems that have become staples in public schools. Teachers see the wave of parents’ rights bills in state legislatures as a ploy to drive a wedge between educators and parents. Moreover, as schools grapple with the pandemic and a personnel shortage, educators point out, the bills create a hostile climate for teachers that could drive them out of the workforce.

“One of our major concerns is that we were going to see an increase in the teacher shortage because of this,” Smith-Margraf said. “We had many, many people telling us that they were going to leave education if this passed. There are thousands upon thousands of jobs available at this particular moment, and all sorts of industries that our people are very well qualified for because they’re very well educated. And so we were very concerned about seeing a mass exodus because of this.”

In Utah, educators have also raised the concern that “curriculum transparency” bills could worsen a teacher shortage. Although the Utah legislature last year passed resolutions prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, the state has yet to pass a bill that would give parents significant new influence over the curriculum.

“The onslaught that’s happening in some other states hasn’t happened in the same way here,” said Sara Jones, the Utah Education Association’s government relations and professional programs director. “I don’t want to say that there hasn’t been an issue that educators are concerned about here, but we haven’t necessarily had the same outcomes.”

The Utah Education Association did object to a school curriculum transparency bill that would have required public school teachers to post instructional materials online every day for parents to review. After a public backlash from educators and their supporters, HB234’s sponsor, Rep. Jordan Teuscher, withdrew the bill. He blamed what he called a “coordinated misinformation campaign” against the bill and insufficient time in the legislative session to get it passed.

But this month a Utah bill focused on “sensitive materials in schools” passed with the support of parental rights groups such as Utah Parents United. That bill “requires a local education agency to include parents who are reflective of a school’s community when determining whether an instructional material is sensitive material.” The legislation’s most controversial aspects, including a provision that could have allowed parents to pocket $10,000 per complaint about the use of “sensitive materials” in the curriculum, were excluded from the final version of the law.

“We still oppose the final version, but it doesn’t go nearly as far as the original version did,” Jones said. The legislation bans pornographic material in schools, which was already prohibited, and will track complaints lodged against schools and how schools resolve them.

“So, who knows what might come next year once this data is presented to the legislature, but it doesn’t create a new parental ability to challenge [learning materials] in court,” Jones said.

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which supports curriculum oversight bills, said that the weakening of legislation like Utah’s HB 234 stems from lawmakers compromising away parental rights in education. She said that parental rights bills make it clear that the boundary between home and school should be respected and that families should be part of all discussions regarding the mental and physical health of their children.

“When you see a lot of compromises or changes being made to this legislation, I think it’s being overcomplicated in many ways,” Justice said. “I think there’s been an effort to do so much at once regarding curriculum transparency that the parental rights legislation really does need to stay and begin at a very fundamental level, which is that the state recognizes that the parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, and everything else must go through that lens.”

Although groups that back these curriculum bills have been dealt blows in several states, they have succeeded in others. Justice points to Florida’s HB 1557, widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign soon. The legislation prohibits school personnel or third parties from teaching lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity to children in grades K-3 or in a way that would not be developmentally appropriate for students. The bill will also affect how mental health services are provided to Florida youth and how much influence parents have over the conversations between their minor children and mental health counselors. Florida’s previous school counseling standards affirmed gender and sexual diversity.

Last year, Florida also passed a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” law that prohibits government entities or other institutions from infringing “upon the fundamental rights of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, health care and mental health of a minor child” without justifiable cause. The bill states that parents have the right to be informed about their children’s educational programs and requires school districts to promote parental involvement by providing families access to children’s classwork and instructional materials. It also recognizes a parent’s right to withdraw a child from portions of the school’s curriculum.

“Every state needs to have a parental rights legislation that recognizes the parent has the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children,” Justice said. “That includes the education, the medical care, the moral, religious, character training — all of those things that come from the parent. We need to work to redefine what the school should be doing in that child’s life, and then we need to stick to it.”

Paige Duggins-Clay, chief legal analyst for the Intercultural Development Research Association, an independent education nonprofit in San Antonio, Texas, said parental rights bills are misleading because they suggest families don’t already have a say in their children’s education when they can take part in school board meetings or approach teachers and administrators about any concerns. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott kicked off the year by announcing his parental bill of rights proposal to “amend the Texas Constitution to make clear that parents are the primary decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”

Like Utah’s “sensitive materials” bill, the proposal references obscene content in schools, stating that teachers who show students such materials would “lose their educational credentials and state licensing, forfeit their retirement benefits and be placed on a ‘do not hire list.” Abbott’s plan would also allow parents to review curricula online, ensure their concerns about learning materials are heard, and give them the option to determine if their children should repeat a grade instead of leaving that decision to school personnel alone.

“The reality is parents already have really robust rights, whether they’re in the constitution, state law or federal law,” Duggins-Clay said. “So what this does is create this really harmful relationship, or try to generate a really harmful relationship, between parents and the community and schools.”

In 1995, Texas enacted similar legislation outlining parental rights in education. It states that parents have the right to access students’ attendance, academic, disciplinary and health records as well as to participate in school board meetings and review curricular materials. Given this, Duggins-Clay said, the new legislation is duplicative and unnecessary. She suspects some lawmakers are introducing such policies because they want to defund public education and eventually privatize it.

“For many folks, creating that divisive rhetoric and partnering it with this concept of rights and choice is one way that we’re seeing folks who are unfriendly or adversarial to public education promote privatization policies,” Duggins-Clay said. “It’s important to see that for what it is and for folks to recognize that that’s not a productive thing for anybody. We know that the way that we can solve issues around mental health and the pandemic and talking about difficult issues in the classroom is not by creating even more rancor in our discourse; it’s by bringing people together.”

Texas parents are largely happy with public schools, she said, citing a new poll from the Charles Butt Foundation, which works toward educational equity in Texas. The poll found that 68 percent of Texas parents give their local public schools a grade A or B, while just 48 percent of non-parents do. The poll also found that approval ratings for local public schools have risen during the pandemic.

In Georgia, though, many parents have been swayed by the divisive political rhetoric they’ve heard about education, said Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators. There, parental rights bills made their way through the state legislature earlier this month. Morgan testified against the legislation, calling it an attack on public educators. Echoing Duggins-Clay, she said that these laws aren’t needed, as parents may already provide feedback about instructional materials before their local school boards. Instruction is based on standards set by the state, with community input, she said.

Morgan said some lawmakers have been motivated to pass these bills after seeing how Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin ran a successful campaign last fall that focused on provocative reading materials and parents’ rights in schools. Rather than help public education, Morgan said, these bills harm it.

“They are intended to drive a wedge between parents and educators,” she said. “These bills turn what should be that partnership, and what has always been a partnership, into an adversarial relationship.”

Earlier this month, Georgia lawmakers passed legislation limiting the teaching of divisive concepts in schools. Under the law, parents and other stakeholders can submit formal complaints to school administrators about offensive learning materials.

Morgan said the curriculum is not divisive — it’s the legislation.

“Your divisive content — it’s right here,” she said.

The proposed constitutional amendment would capitalize on a nationwide GOP movement to demonize critical race theory — a high-level field of academic study about the ways in which racism has become embedded in various aspects of society — and turn it into a catchall term for various race-related teachings, including instruction on “white privilege” and “anti-racism” curriculum.

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“We are saying that you cannot guilt a kid because of the color of their skin,” said Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Apache Junction.

House Concurrent Resolution 2001 is based on the false premise that critical race theory encourages white students to feel guilty for historical racism. The theory doesn’t assign blame to any one group, but rather analyzes how racism contributes to inequality, such as the way racist policies in previous generations may affect contemporary housing trends. 

The legislation declares that critical race theory violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964. It would ban schools from teaching that any racial group is inherently racist, or that individuals are to blame for the actions of members of their racial or ethnic group. 

It also would prohibit schools from engaging in affirmative action policies that favor some applicants over others based on race or ethnicity beyond outreach and advertising campaigns — which is already banned in state law.

The measure had stalled in the Senate Education Committee, where it had failed to receive a hearing. But Rep. Steve Kaiser, a Phoenix Republican and the sponsor of HCR 2001, convinced Senate President Karen Fann to remove it from the Education Committee and instead assign it to the Appropriations Committee, where it was heard Tuesday.

Sen. Sean Bowie questioned whether it was a good idea to put such  broad language into a ballot measure, given that voter-approved legislation is more difficult to revise. A similar proposal is working through the House, he said, that would statutorily ban critical race theory and would be much easier to deal with if problems arose. Constitutional amendments can only be approved by voters.

“If the voters do approve this, as they’ve approved other things in the past, it’s really hard to change it if there are unintended consequences,” he said. 

Joe Cohn, lobbyist for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which advocates for free speech rights on college campuses, said the bill would restrict the strategies and resources teachers can use. 

“No resources at all can be spent on any events or anything that promotes particular ideas. And that would include a prohibition on a faculty member organizing a speaking event, or presenting a research presentation,” he said. 

A provision in the bill barring  teachers from compelling students to promote statements or ideas that support different treatment of people based on race or ethnicity could also eliminate critical thinking assignments in which students take up “devil’s advocate” positions on abhorrent policies to learn how to identify, develop and dispute arguments. 

But proponents said the constitutional amendment would protect students from harmful, discriminating lessons. 

Shiry Sapir, a Republican running for superintendent of public instruction, claimed that racism has been revitalized by critical race theory. In a nod to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s questioning of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last week, Sapir said she rejected the idea that any infants harbor grievances against others because of what occurred “centuries ago.” 

“It is very dangerous and harmful to our children who have no say regarding the color of their skin, having to hear (critical race theory) inside the classroom,” she said. 

Matt Beienburg, lobbyist for the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank that has crusaded against anti-racism education in schools, said teaching critical race theory is unconstitutional. 

“Ideologies such as critical race theory…reject the legal principles of treating individuals neutrally and equally without respect to race. Attempts are now being made to circumvent the constitutional language under the banners of antiracism, diversity, equity and inclusion and similarly benign sounding slogans that are being used to undermine the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal colorblind treatment for all,” he said. 

Legislators were at odds over whether classroom discussions of race are beneficial to students or detrimental. Sen. Raquel Terán, D-Phoenix, said a quality education is incomplete without acknowledging the nation’s ugly past. She worried the bill’s broad language would lead to teachers cutting that content out of their lesson plans. 

“Children deserve an honest and accurate education that enables them to learn from the mistakes of our past to help create a better future,” she said. 

Leach blamed critical race theory for why public schools are hemorrhaging students, and said that while the country has a checkered past, there are ongoing efforts to remedy it. 

“Parents (want) their kids to go to a place where they can learn,” he said, “Yes, there are spots in our history that are blemished. Some would even go so far — and maybe I would be included — (to say) that they are rotten. And as we see them, we take care of them. Granted, not soon enough, but we are a deliberative country.”

The committee approved the measure 6-4 along party lines. It goes next before the full Senate, and if passed, it will go directly to the November ballot.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

From educators’ reflections on two tumultuous years to escalating school board fights over curriculum and transparency and new data surrounding both student reading scores and the benefits of tutoring, here were our most shared articles from February: 

700 Days Since Lockdown: Educators, Students, Parents and Researchers Reflect on Pandemic’s ‘Seismic Interruption to Education’

Reflections: 700 days. That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents; teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. As spring approaches, there are some reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

—Photo History: ​​Scenes from 24 months of lockdown and perseverance (See here)

—Student Relationships: Teens share their tales of romance & friendship 700 days into COVID (Read here)

—74 Interview: Ed finance guru Marguerite Roza on funding, parental ‘awakening’ and being a data person in a time of public health panic (Read more)

—Special Series: See our full coverage — Reflecting on the COVID school years 

Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and Critical Race Theory to Teachers’ Names & Schools, Minnesota Districts Flooded With Freedom of Information Document Demands

School District Chaos: In bucolic Owatonna, Minnesota, the head of the school system’s HR department has been working since August to fulfill a request for records anonymous activists believe might reveal the presence of critical race theory in local classrooms. Down the road in Rochester, district officials told another group it would cost more than $900,000 to conduct its document search, which asks for curriculum covering history, social studies, geography, English, English literature, U.S. history and world history, and “any courses with a sociological or cultural theme [and] any courses with a curriculum that includes a discussion of current events.” In tiny Lewiston-Altura Public Schools, some of the activists lodging the requests have protested board meetings. The public has an absolute right to know what’s being taught in schools, freedom of information advocates tell Beth Hawkins, and Minnesota’s “sunshine laws” make asking for records as inexpensive as possible to ensure public access. Still, as one small-town newspaper groused, it’s hard not to see “politically motivated, overreaching demands designed to bury districts.”

‘We Have First-Graders Who Can’t Sing the Alphabet Song’: Pandemic Continues to Push Young Readers Off Track, New Data Shows

Learning Loss: Young children learning to read — especially Black and Hispanic students — are in need of significant support nearly two years after the pandemic disrupted their transition into school, according to new assessment results. Mid-year data from Amplify, a curriculum provider, shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. This year’s quarantines and short-term closures likely contributed to the slow progress, “For the youngest learners to go to school for two or three days and then be out for 10 — it’s not just picking up where you left off; it’s actually starting all over again,” said Susan Lambert, chief academic officer of elementary humanities at Amplify. Results from fourth- and fifth-graders, however, show greater recovery, with the rates of students meeting benchmarks nearly back to the same level they were in the winter of the 2019-20 school year. Tutoring providers are seeing the impact of remote learning up close. “We have first-graders who can’t sing the alphabet song,” Kate Bauer-Jones told reporter Linda Jacobson.

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it To Combat Learning Loss

Research: In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. Now, days after the U.S. secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a new study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring yielded modest, if positive, learning benefits for hundreds of middle schoolers. But those gains were considerably smaller than the results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” study co-author Matthew Kraft told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.”

NYC Schools Reported Over 9,600 Students to Child Protective Services Since Aug. 2020. Is It the ‘Wrong Tool’ for Families Traumatized by COVID?

Absenteeism: Paullette Healy’s younger child had nightmares after the knock at the door of their Brooklyn apartment. Standing outside was a caseworker, explaining that the family was being investigated for educational neglect for not sending their children to school amid COVID fears — even though the kids had kept up with their work remotely. The report was one of 9,674 made by NYC school staff for suspected abuse and neglect to the state child abuse hotline from August 2020 to November 2021, according to public records obtained by The 74. In the first three months of the 2021-22 school year, there were about 45 percent more reports than during the same time span the year before, when most of the city’s nearly 1 million students were learning virtually. Now, after NYC student attendance rates plunged in early January amid the Omicron surge, and with ongoing debate over a remote learning option, there are fears even more families may get entangled in the child welfare web. The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small reports.

School Choice Backers See Opening in COVID Chaos, Even as Culture War Issues Threaten to Fracture Coalition

Education Reform: School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the public school power structure. The coalition had weakened over the past few years. But COVID-19 is changing that. Fueled by parental impatience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — there has been a flurry of legislative choice efforts in Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia and West Virginia. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things,” said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who chairs the nonprofit reform group ExcelinEd. “And I don’t see it going away.” But as 74 contributor Greg Toppo reports, even as choice backers see fresh opportunity in pandemic chaos, there are early warning signs that the coalition could fracture again. Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools, said concerns over so-called critical race theory could be “the Achilles heel” of the current choice renaissance. The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” but “winning the culture war.”

Vax Up, Masks Down: Maryland, Massachusetts Lead Effort to ‘Off-Ramp’ Face Coverings in School

School Safety: As Omicron cases recede in most of the country and K-12 debate turns to whether students should still have to wear masks, two Democratic states have charted a middle path that offers highly immunized districts the option. If more than 80 percent of students and staff are fully vaccinated, Massachusetts and Maryland let districts do away with mask requirements. Maryland also allows an end to masking when case rates remain low. Meanwhile, governors in New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware all announced this month their school mask mandates will be sunsetting, as soon as Feb. 28 in Connecticut’s case. Their actions follow a growing chorus of experts nationwide calling for mask-optional classrooms. “You cannot mask in perpetuity,” Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury told The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small. “You have to be able to have a responsible off-ramp.”

Report: With Omicron, Math App Zearn Reveals a Troubling New Gap in Student Engagement — Even Where Schools Are Open

Missing Students: When the latest variant emerged, the data scientists at Zearn saw the same socioeconomic disparities in student use of their math app as they did in the first days of the pandemic. Or so they thought. Just as in March 2020, the number of affluent students using the popular math program remained relatively stable as December’s COVID-19 disruptions plunged schools into chaos, while the number of low-income kids plummeted. But this time, the Zearn team could find no correlation between the dip in student math participation and pandemic-related school closures. Instead, the drop seems to be tied to case counts — the gaps appear to be biggest where COVID-19 infection rates are highest. And kids in the low-income communities are hit hardest. Beth Hawkins has the story.

New National Poll: Americans Split on Whether Schools Should Teach Current-Day Racism

Curriculum: As battles erupt around the country over how the subject of race should be treated in the classroom, a new survey finds Americans are split over whether schools should teach children about current-day racism. It found that 49 percent of 1,200 respondents from around the U.S. believe schools have a responsibility to ensure students learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in America. Meanwhile, 41 percent believe schools should teach students about the history of slavery and racism — but not about race relations today. A full 10 percent said schools do not have any responsibility to teach about slavery or racism in the U.S., according to the latest Mood of the Nation Poll conducted by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. The poll, released today, also addresses the degree to which people believe parents should influence their child’s education — another current flashpoint — the teaching of evolution and sex education, and COVID safety. Across the board, respondents said parents should have the most sway, followed by teachers. Jo Napolitano breaks down the results.

Increasing Segregation of Latino Students Hinders Academic Performance and Could Amplify COVID Learning Loss, Study Finds

School Segregation: Elementary students from low-income families are less likely than they were two decades ago to attend school with middle-class peers — a trend tied to the growth of the Latino population and continuing white flight from many school districts, according to a new study. In an analysis of over 14,000 districts nationwide, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland showed that in 2000, the average child from a poor family went to an elementary school where almost half the students were middle-class. By 2015, that figure had fallen to 36 percent. The increasing segregation, the authors said, has implications for districts’ efforts to address learning loss related to the pandemic because Latino families were among those hardest hit. Linda Jacobson has the story.

Teen-y Tiny Pandemic Love Stories: Students Share Their Tales of Romance & Friendship Two Years Into COVID

Student Relationships: Online games. Dating apps. Penpals from across the globe. Amid nearly two years of the pandemic, young people at every turn have found creative ways to connect with their friends and potential love interests. Despite what at many times has been a largely virtual world, teens often came out on the other side of lockdown with relationships that were stronger for the experience. Or as one New York City high schooler put it: “If you’ve been through a pandemic with someone, I feel like we’re bonded for life.” From long-harbored crushes to new friends over Zoom, breakups to hookups, and Bumble DMs to online multiplayer games, young people share their experiences of pandemic friendship and romance, brought to you in the form of seven mini-love stories. Asher Lehrer-Small has our Valentine’s Day special.

America’s School Boards Are in Crisis. Here Are 9 Ways to Fix That — and Keep the Focus on Educating Children

Commentary: The governing of public schools in many communities is nearing total collapse. From coast to coast, fights over book bans, curricula, bathrooms, racial issues, masks, vaccinations and police on campus have torn communities apart and led to angry confrontations, violence and destruction of property. People have resigned from school boards or declared they will not run for office due to the intensity of these conflicts. Meanwhile, problems such as student performance, teacher pay and working conditions, and learning loss during the pandemic remain on the sidelines. To help save one of the oldest forms of governance in this country — predating the American Revolution — contributor Christopher T. Cross suggests a number of actions that every state, every school board, can take to improve the governance of our public schools.

—74 Opinion: See all our latest op-eds and commentary

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Last year, Texas lawmakers passed two laws designed to limit how teachers could discuss issues of race in the classroom. The state’s current law, Senate Bill 3, replaced an earlier measure, House Bill 3979. Both have been labeled by conservatives as anti-critical race theory laws although the term is not included in either law.

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“As part of the routine contingencies of the charter application process, TEA included a general contingency for all approved Generation 26 applicants that they submit a statement of assurance that the school design and curricular materials are aligned with the TEKS including all clauses of HB 3979 and any subsequent related legislation,” the agency said in an Thursday email to The Texas Tribune, referring to the standards that outline what students learn in each course or grade, called Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.

The new requirement was first asked for charter schools set to open in August. The agency did not immediately say if it will require this statement beyond that applicant pool, nor elaborate on why the assurance was needed or whether they will expand it to include all charter, or even all public, schools. A charter school is a public school that is state-funded but run mostly by nonprofits.

In January, the education news outlet Chalkbeat reported how an application for a new charter school in San Antonio was approved, then put on hold because the school had a quote from author Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” on its website and application materials.

These efforts in secondary schools have been mislabeled by some conservatives as the teaching of critical race theory, something that has always been taught on the university level. Critical race theory is the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals. But it has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

Earlier this month, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to ban the teaching of critical race theory at Texas’ public colleges and universities

The state’s current law, SB 3, states a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The law doesn’t define what a controversial issue is. If a teacher does discuss these topics, they must “explore that topic objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”

The law also also states that America’s history of slavery can’t be taught as contributing to the “true founding of the United States” and that slavery is nothing more than a deviation from the country’s foundations of liberty and equality.

Brian Whitley, vice president of communications and research at the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said he hasn’t heard before of charter schools having to provide any statement that the school will follow state laws.

“It’s sort of a moot point,” he said. “Just like ISDs, public charter schools in Texas follow all state laws that apply to them.”

Charter school administrators are more concerned with how to correctly comply with the law rather than looking for ways to be against it, he said.

Mark Wiggins, lobbyist for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said he believes this is a way for the TEA to hold charter schools accountable. While public schools must respond to elected school boards and taxpayers, the TEA holds that role for charter schools.

“Charters need to be held to the same level of accountability as traditional public schools,” he said.

Since lawmakers passed the social studies restrictions, educators have been confused on how it should be applied.

Chloe Latham Sikes, deputy director of policy at the Intercultural Development Research Association, said one of the issues with the TEA issuing this requirement is that the agency still has not given official guidance on how to comply with the law.

Sikes also believes it is redundant as schools are already having to follow the state’s curriculum guidelines.

In documents obtained by The Texas Tribune, the TEA has been advising school administrators that teachers should just continue teaching the current curriculum until the State Board of Education revises the social studies curriculum over the next year.

“It just brings up the question, well, what is really the purpose of that [law] if there’s no state guidance to comply with?” she said.

Disclosure: Association of Texas Professional Educators and Texas Public Charter Schools Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/17/texas-charter-schools-law/.

Nikkolas Smith is not surprised by the book bans and culture of fear dominating schools in his home state of Texas.

If anything, recent events make his work as a children’s book illustrator and self-described “artivist” more urgent.

“I’m gonna keep making books that will probably be on banned lists… because all they do is tell the truth about history. And it’s just ridiculous that accurate history is trying to be suppressed, basically, by those in power who have benefited from racism for centuries,” said Smith, who collaborated with Nikole Hannah-Jones to illustrate The 1619 Project for children. 

Growing up in Houston, he was taught to celebrate the tales of Davey Crockett and the Alamo — “whitewashed” stories “always from one perspective:” glorifying those who owned and killed other human beings, he told The 74.

Now, alongside the words of Hannah-Jones and children’s book author Renée Watson, Smith’s art flips the script to teach young readers the legacy of slavery rooted in humanity; a Black history rooted in joy. 

In Born on the Water, the children’s picture book accompaniment to The 1619 Project, Smith’s paintings bring the cultures of West Africans to life, showing the pre-enslavement history often omitted from classrooms.

“One of the things that me and Nikole talk about is there’s so much rich history, and culture, and so much joy in these tribes and these people that were stolen from their land,” Smith told The 74. “You really have to understand all of that to understand how heavy it was, and how tragic it was… We really just wanted to show that life.”

From his plant-filled Los Angeles home, Smith paired Hannah-Jones and Watson’s poetry with family traditions, beautiful hair, dances, imagery that evoked death and spirits. Using a digital speed-sketch style, his illustrations began as monochrome shapes and skeletons in Photoshop, impressions of how he felt after reading and internalizing their verses. 

The book hit shelves last fall amid a wave of proposed state laws aimed at preventing students from learning a mythical “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” In at least four states, legislation attempted to ban the 1619 Project explicitly. So far, Florida has succeeded.  

While a vocal minority of lawmakers and parents believe school aged children are too young to grapple with just how violence against Black people was intrinsic to the nation’s founding, many more yearned for the content. Born on the Water topped bestseller lists as families headed into 2022, looking for ways to talk to children about the country they’ll inherit. 

Smith’s artistic approach seemed a natural fit. In digital paintings, he added layer after layer of color and symbols — clouds modeled after picked cotton, the shape of a person sinking underwater, or a green toy tied to a tree, the only sign of life left after colonizers stole a tribe — to convey anger and fear in ways young readers could feel without being traumatized by explicit violence.

Long-inspired by Nina Simone “to reflect the times,” he’d balanced trauma and life in children’s illustrations for years, painting Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain and others killed by police. 

His second book, My Hair is Poofy and That’s Ok, explored the internalized hatred young Black children develop from racism and microaggressions. 

Through his work, which he describes as “art as therapy”, he tries to help himself and viewers heal “the broken bones of society.” 

“For them to say, we have a book about the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and all of these very heavy things that we as Black people in America, we think about it all the time … I felt like that’s one of the biggest broken bones in America,” he said.

“…Remember that these weren’t slaves that were taken, these were brilliant people, and they did some amazing things … They knew how to design and build cities, they built this country, and that’s why they were stolen, because they were brilliant and good at what they do. We just want to remind people of that, and also how much they fought and resisted and got their freedom back.”

“And [for] the young folks who are not Black, there’s no shame in anything we’re saying. We want people to grow up having an accurate understanding of what happened in this country. I feel like it’s really not until we address all of these things openly and honestly that we’re gonna really grow and move forward as a nation.”
—Nikkolas Smith

Smith blurred linear understandings of time by using symbols across generations, to help young readers understand that “[ancestors’] vision of the future, their wildest dreams are now embodied in us — [we’re] having to take that mantle and move forward.” 

And in faces, Smith balanced the world of feelings bound up in the Black experience: from shame, when the protagonist cannot make a family tree beyond three generations, to pride, after her grandmother recounts the rich history of tribes pre-enslavement. Her hair, in Bantu knots, and clothing give reference to past generations.

Ultimately, Smith hopes his work can help the next generation of Black youth have a sense of pride. Over the next few months, he’ll paint scenes of Ruby Bridges, the first young person to integrate a Southern school in 1960. And next year, he’ll collaborate with celebrated author Timeka Fryer Brown on a picture book about the Confederate flag. 

He expects both will end up on some banned lists.   

“All we can do is keep putting the truth out there,” Smith said, “and it’ll get into the right hands.”

All paintings are illustrated by Nikkolas Smith for Born on the Water, a publication of Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. 

The 12-minute history lesson, which landed in mid-February, traces the decades-long legal leadup to the case, as well as the “unforeseen consequences” that played out afterward, series host Clint Smith wrote on Twitter.

“Brown v. Board was an historic and incredibly important court case that reshaped the landscape of American society, but sometimes it’s presented as a singular good without people sitting with its more unsavory consequences,” said Smith, who is the author of New York Times bestseller How the Word is Passed.

“As always, we have to hold and grapple with both.”

The video is the 33rd in what will be a 50-part series on Black American history launched by Crash Course in April 2021. The episodes cover topics ranging from the colonial slave codes and the 1739 Stono Rebellion to journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells and the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. Each is narrated by Smith and are eight to 15 minutes in length. Crash Course has some 13 million YouTube subscribers and most of the Black history episodes have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. 

“I am learning so much from these videos on the African American fight for civil rights and I’ve taught it for years! So worth the watch!” history and politics teacher Swerupa wrote in a Twitter post sharing the Brown episode.

Experts say the lesson captures a level of historical complexity that frequently evades teachings on the topic.

“That video got at all of the important elements of [Brown], but also presented the story in the nuance that I think it deserves and often is not given,” said Keffrelyn Brown, co-founder of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Texas.

“We often just say, ‘Here’s Brown, and then society changed after ’54 …. You do not [frequently see it taught] that there were multiple cases, there were multiple actors, multiple plaintiffs,” added Anthony Brown, the Center’s other co-founder.

As the Crash Course lesson explains, the NAACP played “the long game” in order to win the Brown case, laying the legal foundation for their victory over the preceding two decades. In 1930, they issued the 200-page Margold Report challenging the doctrine of “separate but equal.” In the 1940s, they won some smaller legal victories against segregation in higher education. And then in 1952, the NAACP brought separate cases challenging K-12 segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware and Washington, D.C. that in 1953 were combined into Brown.

But after the historic victory, some efforts to desegregate schools triggered harmful consequences for Black families.

“Some school districts completely closed schools rather than integrate Black children,” explained Smith. 

The video references Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, where in 1959, lawmakers shut down all public school classrooms for five years rather than educate Black and white children together.

As lawmakers across the country have moved to restrict what opponents have deemed to be divisive teachings on race and gender, with legislation introduced in 37 states and passed in 14, according to Education Week, the University of Texas Center’s co-founders agree that materials such as the Crash Course video may be useful for teachers looking to cover this episode in history accurately and without bias.

“I don’t think I found anything in it divisive or controversial,” said Anthony Brown. “The archives will speak for themselves. The histories will speak for themselves. And then it will provide opportunities for learning for students that I think this video did well.” 

His 8-year-old daughter would be able to watch and understand the content, he believes.

Carol Swain, on the other hand, believes the clip is “well done,” but appropriate only for high school students, not those who are younger.

The former Vanderbilt University professor, who is Black and has emerged as an outspoken critic of teachings on structural racism, takes issue with the video’s ending, which relays that school segregation today remains as severe as it was in the late 1960s.

“The implication is that it’s because of white people,” she told The 74. “There are many reasons that segregation persists today, including socioeconomic factors.”

Through the 1960s and into the ‘70s, schools made progress toward racial integration, particularly in the American South. But much of those gains have since eroded, leaving the country’s schools highly segregated today.

The scholar, who co-chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, argues that K-12 lessons should strike a more positive tone, for example by highlighting the multiracial collaborations that won gains for Black Americans through the Civil Rights Movement. Lessons on entrenched racism she argues are less productive for students of all races.

“It saps you of hope if you learn the system is rigged against you,” said Swain. 

April Peters-Hawkins, who is an associate professor at the University of Houston and has studied the ripple effects of Brown, strongly disagrees. It’s important for students to learn the accurate history of Jim Crow even when ugly, she argues, because those events have implications for today.

For example, after Brown, thousands of highly qualified Black teachers were dismissed because white parents would not accept the idea of their children being taught by Black instructors. Academic research documents widespread benefits to students of all races, but especially Black students, from having a Black teacher. The U.S. continues to have a persistent racial gap in its teacher force. About 79 percent of teachers nationwide are white compared to only 47 percent of public school students.

“We’ve never recovered from that [loss of Black educators] as a society,” Peters-Hawkins told The 74.

She regrets that many states are clamping down on lessons on race rather than addressing those issues head-on. 

“We continue to get more and more restrictive about what can be taught,” she said. Pushing away from tough topics, she believes, means “we’re actually becoming more ignorant.”

For those who worry over the comfort of white students learning about past and present racism, she poses a separate consideration.

“Think about how uncomfortable it is to live in this country in 2022 and be a Black American,” said Peters-Hawkins. “That’s uncomfortable every day.”

The bill, sponsored by Del. Dave LaRock, R-Loudoun, wasn’t officially endorsed by Gov. Glenn Youngin. But its language mirrors the text of other administration-backed legislation and closely resembles Youngkin’s first executive order banning so-called divisive concepts — including critical race theory — in Virginia schools. 

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LaRock’s bill is all but certain to meet a quick death in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where legislators already rejected a similar Youngkin-supported bill from Sen. Jen Kiggans, R-Virginia Beach. But the opposing votes between the two chambers speaks to the fierce debate still occurring over public education in Virginia, a core aspect of Youngkin’s campaign platform.

“I think this bill gets into legislating emotions and beliefs,” said Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, a public school civics teacher who’s become a vocal critic of many of the administration’s initiatives. “And to paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts, I think that is a sordid business.”

The legislation would ban any public school employee from teaching concepts largely related to race, including that “one race or sex is inherently superior” to another. Like the Senate bill and Youngkin’s executive order, it takes aim at equity initiatives adopted by some Virginia school districts, some of which have focused on the concept of privilege among students or racial affinity groups among teachers intended to provide “safe spaces” for educators to speak about their experiences. 

LaRock’s bill would ban educators from teaching students that any individual is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, “whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that an individual bears responsibility for past actions committed by members of the same race or sex. 

Democrats in the House unanimously opposed the legislation, arguing it would ban public schools from educating students on historical injustices. In a lengthy floor debate before the bill went for a final vote, they unsuccessfully tried to introduce 11 different amendments specifically excluding certain subjects from the bill.

They included specifically allowing educators to teach about the Lost Cause — a push by ex-Confederates and their defenders to frame the Civil War in favorable terms to the South — and the Jim Crow era. Del. Clinton Jenkins, D-Suffolk, introduced an amendment that would exempt the story of Ruby Bridges, the first Black student to desegregate an all-White school. And Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, endorsed a change that would allow instruction on policies that led to still-existing wealth and income gaps between different races and genders.

“When it comes to dollars and cents, we end up unequal,” she said. “I don’t know how anyone could, in good conscience, teach American history, civics or economics without confronting how race and gender drive income and wealth inequality in this country.”

Republicans in the House unanimously voted down the amendment, saying the legislation wouldn’t prohibit any specific history lessons.

“I am very glad to say that this bill would in no way prevent the teaching of these amendments in schools,” LaRock said. 

“It would, however, prevent teachers from taking sides and presenting these in a manner that indoctrinates children to accept one side or the other in these issues,” he added.

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Robert Zullo for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.