How Critical Race Theory Gets into Classrooms

A great deal of gaslighting has been perpetrated against American parents by “antiracist” activists when it comes to the presence of critical race theory (CRT) in classrooms. These activists often claim that the presence of CRT curricula in American schools amounts to nothing more than teaching accurately and extensively about the country’s tragic history of racial violence. When skeptics question tenets of critical race theory that are far more radical than this anodyne description suggests, these same activists perform one of two rhetorical maneuvers. Either they inform us that critics of CRT simply do not understand the discipline enough to criticize it, or they try to narrow the definition of CRT, insisting it is merely an advanced postgraduate-level legal theory that would never appear in K–12 classrooms.

A cursory examination of America’s most prominent schools of education shows that CRT advocates are making these arguments in bad faith. University schools of education are precisely where academia and the education of children intersect. Consequently, these schools function as something of an information superhighway from the former to the latter. Whatever academic trends prevail in university education departments are likely to make their presence felt in K–12 classrooms. This is precisely why, as a society, we have been guilty of gross negligence by largely ignoring what goes on in these schools. And what goes on in these schools is the promulgation of critical race theory.

In a recent study for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jay Schalin examined education-school syllabi obtained from three leading institutions: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. To get a flavor of what is being taught and assigned, he documented the names of authors who showed up most frequently on required and recommended reading lists at these schools. The results of his research are an unanswerable rebuke to those who claim that concern over CRT’s presence in classrooms amounts to nothing more than moral panic.

The authors who feature most prominently and frequently on lists of assigned reading at these schools indicate that “critical pedagogy” is the chief academic paradigm according to which future teachers are instructed. According to a leading theorist in critical pedagogy, Peter McLaren, “critical educators argue that knowledge should be analyzed on the basis of whether it is oppressive or exploitative, and not on the basis of whether it is ‘true.’” The foundational text of this approach to education is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, which features prominently on reading lists at all the schools Schalin examines in his study.

But on Schalin’s list of the most-assigned authors at all three of the schools he studies, Freire ranks behind two critical theorists who put race at the center of their pedagogical theories. According to the National Academy of Education, Gloria Ladson-Billings, who tops the list, is “known for her ground-breaking work in the fields of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Critical Race Theory.” Ladson-Billings made her pedagogical priorities clear when she wrote, “We educators should align our scholarship with the philosophy of Marcus Garvey: race first!” As Schalin notes, she also seems to argue in some of her writings for reparations for historic educational disparities among the races. It’s worth repeating here that Ladson-Billings is the most frequently assigned author at all three of these schools. Are we still to believe that concerns about the increasingly significant role of CRT in classrooms is overwrought?

Ladson-Billings is followed closely in second place by Linda Darling-Hammond, former adviser to President Obama and author of The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future Multicultural Education.

Stacey Lee is the third-most-assigned author at the University of Wisconsin. She’s the author of Up Against Whiteness: Race, School and Immigrant Youth, in which she inveighs against a “dominant culture that privileges the activities and achievements of white students.”

Another professor on the reading list is Sherrick Hughes. As part of his course at UNC Chapel Hill, he assigns an essay entitled “Maggie and Me: A Black Professor and a White Urban High School Teacher Connect Autoethnography to Critical Race Pedagogy.” Hughes’s own published articles — such as “Honoring Derrick Bell’s Contributions to CRT in Educational Studies,” and “Critical Race Pedagogy 2.0: Lessons from Derrick Bell” — seek to bridge the gap between the legal origins of CRT and its pedagogical implications for classroom instruction.

Critics are often dismissed for worrying about exactly this kind of CRT repackaged for K–12 consumption.

The list goes on. Tara Yosso, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth,” the most-cited article in Race Ethnicity and Education since its publication in 2005, with more than 3,000 citations. Yosso has also written Critical Race Counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline.

The report is worth reading in full. What I have cited above is just the tip of the iceberg.

Many in the American intelligentsia are currently ridiculing any and all concern about the introduction of CRT into American classrooms. It’s another paranoid conspiracy theory, the same as QAnon or the alleged stealing of the 2020 election, they insist. In reality, critical race pedagogy is a cultural tidal wave gathering momentum in America’s schools of education; the wave is only now beginning to crash against the country’s shores. Americans shouldn’t be duped by attempts to convince them that CRT is just a teaching tool or a passing fad. It’s a discipline with self-consciously practical and political prescriptions attached to it.

In fact, this kind of practical prescriptivism is central to all kinds of critical theory. Max Horkheimer, who first defined critical theory in his famous 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” wrote that a theory is critical to the extent that it tries “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” and “to create a world which satisfies” their “needs and powers.” Anyone who argues that critical race theory, which is a species of this larger philosophical genus, does not aim at the practical political overturn of the existing social order is either ignorant or deceitful. Moreover, as is evident from the data presented above, CRT has serious and lasting institutional power behind it in the form of teacher-training colleges.

It’s past time we all pay attention to these institutions. They furnish the minds of many teachers with ideas that boys and girls across America learn to associate with good and evil in their earliest days on this earth.