We’re Educators. Critical Race Theory Is, in Fact, in the Schools

T he media need a fact check. When asked about whether or not CRT was taught in schools, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said simply that “It’s not.” After Glenn Youngkin’s win, Joy Reid spent a segment asserting that critical race theory is not “actually taught” in any public school.

We’re both educators. These assertions are patently false.

In most cases of such assertions, we assume naïveté. In others, however, schools have outright lied to parents about the issue. Indianapolis Public Schools advised their principals to tell parents that CRT is not taught in their schools while offering professional development for their teachers that explicitly outlines the tenets of CRT, recommends strategies for incorporating it, and suggests further reading — including Ibram X. Kendi.

The genesis of CRT in education is arguably Gloria Ladson-Billings’s seminal essay “Just what is critical race theory and what is it doing in a nice field like education?” In it, she repudiates the slow progress of the civil-rights movement and concludes that liberalism is insufficient due to its lack of sweeping changes. Since its publication, Ladson-Billings has been ranked as one of the country’s most influential scholars of education.

Critical race theory is but one branch of a larger approach to instruction called critical pedagogy, which includes CRT, deconstructionist, feminist, postcolonial, and other progressive approaches to teaching. Critical pedagogy forms the basis of many teacher-training programs — Ladson-Billings and other critical pedagogues, like bell hooks and Paulo Freire, are canon at these institutions — and these ideas then leak onto K–12 schools.

There are plenty of examples of critical race theory manifesting itself in public education: fifth graders told to celebrate Communism and brought through a mock black-power rally, or third graders mapping their racial identity and ranking themselves according to privilege. Even in Seattle’s math curriculum, concepts such as geometry and algebraic equations play second fiddle to identity, power, liberation, and activism. The guiding questions encourage students to consider “How can we use math to measure the impact of activism?” One common textbook encourages teachers to, if they must read literature, do so through a Marxist or critical-race lens.

Deniers are correct in one narrow sense: Few if any students read the scholarly texts of Kimberlé Crenshaw or Richard Delgado in their classes. But even so, the language, the theory, the application, the ideas, the instructional practices, the arguments, and the policies of these scholars permeate almost every sphere of K–12 education. To draw from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: CRT is the light that casts the shadows on the wall, even if those looking at it are unaware of the source.

In many cases, denials come from naïveté. In others, when administrators or pundits say that schools are not teaching CRT, they are lying.

To combat the spread of critical pedagogy requires exposure and pressure. Sending examples of activities or curricular documents to news outlets to demonstrate yet more of its ubiquity and apply pressure on school boards or even individual buildings can force their focus back to the content of education. Electorally, Virginia shows that if conservatives run on a platform of returning education to its actual purpose — reading, writing, and arithmetic over activism — they can win even tight elections and implement sensible policies.

Finally, so long as the universities and bureaucracies produce the curricular materials and professional development, these ideas will continue to flourish. Decoupling the university from schools by loosening teacher licensing and breaking the bureaucratic hold by empowering parents with choice would allow teachers to get back to basics.

Education has become a winning issue for conservatives. It’s time to start supporting conservative teachers, holding schools responsible, and doing the diligent work of providing agency and transparency for our families and communities.

Daniel Buck is a teacher and a senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute. Anthony Kinnett is a curriculum developer and coordinator in Indianapolis and the co-founder and owner of The Chalkboard Review.