CRT Bans Are Working

C overage of public education in the Washington Post has developed a habit of making the opposite point of what the reporter appears to intend. In a December article about parental objections to the pornographic book Lawn Boy, reporter Hannah Natanson quoted the book’s author admitting that his work was profane and expressing surprise it had made its way into public-school libraries. And her most recent article, “Slavery Was Wrong: And Five Other Things Some Educators Won’t Teach Anymore,” actually suggests a more positive and salutary effect from “critical race theory bans” than their proponents could reasonably have hoped for.

“For 14 years,” the article states, “a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident.” Assigned to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, students discover that Columbus wrote of the Arawak natives, “They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make for excellent servants.” Students learned from this that Columbus’s first thought was about enslaving natives. But as historian Mary Grabar has documented, Zinn was profoundly dishonest here (as he was in so many other places). The ellipses in the quote cover days’ worth of Columbus’s journal entries. The ellipses hide that Columbus was not speaking his own opinion, but rather referring to the beliefs of the Arawaks’ neighbors, who attempted to enslave them. Therefore, a parental complaint led to students no longer learning a false lesson — to which the only appropriate educational value judgment can be: “Great!”

The article also covers a teacher who pulled her lesson plans on “cake walks,” antebellum dances performed by slaves that mocked the formal dances of their enslavers. But it turns out that parents hadn’t objected to this lesson until the teacher paired it with a reading by critical race theorist bell hooks on drag queens in the 1980s. Hooks writes, “Within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness.” Parents were not wrong to question the pedagogical value of presenting this perspective without a counter. Not to mention that equating the subversion of race-norms by slaves performing cake walks in the antebellum era with the subversion of gender-norms by drag queens in the 1980s is morally dubious, at best. Another lesson better left untaught.

The Post article relates that without pressure from the school district, some teachers opted against assigning Huckleberry Finn because white parents complained about the “n-word.” But this is nothing new, and not an objection typically associated with conservative parents targeted by the Post. The strangest example is an administrator who objected to a teacher’s offering an optional assignment of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” Maybe here the administrator was a bit overbearing. But as the article reported that this English teacher had previously taught a lesson on “toxic masculinity,” it’s hard to blame the assistant principal for being on guard against the intrusion of ideology-based instruction.

The lead anecdote covers an Iowa teacher named Greg Wickenkamp who wondered whether he should still assign Zinn’s Education Project material and critical-race-theory guru Ibram X. Kendi’s books. As parental complaints about Kendi flowed in, the school district offered little clarification at first. Finally, Wickenkamp sought a meeting with the superintendent to ask: “Is it acceptable for me to teach that slavery is wrong?” To her discredit, the superintendent did not offer a straight answer. But, as my AEI colleague Robert Pondiscio put it, “If you’re lacking in moral discernment, unfamiliar with history standards, or just so compliance-minded that you need to be told it’s OK to teach ‘slavery was wrong’ you’re either grandstanding or can’t be trusted with teacher autonomy.” Wickenkamp has since left the profession.

It has been two years since the grassroots parental movement against CRT picked up steam, CRT bans were passed, and teachers were put on notice against overly politicized instruction. The Left has warned that these laws and this parental pressure would lead to flat, if not dishonest, discussion of American history. If this is the worst evidence that the Washington Post can come up with, then these laws and the parental-rights movement have been a bigger success than proponents could reasonably have hoped.