As the 2022 legislative session kicks off, “Indiana state legislators have introduced a bill to ban critical race theory indoctrination in public schools and provide parents with total curriculum transparency,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow and anti-CRT activist Chris Rufo reported on Twitter this afternoon. The legislation, first filed in the Indiana House and Senate as House Bill 1040 and Senate Bill 167, respectively, contains many of the standard curricular prohibitions seen in the slate of anti-CRT laws that a number of states have passed in recent months. But its curricular-transparency provisions also require “each qualified school to post educational activities and curricular materials on the school’s Internet web site,” mandates that schools “add functionality that allows parents of students in the school corporation to opt in to or opt out of certain educational activities and curricular materials under certain conditions,” and includes a number of other efforts to empower parents, according to the text of the Senate bill.
In an interview for a piece I wrote last month on the new conservative education-reform movement, Rufo told me that 2022 “is going to be the greatest year for education reform in a generation.” This is the first salvo in a legislative session that is set to see a wave of new conservative education bills, organized around CRT but combined with broader “parent first” reforms designed to increase autonomy and control for mothers and fathers across the country. As I noted in last month’s article, that agenda was outlined in a coalition statement organized by Rufo and the Heritage Foundation and published in early December, outlining the three agenda items of anti-CRT laws, curriculum transparency, and a “right to exit” — i.e., school choice. “What we’ve tried to do is take this parent revolt that we’ve seen in school-board meetings and local communities and give it a coherent expression in public policy,” Rufo told me.
The Indiana legislation is a promising early effort to put those principles into practice. “This is a major step in the fight against racialist ideology in our public institutions,” Rufo wrote on Twitter.