Diversity audits and equity scorecards: ‘anti-racism’ is king in Guilford schools, teachers and parents tell NR.
In classrooms across the country, students as young as five years old are being instructed in the tenets of an ideology that casts American society as a power competition between racial groups.
This postmodern framework was once confined to the halls of higher education and traveled under the name critical race theory. But in recent years, teachers and administrators steeped in this way of thinking have begun adapting concepts honed in postgraduate seminars for a K–12 audience.
In private and public schools alike, teachers and administrators are evaluating and reforming their curricula along the racist vs. anti-racist binary advanced most prominently by Ibram X. Kendi.
In cities and small towns, Kendi’s central thesis — that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” — is taking root.
The suburban town of Guilford, Ct. is one such place.
Guilford’s Progressive Parents Organize
As America’s so-called racial reckoning was unfolding in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, progressive parents and teachers in Guilford began organizing.
They formed the Guilford Anti-Bias Anti-Racist (ABAR) Alliance earlier this year. The group is composed of members representing each of the parent-teacher organizations in Guilford, and boasts a sleek, well-curated website that provides resources on bias and racism for educators to deploy in the classroom.
“We realize that as a predominantly white, cis-gendered community we are shaped by our privilege and limited ability to fully understand the impact of bias and racism,” the group’s mission page states.
ABAR advocates a hyper-focus on race in early childhood education on the grounds that impressionable minds will develop racist attitudes almost immediately if not otherwise instructed.
“Adults often worry that talking about race will encourage racial bias in children, but the opposite is true. Silence about race reinforces racism,” its web page notes. In the website’s “Teaching Our Kids About Racism” section, an infographic instructs visitors that “Children as young as two years use race to reason about people’s behaviors.”
The website explains in detail how nascent racism emerges in infants and then cements itself throughout the toddler and kindergarten stages. In order to interrupt this nefarious process, ABAR holds, children should be exposed to anti-racist programming at a young age so that they “learn where and how injustice and inequality operate in our society.”
ABAR Parents Have a Powerful Ally
ABAR is not just shouting into the Internet void: Curriculum reforms that reflect their anti-racist activism are already being implemented, thanks in part to the backing of Guilford superintendent Paul Freeman.
The “organic development of ABAR committees is one of the brightest spots in the school year,” Freeman said during a social justice meeting in March, though he conceded that ABAR has expressed disappointment in the district for offering “too little too late,” for which he took responsibility.
Beginning in the summer of 2019, Freeman undertook an effort to educate his educators. He held an anti-racism retreat so that teachers and administrators could scrupulously audit the racial makeup of virtually every group they’ve ever been a part of. Freeman said he presented teachers at the retreat with a “racial autobiography,” which asks the writer to describe the “racial makeup” of their neighborhood, hometown, middle school, Girl Scout troop, soccer team, current occupation, and so on.
During the retreat, Freeman also distributed copies of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Debby Irving’s Waking Up White, he said. Later, Freeman provided Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist to every teacher in the district in grades K–12 at a cost of $6,000, according to email correspondence reviewed by National Review.
Culturally Responsive Scorecards and Guilford Audit
“The socially responsive” curriculum that teachers learned to embrace in seminars and through Freeman’s suggested reading materials has already filtered down into classrooms.
The Guilford Board of Education (BOE) is conducting an “equity” audit, interviewing minority students about their experiences with equity in the school system, and distributing “culturally responsive education” (CRE) scorecards to faculty.
The audit examines all facets of Guilford curriculum to expose shortcomings with regard to “addressing equity and social justice,” a statement by the Guilford BOE indicates.
An anonymous former Guilford school staff member said she believes the audit was in part the prescription of Donald Siler and Sharon Locke, two paid consultants working with the Guilford BOE to create “culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy.”
The scorecard, published by New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, is supposed to inform the Guilford audit. It is designed to “help parents, teachers, students, and community members determine the extent to which their schools’ English Language Art, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) curricula are (or are not) culturally responsive,” according to its online promo.
Rather than a passive review, however, the scorecard is a rubric meant to pave the road for “how curriculum can be transformed to engage students effectively.”
It presents a point system for teachers to evaluate their curricula through the binary racist vs. anti-racist framework popularized by Kendi, parents say. Under the scorecard, more points are allotted to books and assignments that represent diverse ethnicities and meet other social-justice criteria. The scores range from “culturally destructive” to “culturally responsive.”
Rather than just assessing curriculum from a distance however, the tool was directly applied to class material in at least one instance. An anonymous student in Guilford High School told National Review that an English teacher offered the scorecard as an optional resource for a speech assignment on a particular novel.
“Culturally responsive curricula should encourage students to connect to experiences beyond their own, examine their own perspective and privilege, and develop a critical consciousness about systems of oppression in order to take action against them,” the scorecard states.
The scorecard website touts a 2019 study of New York City schools that found that “white authors and characters are wildly over-represented in proportion to the student population.”
Critical Race Theory in Practice in Guilford
The scorecard and the district’s push to retrain teachers in anti-racism seem to be making an impact, both by ensuring that new texts and assignments are added to the curriculum and by eliminating what came before.
In many cases, it’s not that instructors are balancing a new perspective against the existing one by, say, teaching both Thomas Sowell and Malcolm X, or both Walt Whitman and Maya Angelou. They’re choosing one over the other.
A number of teachers in the district became concerned last year after one of their colleagues, a seventh-grade English teacher in the Guilford upper middle school, said during a department meeting that he would like to limit his curriculum to authors of color. (This is according to a teacher who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.)
In an email, Freeman, the superintendent, rejected this claim, writing, “I have reached out to the teachers who would match the description in your email below, and they categorically deny having said anything of the sort.”
In other instances, otherwise unobjectionable books are being weaponized for hyperbolic discussion on race, according to the unnamed faculty member.
At the tenth-grade level, two teachers infused modern racial politics into a pair of otherwise standard reading assignments: Just Mercy, a book by Bryan Stevenson that discusses the problem of wrongful conviction and the death penalty, and Antigone, the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles.
While reading Just Mercy for the class, students watched an accompanying Ted Talk in which the speaker argues that the U.S. justice system is founded on white supremacy and racism, the faculty member said. Kids were not offered a competing argument — that the justice system may require improvement but is not foundationally corrupt, she said.
With Antigone, the teacher connected the theme of the play to the case of Michael Brown, an African American who was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in 2014. That teacher compared Brown to a modern-day Antigone, lying dead in the street without dignity or respect, according to the unnamed teacher. The class then read a PBS breakdown of the Ferguson events sympathetic to the riots that erupted in the aftermath of the shooting, she said.
The English teacher, in discussing the Michael Brown case, excluded from the conversation the Obama Justice Department’s conclusion that there was “no credible evidence” that the officer shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender, the faculty member said.
In another situation, the poem “What to My People Is the Fourth of July?” was the subject of a journaling assignment in a Guilford high-school class, according to Danielle Scarpellino, who learned of a student who received it. That work, a twist on the famously patriotic speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” by African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, suggests that America’s Independence Day excludes people of color.
In an “equity” push on the institutional level, the Guilford district recently eliminated a number of accelerated English classes, the faculty member said. She said she’s heard rumblings from teachers in other departments who are fearful the administration will do the same with their courses, stifling the development of some students while throwing others into an academic environment they’re not prepared for.
Guilford Parents, Teachers, and Citizens Join the CRT Resistance
While activists in the Guilford community are moving strategically to racialize the district, other concerned parents, teachers, and citizens have joined the resistance, and it’s gaining momentum.
Dave Holman, a Guilford resident, first sounded the alarm on CRT when he stumbled upon a disturbing sight while walking in his quiet neighborhood. Last August, Holman noticed a bunch of young kids, who he estimated were under ten years old, sketching radical slogans such as “Defund the Police” and “Abolish Ice” in chalk on the sidewalk. Holman was stunned to see such young kids embracing politically charged talking points, and suspected they were getting their ideas about fraught racial subjects from their teachers.
Holman hurried to his computer and wrote emails to officials in the Guilford school district.
In an email exchange from August 2020 obtained by National Review, Superintendent Freeman responds to Holman’s inquiry asking him to confirm whether CRT and the New York Times’ 1619 Project will be incorporated into Guilford curricula.
Freeman answers, “While we do not directly reference either the 1619 Project or Critical Race Theory in our curriculum, they are both valuable approaches to historical instruction.”
“In a system where most of our teaching staff and leaders are white themselves, these are important texts,” Freeman added in reference to the books Waking Up White, White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist, and White Kids.
“We need not whitewash our history in order to help our children to grow to be thoughtful and skillful and proud of themselves as well as compassionate and fair and inclusive of others,” he wrote.
But Holman and his allies believe Freeman is advancing a false dichotomy by presenting just two options: teaching history according to anti-racism advocates or whitewashing it altogether. Rather than explore multiple historical angles and discuss various interpretations, the Guilford initiative will result in looking at matters through one narrow lens, they say. When history is seen through that lens, race is central to every aspect of it, often with whiteness playing the central villain, they contend.
Holman is part of a local group in Guilford called Truth in Education (TIE), which has multiplied in membership from six to over 50 people in the last year. He’s also leading a charge to convince the Guilford BOE to sponsor a public debate on critical race theory, a request they’ve so far allegedly ignored. When asked for comment, Freeman said, “We do not teach Critical Race Theory in the Guilford Public Schools. In fact, I am unaware of any K–12 schools in which it is taught.”
While Holman has had success rallying parents against the newly racialized curricula, he’s met resistance from the local paper, the Hartford Courant.
The Courant sent a reporter to cover TIE’s informational meeting on critical race theory on June 24 and subsequently published an editorial accusing the group of using “racist dog whistles” and “echoing the KKK.”
In a letter to the editor obtained by National Review, TIE member Danielle Scarpellino responded by demanding that the Courant retract the op-ed, and she defended the position of many Guilford parents who believe that racializing the school’s curriculum will harm children.
“It is CRT’s racist beliefs, alongside its denunciation of science and rationality in public policy formation, our Constitution, our genuine history, our belief in equality among citizens, Enlightenment values, Western culture, masculinity, and the civil rights tenets of Martin Luther King, that drives the objections of citizens. Assemblages of bipartisan and multiracial citizens across our country object to CRT, not due to their philosophical affiliation with the KKK, but due to CRT’s irrational and racist beliefs,” Scarpellino writes.
In an email obtained by National Review, Scarpellino said she attended a meeting with Superintendent Freeman, during which he made the comment, “For the last three years, it has been my goal to elevate Guilford on its whiteness.” Freeman didn’t deny he made the statement but pointed out that nothing like it appears in the district’s official communications.
After she scheduled a mutually agreed-upon follow-up meeting to ask more questions about the scorecard and other equity and inclusion initiatives coming down the Guilford school pipeline, Scarpellino said Freeman suddenly canceled, with no opportunity to reschedule. Freeman neither confirmed nor denied the meeting’s cancellation.
Scarpellino said that since Freeman has stopped engaging with her, she has resorted to FOIA requests, incurring fees in the hundreds of dollars, to gather more information about what’s happening in Guilford schools. Last year, she spearheaded two separate petitions calling for Freeman’s firing and an end to teaching “social justice indoctrination,” collecting over 300 signatures.