What’s Behind Right-Wing Attacks on Schools for ‘Teaching Critical Race Theory’
It’s no coincidence that many states that have passed new laws forbidding the teaching of “divisive” topics are the same ones undermining and privatizing public schools.
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This article was produced by Our Schools.
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Introduction[edit | edit source]
“No one deserves the school I went to,” Celia Gottlieb said when telling Our Schools in 2021 about the high school she attended in Highland, New York, a small community in the Lower Hudson River Valley region of the Empire State.
The Highland Central School District would have raised few concerns to the casual observer. Its state data report card in 2022–2023 said the district graduated 89 percent of its students, above the national rate of 87 percent,[1] with a college, career, and civic readiness level of four, the state’s highest rating. But Gottlieb’s negative recollections about her high school years had more to do with what went on inside the building.
“There was not a single day that I didn’t hear a student openly use the n-word,” she said. “Confederate flags were common. Students had Confederate flags on their cars and on their clothes. One kid wore a shirt with a Confederate flag on it nearly every day and was never told to take it off, even though a student who wore a shirt with an LGBTQ message on it was told to take it off.”
Gottlieb, who identifies as white and Jewish, described learning a “whitewashed curriculum” in which the only history taught was American and European. She said there were few references in lessons to the legacies of colonialism, even though the influence of the Dutch settlers who founded the town was ubiquitous in the names of the local streets and buildings.
The Reconstruction period following the Civil War—when formerly enslaved Black people enjoyed a degree of prosperity before the backlash of Jim Crow—received only a brief overview, said Gottlieb. There was nothing taught about Black, Native American, or Latinx culture, she recalled. History courses were taught mostly by white male teachers who were often athletic coaches, who wanted to “talk about what was important to them, not what was important to the students,” explains Gottlieb.
In 2019–2020, when Gottlieb attended Highland Central schools, the district’s student population was majority white, 70 percent, but was slowly diversifying—the population of white students was higher, 80 percent, 10 years before Gottlieb attended. And there was evidence the nonwhite students were not as well served. According to its report card, Highland Central School District was designated a Target District by the state, meaning it “struggled to prepare certain subgroups (such as students with disabilities or certain racial/ethnic groups) but not all of their students with some or all indicators of success.”
Gottlieb didn’t need to look at the data to know that what was going on in her school was wrong. But what she didn’t anticipate was that her commitment to change the culture of her high school would in time land her smack in the middle of a culture war over how public schools should address issues of race, inequity, and diversity in institutions dedicated to educating all students.
Similarly, North Carolina public school teacher Justin Parmenter found himself swept up into an ongoing culture war being waged by right-wing politicians in his state when he penned an opinion piece for the Charlotte Observer and immediately got called out by a legislator on the floor of the state House of Representatives.
The main point of his editorial, Parmenter told Our Schools, was that teaching his seventh-grade class in the hybrid model many schools adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t sustainable because it forced teachers to make compromises that limited the learning opportunities of their students.
But that point was not what Iredell County Republican Representative Jeff McNeely was compelled to comment on. Instead, he attacked Parmenter, who was named a finalist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Teacher of the Year in 2016, for attempting to “indoctrinate” his students about “environmental pollution.”
As Parmenter explained on his personal blog, McNeely’s remarks referred to a piece of writing Parmenter asked his students to respond to that happened to be about pollution, and McNeely made his comment in the context of a discussion in the House about a new bill, HB 755, that “would require schools to post online a comprehensive list of all teaching, classroom, and assignment materials used by every teacher in every class session,” according to WRAL. McNeely spoke out in support of the bill in the House Education Committee meeting because he felt it would “help the parents going to the next grade be able to look and see what that teacher taught the year before” and, apparently, avoid having their children exposed to teachers who would “teach ’em in a certain way to make ’em believe something other than the facts.”
Aside from pollution being, indeed, a fact, what HB 755 proposed was impractical, to say the least, Parmenter said. “Teaching is an art form,” he said, with multiple opportunities for “teachable moments” to arise spontaneously during every lesson. Having to document that would not only be tedious busywork, but it could also discourage teachers from tailoring instruction to students.
Parmenter suspected that McNeely’s comment, rather than being an honest discourse on pedagogy, was more likely a ham-handed attempt at making a “cheap political point.”
“It’s not surprising,” Parmenter said when Our Schools spoke to him in 2021, “given the current national context.”
The national context both Gottlieb and Parmenter became embroiled in was a wave of agitation drummed up by right-wing political organizations and Republican politicians over the perceived “indoctrination” of students that was supposedly occurring in public schools.
Drawing the Wrath of a Nationwide Movement[edit | edit source]
While both Gottlieb’s work for her high school alma mater and Parmenter’s work for his students represented well-meaning efforts to improve the culture and curriculum of their schools, they unwittingly became the targets of the wrath of a nationwide movement fomented by right-wing organizations.
In Gottlieb’s case, her desire to improve the culture of her school became a target for those arguing that any work related to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools was an attempt to promote “divisiveness”[2] in communities and to “indoctrinate” students in ideas, such as critical race theory (CRT), that supposedly discriminate against white students.
In Parmenter’s case, his work to engage students in learning by presenting material that interested them and was relevant to their lives also drew charges of indoctrination from right-wing politicians and became fodder for their calls to clamp down on schools and teachers for spreading supposedly divisive content like CRT.
“In towns nationwide, well-connected conservative activists, and Fox News, have ramped up the tension in fights over race and equity in schools,” reported NBC News in the summer of 2021. The NBC reporters counted “at least 165 local and national groups” that received support from “conservative think tanks, law firms, and activist parents” to “swarm school board meetings, inundate districts with time-consuming public records requests, and file lawsuits and federal complaints alleging discrimination against white students.”
The controversy “exploded in the public arena” in the spring of 2021, according to Education Week, “especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures… [were] debating bills seeking to ban… [CRT’s] use in the classroom.”[3]
The bills surfaced in at least 15 states, as of a May 2021 Education Week report. That included North Carolina’s version, which debuted in May 2021, NC Newsline reported.
The bills repeated a nearly identical set of prohibitions on “how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and other social issues,” according to Education Week, using language similar to that of an “executive order former President Donald Trump put in place to ban diversity training for federal workers.” President Biden rescinded that order, but efforts to ban diversity training continued in universities and school districts in 2021, according to the Washington Post, where the focus of legislation extended beyond employee training to include school curricula and teaching practices.
The specifics in these bills banned teachers from addressing concepts related to race and gender, for instance, prohibiting teachers from making anyone “feel discomfort or guilt” because of their race or gender. But the list of transgressions seemed purposefully vague and general, almost as if to invite a lawsuit, explained Adam Harris in the Atlantic. And proponents of the bills adopted CRT, an academic idea dating back to the 1970s, as a shorthand for their concerns.
Although none of the right-wing groups or the legislation they push for appeared to have targeted Gottlieb or Highland schools, she believed “the haters,” as she called them, were there, even if they did not “appear to be organized—yet,” when she spoke to Our Schools in 2021.
However, the backlash was close by, less than an hour’s drive, where the Onteora Central School District was identified for a “Flagged Curriculum” that supposedly taught “political activism, false facts, critical race theory, etc.” on What Are They Learning, a now-defunct website that “[allowed] you to browse problematic curriculum being assigned across the country, and anonymously upload your own examples from your child’s school.”
The website was the creation of Luke Rosiak, according to the podcast of the Family Research Council hosted by Tony Perkins, the organization’s leader. The Family Research Council “bills itself as ‘the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,’” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “but… [its] real specialty is defaming LGBTQ people.” Rosiak was “an investigative reporter” for the Daily Caller, “a conservative/Republican news spin organization founded in 2010 by conservative reporter Tucker Carlson and former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch.
The Onteora district’s alleged transgression was that it “[paid] Morningside Center,” a New York City nonprofit that assists schools with racial equity and social-emotional issues, “to train staff to lead ‘circles’ during class time.” Circles, the website warned, “are modeled after Native American religious rituals.” Furthermore, the comment on What Are They Learning went on to say that the district’s “teachings have anti-racist, critical theory underpinning.”
The Highland Central School District was never flagged on What Are They Learning, but visitors to the site were urged to “blow the whistle” to target districts that had yet to be designated for parental concern.
The site also linked to Parents Defending Education, which continues to operate its own “indoctrination map” to flag schools engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion work, for “resources.” That organization’s founder and president is Nicole Neily, who has a lengthy history of being an employee of organizations funded by right-wing philanthropists Charles Koch and his late brother David, according to Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
‘None of This Is Really About Critical Race Theory’[edit | edit source]
A prominent flashpoint in this upheaval is the supposed infiltration of the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in public school curricula.
“But none of this is really about CRT,” James Ford told Our Schools in a phone call. Ford is a former North Carolina Teacher of the Year, a former member of the North Carolina State Board of Education, and the current executive director of the Center for Racial Equity in Education.
“First, in these calls to stop the teaching of CRT,” he said, “there is no clarification of what CRT really is. There’s no argumentative critique of the actual concept.” Indeed, many of the 15 bills in 2021 against teaching CRT in schools did not even mention the term.
The real target, Ford explained, was “divisiveness.” For the people who criticized teachers and promoted these bills, Ford believed, there could be “no nuance at all” in discussing “matters of religion and customs and the values of rugged individualism and free-market ideology.” There could be no challenges of assumptions and no revising of long-standing mythologies about America and American society.
According to Ford, these people saw education as a process about “making kids assimilate,” and “simply talking about a subject like pollution takes on a heightened sense of alarm about society being undermined.”
Outlawing ‘Divisiveness’ in Schools[edit | edit source]
Many of the bills specifically targeted the banning of teaching “divisive concepts,” according to Politico, with one bill, in West Virginia, going so far as to call for teachers to be “dismissed or not reemployed for teaching… divisive concepts.”
Proposed laws against “divisiveness” in schools prompted Ford to question, “Divisive for who?” and he noted that the people behind all these bills were overwhelmingly white, wealthier folks who generally benefited most from the nation’s education system. Ford suggested they may have been provoking white resentment against public schools because schools are now more populated with Black and Brown children who may express doubts about a prevailing narrative about the country that may not include people who look like them.
Ford also found it ironic that people who were intent on outlawing school “indoctrination” chose to impose their own agenda by attacking critical thinking and questioning of cultural norms, which, to him, was what truly sounds like indoctrination.
From a practical standpoint, it would be nearly impossible to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. And it’s hard to imagine how teachers of American history would have steered clear of violating these laws while teaching about the Trail of Tears, slavery, the Civil War, and the suffragette and Civil Rights movements, or how English teachers could have engaged students in writing while avoiding current events and topics that were apt to elicit meaningful responses from students.
Structural Racism Is Real[edit | edit source]
Someone who does know what it’s like to engage in the hard work of making schools more welcoming, inclusive, and just, and then be targeted for political smears by right-wing agitators, is Letha Muhammad, the director of the Education Justice Alliance (EJA) based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“EJA’s work is focused on ending the school-to-prison and school-to-deportation pipelines,” Muhammad told Our Schools in a phone call, referring to the well-established understanding that students of color disproportionately experience excessively harsh school discipline practices and the involvement of law enforcement officers in schools, and these experiences often lead to those students being pushed out of the school and into the criminal justice system, or, in the case of undocumented students, into the immigration system.
EJA, according to its website, encourages local school officials to explore alternatives to school suspensions, to protect immigrant and undocumented students, and to invest more in school support staff—such as school psychologists, mental health therapists, counselors, and nurses—to help attend to the social-emotional needs of students.
Much of EJA’s work, Muhammad said, happens through empowering students and families to be front-line advocates in the struggle against racial inequity and injustice in schools, since they are the ones being most affected by harsh discipline policies.
Muhammad explained, “We work with young people and families to… share a narrative about the reality of their lives and their needs for support rather than punitive policies.”
It was that work of empowering student and family advocates that made EJA a target of Education First Alliance, a North Carolina-based advocacy group that opposes, among other things, “radical” “teacher training” in “critical race theory.”
In a post titled “EXCLUSIVE: Foreign Money Funding Critical Race Theory in North Carolina’s Public Schools,” Education First Alliance’s president Sloan Rachmuth reported EJA had been among a group of government and nonprofit organizations that had been “awarded part of a $1.4M grant from Switzerland-based Oak Foundation to ‘combat structural racism within the education system’ in North Carolina.”
The piece alleged that grant money awarded by a Swiss foundation was essentially “foreign control of North Carolina’s school system” and that this foreign agenda was “being carried out by groups like Durham-based Education Justice Alliance [EJA is based in Raleigh] who trains student activists to campaign against ALL school discipline policies and against allowing school resource officers on campus.”
Rachmuth found it all the more concerning that the Oak Foundation was among the many investors in a massive infrastructure development project rolled out by the Chinese government, and she concocted a guilt by association argument to accuse recipients of the grant, which also includes the North Carolina School Board, of “‘transforming’ the state’s school system into a Marxist system.”
When Our Schools asked Muhammad about what her reactions were to the article when it was brought to her attention, she responded, “Wow, the lies. I had heard of [Education First Alliance] but had not really paid any attention to them and was really taken aback by the manipulation of facts to support a particular narrative.”
“What they say about our organization are just lies. We don’t have anything to do with spreading communist doctrine. We do train students to be activists for themselves. We don’t train them in advocating communism.”
To those who oppose the need to address structural racism in the education system, Muhammad wanted to assure them that structural racism is real.
“I am a Black woman and mother of three children who have been and are in the public school system. I’ve seen with my own eyes how structural racism shows up in schools. You can’t convince me otherwise. Look at the data and talk to students and parents. There’s just no denying this.”
Yet denying that reality has become ideal fodder for groups intent on inciting white rage.
The Other Education Agenda[edit | edit source]
Because these concerted attacks on public schools and teachers make little sense academically, they have prompted many observers to consider whether there is more of a political intent behind the effort.
Parmenter suggested that the attacks on schools and teachers were an attempt to change political momentum at a time when national leadership under a Democratic presidential administration was enjoying high approval ratings.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg seemed to agree, writing in 2021, “Part of the reason the right is putting so much energy into this crusade [against the teaching of CRT] is because it can’t whip up much opposition to the bulk of Joe Biden’s agenda.” She concluded, “Telling parents that liberals want to make their kids hate their country and feel guilty for being white might be absurd and cynical. It also looks like it might be effective.”
But that argument makes sense only if you ignore the other education agenda right-wing politicians rolled out at the very same time they were whipping up white resentment over diversity in schools.
It’s certainly no coincidence that in many states where there were bills attacking the teaching of divisive topics—including Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, and West Virginia—state lawmakers were considering or enacting “school choice” laws to create or expand programs that give parents vouchers so they could remove their children from public schools and send them to private schools at taxpayer expense. Other school choice acts created or expanded programs that give parents taxpayer dollars to spend on homeschooling and other educational expenses they incur for their children.
The 2020–2021 school year was the “best year ever” for school choice advocates, said Alan Greenblatt on the news site Governing. Greenblatt noted the proliferation of new laws created education savings accounts that give parents public funds to pay for “a wide range of education-related services.” Other laws created or expanded state tax-credit programs that funnel donations from businesses and wealthy people into school vouchers for parents.
Many of these provisions passed in states that had previously resisted school choice programs—such as Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia—or that—like Georgia, Maryland, Montana, and South Dakota—had very small programs that ballooned into massive redistributions of public funds for education.
“States that were long resistant [to school choice] have now opened up,” Greenblatt observed, and once the programs started up, regardless of how small, “they tend[ed] to expand, not contract.”
Greenblatt credited the COVID-19 pandemic for creating a lot of the momentum for this expansion of school laws. But he also quoted education historian Jack Schneider who noted that the drive for more school choice was accelerating long before COVID-19, during the expansions of charter schools under former President Barack Obama and through the fiery denunciations of “government schools” by former President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Indeed, school choice proponents like the conservative Manhattan Institute have long contended that a public school system funded by government, but with private entities providing the education services, should be “the democratic norm” for the nation. They called privatization of the school system “educational pluralism,” as opposed to the apparent divisiveness of publicly operated institutions.
“Public schooling forces zero-sum conflict such as we are seeing over CRT,” wrote Neal McCluskey, the director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, in RealClearPolicy. Of course, this “conflict” is “zero-sum,” as James Ford pointed out, only if you insist it is.
But school choice proponents like McCluskey argued that having a public system that allows people from different backgrounds to come together and share varying points of view is not “diverse” at all because it might open a window to a critique of America that potentially “demonizes” the country.
Instead, in this up-is-down and down-is-up view of the world, the only way to solve divisiveness, according to McCluskey, is by “letting millions of families and educators choose for themselves” by funding a system of privately operated schools that cater only to those parents who already share the same ideologies.
McCluskey might have been correct that such a system could “end heated disagreement over ideas like CRT” in schools, but it certainly would guarantee these conflicts spill over into other arenas for these students later in life, when they become adults whose views have hardened and become more resistant to change because they never experienced real diversity of thought during their formative years.
“[A] new era of school choice vouchers may be parents’ best defense against public school curricula,” warned former Attorney General William Barr, according to Just the News, in his first public speech since leaving office under the Trump administration in December 2020.
“Barr suggested,” Just the News reported, that “some of the new woke curricula pushed by the left might infringe religious and speech freedoms and impose a secular theology that violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause prohibiting government from imposing religious beliefs.”
A nonprofit launched in March 2021, Parents Defending Education (PDE), targeted “woke indoctrination” in schools, Fox News reported. PDE was “just the latest” organization to take up the cause, according to the article, which also listed Discovery Institute, Oregonians for Liberty in Education, and Parents Against Critical Race Theory.
According to a May 2021 article in Education Week, PDE targeted school districts around the country with federal civil rights complaints against schools that addressed systemic racism. The article noted that “[PDE] staffers work or previously worked at organizations such as the Cato Institute,”—where McCluskey works—the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Coalition for TJ. The Cato and Fordham institutes are ardent proponents of school choice, and Coalition for TJ filed a lawsuit to stop changes to admission standards that would allow more enrollment diversity at a Virginia high school.
James Ford agreed that attacks on “woke” indoctrination in schools were “unequivocally related to efforts to privatize education,” and he pointed out that many of the same people orchestrating the laws targeting public education are strong proponents of school choice. “Historically, there is a pattern connecting race issues and privatization,” he said.
Numerous studies have found evidence supporting Ford’s argument, but it’s not at all hard to imagine that an effective strategy for pushing white families out of public schools is to raise fears that their children are being indoctrinated with values and beliefs that could divide them ideologically or emotionally and draw a wedge between them and their families and neighbors.
Nor is it a stretch to believe that families of color, seeing white families become enraged about the teaching of structural racism, would consider fleeing a public school to find a privately operated alternative that would be more culturally affirming for their children.
What the Fighting Is Really All About[edit | edit source]
It’s not surprising at all that a highly organized campaign aimed at public schools followed closely after the reign of former President Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who revealed[4] that modern-day conservatives don’t want to improve public schools as much as they want to undermine and privatize them.
For this reason and others, news stories in 2021 about attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion work in public schools reported that right-wing radicalism saw a campaign against cultural race theory as a tactic to gain an advantage in a battle with much higher stakes.
NBC reporters placed these attacks in an electoral context aimed at “ousting as many school board members” as possible and fomenting the next iteration of grassroots conservative populist revolt “akin to the tea party” movement that radicalized the GOP in 2009–2010.
Similarly, a report for Time said the conflict was an extension of a decades-long culture war that conservatives believed was “a winning electoral message.”
But what DeVos’s agenda revealed to the nation was that attacking the institution of public education, and furthering its demise, is an important goal of the radical right in and of itself.
Public schools are, after all, one of the few, if not the only, places where people are brought together in a common space that reveals their differences and engages them in sharing these differences and coming to mutual understandings about them. If that can somehow be framed as something negative—by attacking what schools do to accommodate differences—then the right wing would be one step closer to achieving its goal to hasten the demise of public education.
But as long as there are people like Gottlieb and Muhammad, who see in public education the potential to rise above our differences and focus on what unites us, then public schools still have a chance at becoming stronger and more enduring American institutions.
“I’m still patriotic in every way,” Gottlieb said, “and there’s a potential in our country to create a more just nation, but that requires a more robust public education system.”
‘I Don’t Think That’s Funny at All’[edit | edit source]
In the meantime, public school teachers continued to be scapegoated by conservative advocates stigmatizing the idea of addressing controversial topics in schools. Proponents of the anti-CRT laws seemed to not know teachers “have to leave our politics at the door,” Justin Parmenter said, and these conservative advocates seemed to believe teachers “don’t have the integrity and professionalism to understand that [they] know there are lines you simply don’t cross.”
Parmenter sensed that the negative impact of these laws on the teaching corps would discourage future teachers from entering a profession in which they would be constantly under the watchful eye of people who may not respect them and understand how they do their job.
“Less mysterious” to him was the negative impacts these attacks on public schools and teaching have on students.
“For children to learn how to read and write, they need to engage with a variety of different texts,” he said, and while he found Representative McNeely’s accusations of “indoctrination” somewhat comedic—“like because I just happened to mention that the piece of writing my class focused on was about pollution, that made him think, ‘I just caught one of these Commies admitting what they are up to’”—Parmenter feared these efforts and laws would ultimately end up being harmful to their students. “And I don’t think that’s funny at all.”
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Based on 2021–2022 figures, the latest available upon access in June 2024 (page last updated May 2024). “In school year 2021–22, the U.S. average adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for public high school students was 87 percent.” National Center for Education Statistics, “High School Graduation Rates.”
- ↑ Jeff Bryant, AlterNet, “Here’s the Truth Behind the Right-Wing Attacks on Critical Race Theory” (May 28, 2021).
- ↑ Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, “What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?” (May 18, 2021).
- ↑ Jeff Bryant, Raw Story, “How a Trump Administration Official Is Quietly Exploiting the Pandemic to Advance Her Family Business -- and Right-Wing Agenda” (April 23, 2020).
