School test scores are crashing. Teachers are quitting. Parents are being patronized.
But it’s OK. At least public schools are promoting critical race theory.
A video posted to Rumble of the goings-on in the Francis Howell School District of St. Charles County, Missouri, demonstrates how CRT is being pushed there, although advocates are careful to say it’s not really CRT.
The video appears to show supporters of the district’s black history/literature curriculum praising the courses at an April meeting of the school board.
In the next month’s meeting, an individual identifying herself as a member of the curriculum writing committee told the board: “These courses do not teach critical race theory and do not attempt to rewrite history.”
But that’s not true.
The video then flashes back to a September 2020 Zoom meeting entitled “Rethinking K-12 Black History Education.” The meeting was between members of the district’s curriculum committee and LaGarrett King, a University of Missouri education professor who was apparently functioning as a consultant. (The Western Journal reached out to the school district for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.)
King is introduced on the video as specializing in “race, critical theories and knowledge, and critical multicultural teacher education”.
He made multiple claims that can be identified as falling under the CRT umbrella: Traditional history and social studies curriculums are racist, white people don’t want to talk about their whiteness because that is triggering “especially [for] white males,” and racism is defined as “prejudice plus power.”
King also said, “In many ways, what we have done in our history curriculum is that we have made those who have oppressed people — the oppressor — we have humanized them. And those that have been historically oppressed, we have continued to dehumanize.”
History, as traditionally taught, “is psychologically violent towards black students and non-whites, but it’s not psychologically violent to white children,” he added. “And if it becomes psychologically violent to white children, what happens? Their parents step in.”
King was critical of progressives who point to advances among the black middle class and the fact that the U.S., a country that abolished slavery more than 150 years ago, elected a black president.
“Have we had a black president tied to the lineage of slavery?” he asked.
Regarding the nation’s founding, King said, “July 4, 1776, means nothing to black people.”
In the video, a curriculum committee member noted that the school district is “in the middle of Trump country” and that there has been pushback when the idea of “white privilege” comes up. King said if such terms are a problem, “don’t use the verbiage.”
Discussion among curriculum committee members recorded on the video indicates they saw a need to prepare for parental backlash. One member said they can “go back to” an anti-racism resolution the school board passed in 2020 “and that provides support for the administrators to say, ‘No, we are moving forward.'”
Another said the school district is in a parental role, and that many parents respect the district.
“So if you take on that role and you say, ‘This is what’s best for our students and these are the reasons why,’ they’re going to take it,” she said.
Still another said: “Yes, we are in a very conservative county — we all know that — and sometimes I think we have deferred to letting that stop progress.”
Translation: Those conservative parents are just going to have to take it.
CRT is a dimension of social justice, and social justice is a necessary part of contemporary education, we’re told.
For instance, in an online publication called Resilient Educator, Caitrin Blake, composition instructor at Arapahoe Community College in the Denver area, wrote on “Teaching Social Justice in Theory and Practice.”
Blake told teachers, “Social justice advocates hope to build a society in which individuals have equal access to resources and receive equitable treatment regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexuality, income level or disability.”
But pesky academic things might get in the way, according to Blake, as seen when social justice discussions must be curtailed “in order to prepare for standardized tests.”
Of course, this raises a question: As members of the education establishment discuss ways to make leftists out of children, what about the actual function of teaching them reading, mathematics and composition?
Who is doing the real job of education?
It’s reminiscent of a 1970s plane disaster where the flight crew was so focused on a burned-out light bulb that no one was paying attention to flying the plane, and it slowly lost altitude and crashed in the Florida Everglades.
Likewise, with all the concern about CRT and social justice, who is pointing out that math and test scores continue to drop?
And this has been going on for decades. In fact, the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education report warned in 1983: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
That was nearly 40 years ago! How much worse is it now?
Maybe that commission was closer to the truth than they realized, given increased linkings of Marxism to CRT.
Another point: King, in the St. Charles County video, was quick to criticize reactions by “white males.”
Blake, writing in Resilient Educator, said that while girls may delay social justice by excluding people, there’s a problem with “boys who prove their masculinity by dominating and controlling others.”
Effectively, girls’ behavioral problems reflect nothing more than them being mean, but boys’ behavior is tied to their masculinity. This is what is being taught to teachers working with boys as young as 5?
Perhaps that’s why 44 percent of teachers leave the profession in the first five years of their career, according to the Teacher Career Coach website.
Reasons include stress and burnout, but could it be that some of that stress comes from the nonsense that is CRT and social justice advocacy?
Thankfully, parents are becoming increasingly aware of the problem.
So let the interventions begin…
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