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Here’s a four-point action plan for citizens who want to resist the efforts of teacher unions and the Biden administration to force Critical Race Theory (CRT) into public schools.
The plan recommends four resolutions that citizens can propose that local school boards adopt and school board candidates endorse. With less than three weeks to election day, it enables voters to determine where school board candidates stand on this controversial issue.
Resolution number 1:
This school board will not accept, nor utilize any material, from The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which argues that slavery is the central theme of U.S. history, that 1619 is the year America “began,” and that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery.
Democracy – government of, by and for the people – is the central theme of U.S. history. Immigration is a more important theme than CRT. Virtually all Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants.
Resolution number 2:
This school board will not apply for federal education grants in the U.S. history and civics curricula.
The Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Education has proposed a rule stating that it will prefer grant applications which incorporate CRT-type themes in the projects for which funding is sought. An application incorporating CRT is against the policy of the board; an application not incorporating CRT is a waste of time and resources, since it would have no chance of being approved and funded.
Resolution number 3:
This school board rejects the resolution adopted this past summer by the national convention of the National Education Association, namely “NEA New Business Item 39.”
NEA New Business Item 39 states “The NEA will provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.”
Resolution number 4:
This school board will not accept books from the American Federation of Teachers nor from the First Book non-profit, which are distributing for free books by Ibram X. Kendi, an activist scholar. In his book “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi states that “The only remedy to past racism is present racism. The only remedy to present racism is future racism.” Naturally, the only way to interpret this quote is that the “remedy” is to discriminate against whites. The cure for racism is not more racism.
None of these resolutions seeks to ban teaching about slavery and racism, which are important and tragic themes of U.S. history. Undeniably, elements of racism persist today.
Equally unarguable is that there is less racism today than twenty-five years ago, and less than there was fifty years ago when redlining was prevalent in mortgage lending, for example. There is no Jim Crow, i.e. de jure discrimination, as there was seventy-five years ago. Slavery was abolished more than a century and a half ago.
Martin Luther King believed that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Our history proves him right. We may not be quite there yet, but we have traveled a long, long way.
Yet, CRT implies, if not teaches explicitly, that racism persists undiminished as the defining feature of American society. Indeed, President Biden believes that racism is systemic.
Ibram X. Kendi’s solution – that a new and opposite wrong remedies a past wrong — is exactly contrary to what moral parents teach their children: two wrongs do not make a right.