I worry that civil discourse around CRT is not going to happen. Instead, parents who most believe in civil discourse will simply pull their children out of public schools, rather than wade into the controversy. Teachers who are not “woke” will be treated as pariahs by other teachers and administrators. Public schools will end up serving the children of parents who are either very progressive or apathetic. There will emerge another school system, a separate but equal school system if you will, for children of parents who are conservatives or old-fashioned liberals.
[UPDATE: Read Bonnie Snyder’s essay. Also, Richard Hanania writes that legislative bans will fail to achieve their attended purpose.
the only real option for conservatives is to attack public education and encourage a larger migration to private schools and home schooling.
They might be separate, but they won’t be equal, because one will be free and the other will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. As such the vast majority of the population will end up at public schools even if they dislike them.
Those that do pay a fortune to seal their kids off from the public schools will see them…go off to college and get taught the same stuff anyway. Or avoid the entire system but watch every single decision maker at every single institution impose the will of this ideology on them because its what they were taught growing up in public school.
Sorry, but you’ve got to fight and win.
As to the school board issue, we should pursue both through school boards and legislation. I sometimes wonder if the people saying we should only go through the school board have ever actually examined school board politics and how they work. It’s going to be an uphill battle.
Let me give an example from the famous Loudoun County. The school board has been extremely pro-CRT, pro-Trans, and hostile to parents. As part of their campaign of terror, they have even conspired to record the names of parents or students that question their ideology so as to punish them both in and out of school. Anyone who signs a petition trying to recall them knows their children are at risk and their jobs (including private jobs unrelated to the schools) may be at risk.
This isn’t new to me, the exact same harassment campaign was done back when I was a kid going to a “too Asian” magnet school. My best friend whose mother was on the school board was threatened that if she didn’t pull her kid from the magnet school that his younger siblings would be retaliated against in school.
And of course a recall election is needed, because elections for these people are way out in the future to matter. So how would you flip the school board? Well, most of the seats aren’t for the entire county, even though policy gets set at the county level. Loudoun leans blue, but it’s especially blue in the more populous eastern part of the county. If you want a school board majority (and given then the entire education apparatus is against you, you probably need a super majority) you have to get enough signatures (in each specific area) and win seats in deep blue areas, despite in theory the county being only slightly blue.
If you live in the western red part of the county you are not able to control your local schools. Even if most of the parents attending my kids schools were against CRT, there is nothing we could do about it. Democrats an hour away who might not even have kids and whom I will never meet will determine my school boards policies. I don’t see how the school board represents local control by actual parents.
If you do win, then outside forces are called in to negate your win. Just as how when Asian parents in Fairfax won their local PTA election on an anti-CRT platform, the state level PTA effectively disbanded their PTA and took all their funds.
All of the local media is lined up against you (go read any of the county newspapers) and anyone who campaigns against the school board is targeted and punished.
So yeah, I support going through the school board, but I also support you know winning the governors race (this November, doesn’t require any signatures) and passing legislation that will protect everyone in the state from CRT even if they live in a blue area.
I find the idea that “Deep and meaningful exploration of complex ideas” is what we want K-12 students doing with controversial ideological subjects is idiotic. I want my kids to learn the three Rs and BE KIDS. I want my daycare I’ve been FORCED to pay for to just be regular old daycare. The idea that this is a free speech issue is ludicrous, and I’ll believe that people who are against CRT legislation care about free speech when they allow The Bell Curve in the K-12 curriculum as a counterweight explanation to “whites be evil.”
Lastly, I just want to state the obvious. The unwillingness of libertarians and the so called anti-woke left to fight effectively on this issue shows thier utter uselessness.
“Sorry, but you’ve got to fight and win.”
If Hanania is right, you’re just fighting your own little Pickett’s charge, and the time and effort and money would all be better spent trying to liberate people from the public education system as much as possible, since any laws imposed at the state level can be twisted or ignored by the people who implement them (you yourself have noted how affirmative action legislation does not stop universities from engaging in affirmative action).
If the ultimate outcome of these anti-CRT bills is so easily predicted, why is the left going *completely* crazy here in Texas over the bill that just passed?
(Certainly some of it is for fundraising purposes, but all of it?)
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Julián Castro claims that new Texas curriculum rules would “recast the KKK as the good guys.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-lying-castro-in-the-news/
If I was launching a new product, I would take a MVP (minimum viable product) approach and hope that a thousand flowers bloom from there. Iterate, iterate, iterate one small step at a time.
Maximizing experimentation at the minimal cost possible is the key.
In light of that, I’m not willing to take just one approach to countering CRT. Let’s try it from multiple fronts.
Now I know where one of the progressive teachers in my audience got her talking point.
That talking point is utterly false of course.
Before I recently unplugged from Twitter, I asked several local TX progressives that were dialing 911 over the TX anti-CRT bill to show me which clause or clauses were causing them the most concern. No responses.
The bill is online and is written in plain English. No charitable reading will get you anywhere close to the claims that they have made.
https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=87R&Bill=HB3979
Because it’s their job and it’s great for ginning up support among their base no matter its effectiveness. Did conservatives not devote considerable space to taking down Ocascio-Cortez’s original Green New Deal proposal despite it having 0% chance of passing? Since when have politicians and pundits ever confined themselves to criticizing only ideas with a chance of becoming reality?
Moreover, they may simply not know how little anti-CRT bills matter. A few years ago many thought we were on the verge of a patriarchal Christian reconstructionist dictatorship. Doubtless you mocked that fear as absurd. Now you’re esteeming their powers of prognostication?
“and the time and effort and money would all be better spent trying to liberate people from the public education system as much as possible”
The counties yearly school budget is about $2B.
The county anti-CRT group has raised a whopping 125k or so. If I take that 125k and divide by 84k students I get a whopping $1.48 per student per year to fund school choice.
Tell me again how we are going to liberate the public education system with 125k?
You people have been hawking school choice for decades and our no closer to the goal. I’d be fine with school choice, but in the meantime we got what we got. I’m a lot more impressed with what Rufo and Co did with a buck fifty and two months then what’s been done for school choice in a couple of decades.
We’ll know what he’s accomplished in due time. Again, legislation is just paper. Let’s see how they’re enforced.
have noted how affirmative action legislation does not stop universities from engaging in affirmative action
Perhaps because nobody calls them on it. Nobody sues. Nobody important makes a political issue out of it.
It is just possible that making a political issue out of it would be a winner. Of course, the winning politician would then have to do something about it. One thought: require the university to release the entering class’s SAT scores by affirmative action category. People will notice if there is a significant difference. And, of course, it may provide hard evidence, “See, they really were discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, breaking the law.”
The problem is ultimately that the Supreme Court has already ruled on this and they allow discrimination against whites/asians in the name of diversity (in theory only until 2028, but I don’t think that’s a hard deadline). There is a lawsuit against Harvard meant to overturn that but since it needs to go all the way to the Supreme Court it takes many years.
They have documented the blatant discrimination and they are suing. Will it be successful?
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The consequence of considering Asian-Americans unfavored minorities is clear: less qualified individuals from other social groups get their shot before Asian-Americans with higher qualifications do. According to Students for Fair Admissions’ analysis, a black applicant to Harvard in the 40th academic percentile of all applicants has a higher chance of admission than an Asian-American in the 90th academic percentile. Asians in the 90th academic percentile are unfavored compared with Hispanics in the 60th percentile and whites in the 80th percentile as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Minority-Admissions-American-Excellence/dp/1635767563
https://www.city-journal.org/harvard-race-conscious-admissions-policy
It is probably a better strategy to try to soften what is taught from within.
I’m an eastern Loudoun parent. After 66 (cumulative) years of public schooling in our family, we are sending our youngest to private school next year. We simply gave up on LCPS. While we will continue to Fight for Schools, admittedly we are less invested now.
What about charters schools?
At this point, the time has come to attack the Motte of public education. Right leaning voters should insist on it. Public education is a termite riddled house, it is not safe and likely it is best just to pull it down rather than count on a successful repair. As much as parents care about “good schools”, we all know that the reputations of such schools likely reflect the demographics of the student body more than anything else.
Republicans politicians need to campaign on replacing it with direct cash payments to parents which can be used at their discretion to educate their children. While I’d encourage voting down levies, I’m pretty sure Dems at the state/national level will just bail these schools out.
I agree. Conventional wisdom seems to be that public schools are sacred cows; you can try to ‘reform’ them, but can’t attack them (and trying to reform them will still get you accused of attacking them). But conservative politicians may well find that going after the public education system in earnest doesn’t bother voters as much as they might think.
Having said that, I don’t want to see politicians get involved in what should and should not be taught.
But they already do! Who hasn’t heard stories of legislatures requiring sex education and requiring it to be “abstinence only”? Of course, like most everything governments do, most of the nuts and bolts are determined by the bureaucrats. But legislators are not virgins when it comes to “get[ting] involved in what should and should not be taught.”
Wow, I can’t believe Kling said this! Kling’s outrageous implication is that politicians weren’t involved in government run schools staffed by government employees before now. Of course, politicians are involved in government run schools, how could they not?
Republicans should continue to push for school choice, and with school choice, Republicans should leet progressives do what they want in progressive schools. But in the meantime, when Democrats have blocked school choice, and Republicans are legally coerced into paying for public school, and it’s financially prohibitive to opt-out, Republicans should absoulutely get involved in political fights to get governmment to provide them a reasonable service.
I feel like Arnold is missing the forest for the trees in most of his posts on this topic.
From my vantage point, it’s about enlightenment values vs. illiberal values.
CRT (or whatever you wanna call it) in k-12 is just one battle amongst many others.
But, k-12 is the current flashpoint of significance and just also happens to be the area where we can achieve the most success.
Let’s post some more Ws as opposed to wasting our time on semantics.
The latest polling data are out.
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According to Rasmussen, 73 percent of American adults have been following the news about critical race theory “somewhat closely” or “very closely.” Even more importantly, Americans believe that critical race theory “will make race relations worse” by a 19-point margin.
There are two other important points in the crosstabs: Latinos and Asians oppose critical race theory by a 2:1 margin (slightly higher than whites); and independents oppose critical race theory nearly 4:1. In other words, the movement against critical race theory is broad, multiracial, and cannot be ignored.
https://christopherrufo.com/polling-crt/
CRT is here to stay. It is of main benefiit to the Dems, the perceived Elites and the associated ruling class. A divided nation is their goal and the basis for them to stay in power. CRT is the Dems gravy train. Through their never ending persistence the opposition will crumble.
Conservative states still have leftist universities. But the same is much less true at a local level — conservative areas have much more conservative public school systems (whose teachers and administrators are largely made up of locals). This was easy to see in my state where all of the progressive urban districts went virtual-only while the public schools in conservative areas continued to have in-person instruction.
There will be a rush to private/charter/parochial schools in some places. But there will also be an even more thorough ideological sorting, with even conservative families moving out of urban areas into suburban, exurban, and rural ones.
Oh, and, BTW — school districts in my state care VERY much when they lose students (to home schooling, charters, private schools, or neighboring ‘schools of choice’ districts). That’s because here, the funding comes from the state on a per-student basis. School districts that lose enough students here in Michigan can (and have) gone out of business (which means merging with a neighboring district — either by choice or by state mandate). So public school districts cannot so easily ignore the concerns of their customers.
Many parents oppose CRT as a hobby. CRT has well funded, skilled political operatives promoting CRT as their day job. Top unions like the NEA and AFT are formally pushing CRT as a top priority. Needless, to say, the well funded and skilled political operatives fighting poltiical battles as their day job usually beat hobbyists and concerned parents.
Republicans voters rank CRT education as their top concern in polls. They have the moral high ground in wanting a voice in what is done with their tax dollars to their own children. The odds are stacked against them, but it would be wrong to just throw in the towel. Even if they lose, they can lose on better terms, or build the case for school choice. If CRT wins with no serious opposition, there is much less of a case for school choice.
Next, Republicans have already pushed for school choice. Donald Trump named school choice as his lead policy issue for his 2020 campaign. Democrats and the teacher unions have pushed back and won so far. Republicans should continue to push school choice, but retreating from the CRT fight is not a wise strategy.
I’d go further. Let’s say an anti-CRT bill was passes, but the professionals work around it. When your kid comes home and they’ve tried to teach them CRT, you can at a minimum say “what they are doing is wrong and a majority of people agree it’s wrong, that’s why they passed a law.”
The rate of people genuinely homeschooling (not just doing public school over Zoom) has reached a record high of 11% this year. That’s double what it was a year ago. While that is still a minority of the population, it’s a clear sign of a that attitudes are changing and that the public school system is under serious threat.
School choice ought to be the biggest educational priority, and not just because of CRT. Public schools are often the only place people will experience violence in their lives. If public schools won’t keep violent, disruptive students in check and away from the rest of the student population then parents need a way to extract their kids from that environment.
I’m not totally against a ban, but I think a lot of people are in for a rude awakening if they think a ban is going to prevent teachers from teaching that stuff (I believe California prohibits CPUSA members from becoming teachers, ha!)
If we are going to do anything to reform public schools, perhaps the best thing would be to install cameras into every classroom so that parents can monitor the teachers. We already had that experience during COVID and that’s why so many parents know about the CRT crap being pushed by teachers. The fact that this sort of surveillance made the indoctrinators nervous is a good sign.
My experience has been that a good deal of what parents like about public school is that the kids are gone and safe for much of every weekday. Moreover, parents don’t have to worry about the hour to hour of their kids’ education. Someone else is taking care of that.
I don’t think homeschoolers will ever be more than a small minority.
> Moreover, parents don’t have to worry about the hour to hour of their kids’ education. Someone else is taking care of that.
Most parents won’t bother to watch most of the time, nor should they need to. But having even just one (perhaps overly) concerned parent watching occasionally is going catch stuff.
> I don’t think homeschoolers will ever be more than a small minority.
When I was growing up homeschoolers were weird people on the fringes of society. Now I live in a blue district in a blue state and there are hundreds of homeschoolers (my kids included). They’re involved in all sorts of activities (sports, theater, etc.) and regularly interact with public school kids. I don’t ever expect homeschooling specifically to become the main form of education, but the fact that this rather extreme approach to education has grown so much so fast is an leading indicator of broad attitude changes in society about school choice.
Wholly apart from issues related to ‘CRT’, Bonnie Snyder’s post just doesn’t make much sense.
“the unhelpful precedent of removing classroom decisions from practicing educators and giving relatively distant bureaucrats increased control over local operations …”
Precedent? Come on. Public school teachers do not get to decide for themselves the standards for what is covered or what is and is not on the curriculum. Distant bureaucrats have been in control of most of this stuff for a long time.
“cast a pall of fear over the classroom”
Oh please, the pall of fear is already there on one side, which is precisely the problem, in that it allows the other side to hector and harangue demagogically because there is no countervailing force encouraging balance and restraint.
“we should leave it to local school boards”
This sounds like local school boards are Olde Tyme New England Town Hall affairs. Hardly. Where I live the school district covered by the ‘local board’ has nearly 200,000 students and 800,000 voters. Election campaigns tend to be dominated by teacher union money, sourced both locally and nationally, which is always fully aligned with whatever the lefty progressive obsession du jour happens to be. There used to be many more school districts, but they’ve all merged and consolidated and grown with urbanized population. Anyone who thinks dealing with these entities is any less the ‘distant bureaucrat’ experience is nuts.
‘Deliberative Participatory Democracy’ doesn’t scale well. Knowing people and having access to talk to them in a normal way requires a ladder of Dunbar-sized hierarchies, which is how chapters or units of organizations like militaries, trade unions, churches, etc. work, or how the ‘soviet’ councils worked.
At any rate, lets say the school boards were the right level to deal with the problem. Ok, how else would they do it except … by writing legislative-like rules on what teachers ought not to do – really just adding another requirement to volumes of such rules – and then enforcing them with the usual process of discipline.
If teachers bringing in anti-vaccination ideas into biology classes started to become a problem, we all know the state and/or ‘local’ school boards would have no trouble writing the rules and enforcing them ruthlessly to ensure that stopped happening right away.
If a teacher wanted to test the NEA’s, “shall not unreasonably deny the student’s access to varying points of view” and teach Charles Murray’s Facing Reality alongside Kendi or whatever, the NEA would come down on her like a ton of bricks. “Now *that* denial is a reasonable one, and you are unreasonable – i.e., racist – for not restricting your students’ access to *that* point of view.”
And as for top private schools, well see what it takes to get accredited. Inevitably it will be the state that will require any holdout private schools and homeschoolers to cover the same rubbish too.
The American public school system was originated to “get the kids”. It was incrementally made mandatory for more years. As von Mises said in ‘Liberalism’, in areas of mixed nationality, we could read that as diversity, the school is a political prize. It cannot be anything else while it is public and compulsory.
The problem is that now the schooling system is in the hands of people hostile to the American experiment. Now parents are paying attention to what their kids are being taught. In the past, even without CRT, many parents would be surprised with their child being given a certificate of attendance and pushed out the door.
Should parents pay more attention to what the schools were doing to their children? Yes, but the situation is the same as it was found in the 1966 Coleman Report on school equity. The driving factor of a child’s education attainment and achievement is their family background.
von Mises advised that schooling should be left to parents and not use public funds. I would say the more modern solution would be school vouchers.
” I would say the more modern solution would be school vouchers.”
Nope. That’s an attempt to exit the inevitable political problem, but it’s an illusion: there is no escape
Just ask, “Vouchers for what?” If the state is in the business of collecting up money for ‘education’ and redistributing it, deciding who gets to teach, what counts as a diploma, what counts for qualifying for state universities, etc. – then it is inevitably going to attach a thousand strings to everything in every place.
And public school teachers unions are very politically powerful, and they are going to use that power to make sure those strongs are such that they do whatever is possible to undermine alternatives. That’s perfectly reasonable given their interests, it’s just that those interests aren’t the same as parents interests.
So, whether it’s private schools, charters, vouchers, homeschooling* or whatever, there is still a political problem in making sure that those thousand strings don’t include a requirement to get indoctrinated in Kendism and White Devilism.
And if you could solve that political problem with vouchers, then you might as well solve it without vouchers. If you can’t solve it without vouchers, then while vouchers may be good for other purposes, they won’t be for this one.
*Americans tend to take homeschooling for granted, but first of all it can be regulated like anything else, e.g., you must watch a Kendi video, read one of his worthless books, and pass a test on it in order to graduate, no opt-outs! Also, like private firearm ownership, it’s illegal in many countries where people think the US is nuts to allow it at all, and we’re always just one decision from a bunch of judges discovering that what the Constitution really means is that crushing the “domestic terrorism” problem or whatever is a compelling interest for which banning homeschooling passes strict scrutiny, blah blah blah.
In essence, do not forget that the law and bureaucracy too are rotten to the core.
https://twitter.com/JennyChachan/status/1421221826651435011