How Pervasive is the Teaching of Critical Race Theory?

Last month, Andrew Gutmann started speaking out against critical race theory, as it was being taught at his daughter's private expensive Manhattan school, Brearley School. In his letter to the Brearly community, he accused Brearly of teaching children illiberal and indoctrinating antiracism initiatives and divisive obsession with race. Gutmann has founded Speak Up For Education. .

Today, Gutmann authored an opinion piece at The Hill. Here is an excerpt:

There appears to be widespread belief that opposition to critical race theory is a view held solely by the political right. This perception is wrong. It is certainly true that the conservative media has almost exclusively embraced viewpoints unfavorable to critical race theory while the liberal-oriented media has been overwhelmingly approving. But our polarized media does not seem to accurately reflect the view of most Americans.

Since my letter became public, I have received several thousand supportive emails and messages from people across this country, including many from self-described Democrats and liberals. The tone of most of the messages sent to me is not at all political in nature; instead, the tenor is one of desperation and powerlessness.

I have received emails from parents expressing devastation that their kids, as young as five years old, are coming home from school after being taught to feel guilty solely because of the color of their skin. I have received messages from grandparents feeling hopeless that their grandchildren are being brainwashed and turned against their own families. And I have received notes from teachers brought to tears because they are being required, day after day, to teach fundamentally divisive, racist doctrines and being forced to demonize their own students.

Perhaps the most powerful – and most frightening – of the notes I have received are the several dozen from those who identify themselves as having immigrated to America from the former Soviet Union or from countries in formerly communist Eastern Europe. These emails are never political in nature and are nearly identical in message: These first-generation Americans all write that they have “seen this movie before.” They are familiar with the propaganda, the tactics of indoctrination and the pervasive fear of speaking up that plague today’s United States. Simply put, they cannot believe this is happening here.

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Greenwald: Trump’s Confrontational Russia Foreign Policy Was the Opposite of Obama’s Accommodationist Foreign Policy

From most legacy media reports, you would think that Donald Trump was a pawn of the Russian government. You'd never know that this narrative was wildly spun fiction concocted to get Trump out of the White House (Note: I am glad he's out of the White House).

The fable that Trump's foreign policy accommodated Russia lingers, however. As Matt Taibbi showed with numerous exhibits, we were showered with (literally) fake news suggesting that Trump was over-friendly to Russia. Now, Glenn Greenwald has written an article comparing Trump's often confrontational foreign policy toward Russia to the Obama's (and now Biden's) accommodationist policy toward Russia. By writing this, I'm not pretending to know how to approach foreign policy toward Russia. I suspect that I don't know many of the relevant facts (because I'm ignorant of them or because they are secret). Rather, I'm linking to Greenwald's article because the information he presents is shockingly counter to the prevailing narrative of the majority of legacy news outlets: "Biden, Reversing Trump, Permits a Key Putin Goal: a New Russian Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany: That Trump was controlled by Putin and served his agenda was the opposite of reality. First Obama, and now Biden, have accommodated Moscow far more." Here are a few excerpts:

When it came to actual vital Russian interests — as opposed to the symbolic gestures hyped by the liberal cable and op-ed page circus — Trump and his administration were confronting and undermining the Kremlin in ways Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had, to his credit, steadfastly refused to do.

Indeed, the foreign policy trait relentlessly attributed to Trump in support of the media’s Cold War conspiracy theory — namely, an aversion to confronting Putin — was, in reality, an overarching and explicit belief of President Obama’s foreign policy, not President Trump. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama and the Democratic Party famously and repeatedly mocked GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s warnings about the threat posed by Russia as a “relic of the Cold War.”

.    .   .

Consistent with that view, Obama rejected bipartisan demands to send lethal weapons to Ukraine throughout 2015 and into 2016. Even when Russia reasserted control over Crimea in 2014 after citizens overwhelmingly approved it in a referendum, Obama did little more than impose some toothless sanctions (though he did preside over, if not engineer, regime change efforts in Ukraine that swept out the pro-Moscow leader and replaced him with a pro-U.S. lackey). Obama worked directly with Putin to forge an agreement with Russia’s allies in Tehran to lift sanctions against Iran and bring them back into the international community, and then publicly praised the Russian leader for the constructive role he played in orchestrating that agreement.

And, enraging the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy community, Obama even refused to follow through on his own declared “red line” to attack Russia’s key ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, even after Russia asserted governance over Crimea, and even after Russia is said by intelligence agencies to have hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s computers, Obama, in 2016, sought to form a partnership with Russia in Syria to jointly bomb targets regarded by the two governments as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Trump — even as media figures gorged themselves on the conspiracy theory that he was a Kremlin agent — reversed virtually all of those Obama-era accommodations to Putin. Again and again, Trump acted contrary to the Kremlin’s core interests. After publicly threatening Russia over Syria, Trump twice bombed Putin’s key Middle Eastern ally — something Obama refused to do . . . Trump also reversed Obama’s Ukraine policy, sending the exact lethal arms to anti-Russian elements that Obama warned would be directly threatening to the Kremlin and thus excessively provocative. Trump filled his administration with long-time anti-Russia hawks who would never have been welcomed in the Obama administration (including CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, NATO Ambassador Richard Grenell, and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley).

These excerpts are part of Greenwald's much longer, factually supported article.

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New Parent’s Group Opposes the Preaching of Critical Race Theory in Schools

A new parents' group called Parents Defending Education. I heard about this when Erica Sanzi (who is part of PDE) described the organization on Tucker Carlson's show on FOX.

From the About Page of the PDE website,

We believe our children’s education should be based on scholarship and facts, and should nurture their development into the happy, resilient, free-thinking, educated citizens every democracy needs. Our classrooms should include rigorous instruction in history, civics, literature, math, the sciences, and the ideas and values that enrich our country.

Yet in recent years activists have targeted public, private, and charter schools across the country with a campaign to impose toxic new curriculums and to force our kids into divisive identity groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Many schools have already embraced this campaign, and many more are preparing to embrace it.

This new educational mission is not only at war with basic American values, but with our kids’ happiness and ability to succeed in life. Couched in vague slogans such as “social justice,” the new curriculum divides our children into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups. To one, it teaches guilt and shame. To the other, grievance and anger. To all students, it spreads unhappiness, radicalism, and failure.

Schools are adopting this illiberal mission at the behest of a narrow group of activists — without the consent of the students, parents, and communities whose interests the schools are supposed to serve. Those who dissent risk being attacked as bigots and shamed into silence.

This must stop. If you are disturbed by these destructive developments, you are not alone. If you want our schools to return to teaching our children what they need to grow and succeed, please join us. We come from diverse races, religions, economic backgrounds, and political orientations — but we all agree that it is time to join together and stop the madness in our schools.

The organization's website includes an "Indoctrination Map," upon which one can click to find reported school misconduct in the various states. This map contains information regarding numerous incidents.

I clicked on Missouri and found a disturbing report from the Rockwood School District. I have no independent knowledge of whether this information is correct. I'm merely reporting on an email found on the PDE website. If this email is authentic, it is outrageous. The email purports to be from Natalie Fallert, the Literacy and Speech Coordinator for grades 6-12. You can read the document here (if the email was dated, that date has been cut off).  In the email to teachers and principals, Fallert discusses strategies for defusing numerous concerns parents are expressing about critical race theory.  She indicates that parents are complaining. For instance, some parents have complained about lessons on intersectionality.

Fallert advises the teachers to stop using the word "privilege" and to do it "right now."  Instead of using the word "activist," she tells the teachers to use the phrase "take a position."  PDE indicates that the most disturbing thing to the whistleblower who disclosed this email is this: Fallert repeatedly tells the teachers to "Just pull the resource off Canvas so parents cannot see it." She says: "Keep teaching! Just don't make everything visible on Canvas."  She gives additional advice on preventing parents from knowing what their children are being taught.  I'd advise that you click the link and read it for yourself. It's stunning to see a high-ranking member of a school district telling teachers and principals in writing to mislead the parents who they serve.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.  I would suspect that the parents will be demanding documents from the school.  PDE has a "Resources" section on its website urging parents to file FOIA requests (In Missouri, which is where Rockwood School District is located and where I practice law, the state "FOIS" procedure is called the Sunshine Law, Chapter 610).  Here is what PDE urges re "FOIA":

If you see bad things happening in your school, one of the first and best things you can do to fight it is file a Freedom Of Information Act request with your school district. Because schools are taxpayer-funded institutions, FOIA disclosure applies to them — enabling you to see how much money the school is spending on “diversity and inclusion” consultants and other pricey, destructive initiatives.

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California’s Department of Education Evades Simple Questions about Elimination of High School Calculus in New Math Framework

Follow this thread:

And also this thread by Steve Miller, including the "anti-racist" motivation for eliminating calculus, which provoked the above inquiry by House Democrat Ted Lieu:

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