America’s Future Starts Now: The Impact of Governor McAuliffe’s Decline to Destroy Critical Race Theory in Schools

This is part of the CNN opinion series on America’s Future Starts Now, with people sharing how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation and experts offering their proposed solutions. The views expressed in these commentaries are the authors’ own. Read more opinion at CNN.

What’s more, educator morale is low, exacerbating staff shortages. There are a lot of book bans in school and speech codes that don’t end up well. Young people report levels of anxiety and depression.

Last year, Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe lost his reelection campaign, at least in part because his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, repeatedly declared that McAuliffe’s reelection would lead to the widespread teaching of critical race theory in schools across the Commonwealth. Simply put, attacking critical race theory helped the now-governor of Virginia secure his win.

Critical race theory is a set of concepts seeking to explain the structural underpinnings of inequality and racism in the United States. But the term has been attacked by its critics as unfairly pinning blame on White Americans for some of society’s most pernicious ills.

Classroom discussions about race, and what I like to call “truth teaching,” haven’t been as much of a talking point as they were a year ago, and critical race theory isn’t being debated as much in this year’s midterm campaigns. It doesn’t have to be. Conservatives succeeded in removing discussion about racism from the classroom.

The new law bars educators from teaching that any particular group is inherently racist, sexist or otherwise oppressive. It purports to promote teaching about people without regards to their race, gender, disability or other differences. The language in the classroom is so vague it discourages teachers from having conversations about race.

White parents were led to believe that White children were being made to feel bad about being white because of the campaign to eliminate critical race theory. Where’s the proof that teachers, nearly 80% of whom are White, were doing this? They were definitely not in a widespread fashion.

Citizens who recognize the value of teaching our children the truth about our history won’t have a voice in the election due to lack of evidence.

There’s at least one state where voters will decide this fall what gets taught in the classroom. If the Education Accountability Amendment is approved, the majority Republican legislature will be granted more control over public schools in West Virginia.

Those who truly care about the advancement of our democracy must insist that its full truth be taught. Unfortunately, we may have to wait a while before that discussion resumes in our public schools.

Distinguishing between the Classroom and the Classroom: Why House Bill 2 is so bad to us? What did we do in New Hampshire to stop talking about discrimination?

The Marshall School of Business is located at the University of Southern California. His research focuses primarily on race, gender and equity in the classroom and in the workplace. He tweets @DrShaunHarper.

In New Hampshire, I teach social studies and am an avid supporter of public education. Having taught for over 20 years, my greatest joy is participating in a democratic institution that is for everyone.

I commit to continuous learning and growth for my students. Old projects that do not serve my current students and that are culturally sensitive have been let go of and replaced by new strategies.

I teach well-rounded history to the best of my ability as I continually strive to keep my background knowledge robust. I am here to accommodate all my students no matter who they are or where they are from. To do this I must examine my biases frequently and consider what I am centering and why.

That’s why it was so disheartening to see laws like House Bill 2 (sometimes referred to as the “divisive concepts” law) pass in New Hampshire. The disrespect and distrust it conveys to the hundreds of honorable educators I’m aware of cannot be overstated.

The measure, formally known as the Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education bill, was written with the mistaken idea that discrimination is somehow endorsed or practiced in public spaces and classrooms.

Legislation like HB2 and similar laws in other states are obstacles to growth, student well-being and compassionate practices. HB2 prohibits schools in New Hampshire from creating mandatory equity training for faculty because someone might “feel bad.”

At what point did we make a decision to take a position on cruel and dehumanizing activities? Who are we harming by taking a hardline on the concept of slavery? Our silence is an endorsement. That is our ethical crisis. That is what fear-mongering yields.

Fixing Problems: Public Schools, Culture Wars, and How to Embrace the PAMELA-Single-Poor Teachers

Shame and blame has been heaped on the profession of teachers, who are filled with loving, kind, compassionate and principled people. Choosing a career in education is almost always driven by a heart-centered desire to make a positive difference. I have never encountered a teacher in four districts, two states and 22 years who displayed devious political intentions.

Future voters must understand that disagreement is normal and healthy. Changing your mind in the light of new evidence is logical and admirable. Being American, patriotic and democratic is more important than wanting a more just society.

Feeling discomfort and dissonance often accompanies growth and learning; this is something I strive to normalize for my students. Critical thinking and analysis are taught by asking students to wrestle with challenging ideas. At some point, we have confused feeling uneasy with a lack of safety. There is a crucial difference.

The poor drafted laws resulted in the oppression of critical thinking and children, as well as the construction of anti-critical race theory. I know we can do better.

My message to lawmakers? Trust your teachers. Asking them to be thoughtful, sensitive, and inclusive is always reasonable. You’ll find that’s what they generally already are.

Common schools forged a shared identity in the 19th century when government by people, by the people, for the people was a novel idea. The middle class grew in the 20th century due to universal high school.

The murder of George Floyd added fuel, prompting many public school officials to target systemic racism – discrimination built into American institutions – and conservatives to demand colorblindness and an emphasis on America’s basic goodness. There were accusations of “hate” and “indoctrination” after graphic novels with depictions of sexual activity and other books on hot-button topics.

The US population in 2000 was non-Hispanic white. By 2020, that was down to about 42%. Gay marriage support skyrocketed from 27% of Americans in 1996 to 77% in 2021, while the share of people belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque plummeted from 70% in 1999 to 47% in 2020.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/fixing-problems-public-schools-culture-wars-roundup/index.html

The Problem of Families with Children: Implications of the H1N1 Epidemic for Public Education, and How to Ensure that Kids are Protected

It should come as no surprise that parents have been fighting for their rights so vociferously when it comes to public education. They feel that their rights are under attack, so they are fighting.

Giving parents more say won’t make the system better because it forces parents to fund and fight for control of government-run schools.

Freedom is the answer: Attach money to students – as many other countries do – and let families choose among diverse options. Through universal education savings accounts, Arizona recently enacted, and scholarship tax credits, this can be accomplished.

The students and teachers want safer schools that teach about the past and reflect diversity. They can be best supported through policy making that increases equity and understanding in our school systems by supporting their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, not denying them.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the year of 2022 showed a decline in the math and reading scores of fourth and eighth graders. There is no excuse to see why. The pandemic has disrupted three years of students’ lives.

Critics see this as a chance to point fingers and use kids as political pawns. It is necessary to invest in short term and long term strategies to support the emotional development of students, especially black and Latino students, who have been behind in their studies, due to the H1N1 epidemic.

We cannot allow bad-faith battles over bathroom access and participation on sports teams to distract from the important task of educating our kids and providing them with the proper supports to thrive academically and socially.

Both our organizations are focused on addressing the needs of kids, families and communities, but there are interventions that can help students right now.

In the short term, intensive tutoring can have large positive effects on both math and reading. Recent studies have found that paraprofessionals, AmeriCorps volunteers and other people with training in teaching can be just as effective as teachers in one-on-one tutoring.

In schools where a lot of students are from low-income households, there are shortages of teachers. Yet cracks in the system before the pandemic have become gaping crevasses: In February 2022, there were nearly 600,000 fewer educators in public schools than there were in January 2020, and National Center for Education data showed less than half of schools serving majority Black and brown students were fully staffed.

It’s necessary to return to in-person teaching and learning. Now is the time to double down on proven strategies, using the resources we are fortunate to have, to deliver on a promise the US has not yet fulfilled—providing every child access to a high quality public education, without exception.

The idea of some kids being born in the wrong body has been promoted by schools. Suddenly, from Florida to Texas to Wyoming, parents are discovering that schools are teaching, seemingly across the curriculum, that an internal sense of gender trumps biological sex. Worse, some schools are changing, at their students’ request – but without their parents’ knowledge or consent – their students’ names and pronouns to conform to a child’s surprising new “gender identity.”

When parents come to school board meetings to complain, far too many are met with silence or risible accusations that they are politicizing education. Parents have the primary right and responsibility to raise and teach their children.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/opinions/fixing-problems-public-schools-culture-wars-roundup/index.html

The Rise and Fall of Education in the 21st Century: MAGA Extremists Running for Teacher Seats, Elections, and Tax Credits

Jay Richards is an associate research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and he also serves as the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.

While parents are working with teachers and librarians to ensure that every child is acknowledged in school curricula and has a chance to thrive in school, regardless of who they are or where they live, far-right MAGA extremists are increasingly running for vacant school board seats or for reelection to gain control and power over decision-making at all levels of government.

There is an urgent need to provide more support for teachers, classroom aid, and salary increases now more than ever. That measure would provide teachers tax credits totaling

             as much as $15,000 each year.

The real challenges facing teachers have not been addressed by many extremists of the MAgA group. Defunding the Department of Education should not be a topic of debate. However, it has also been central to MAGA Republicans’ federal policy agenda and could have devastating consequences for students nationwide.

America is more inclusive due to it’s improvements across the line of race, gender and ability. Over the course of generations, bipartisan support for public schools has grown.

“A Nation at Risk,” a major report on education released by the Reagan administration in 1983, used fear-based arguments to argue that reading and math test scores were essential for national security. The purpose of public schools was transformed by the logic, because test scores were turned into one critical indicator.

Early accountability reforms led to gains among low-income students and students of color, but progress plateaued a decade ago. Test-and-accountability reforms over-promised and under-delivered and no longer command broad bipartisan support.

rebuilding trust is the first step to renewing the promise of public education. Health officials and political leaders should have been informed of the school closings, since they were left holding the bag.

However, they also want to preserve their mental health and have financial stability, and the teaching profession’s low pay and structures that challenge work-life balance are deterrents – especially when the average student-loan debt is nearly $30,000 and many other professions offer flexible schedules and remote work options. The profession at large has been struggling for a long time. The number of graduates from traditional teacher education programs fell over the course of a few years.

A more diverse set of adult leaders are able to work alongside educators and students as a result of Redefining Learning, and any number of community leaders who can support.

For example, technology could allow expert educators to teach multiple classes virtually while a colleague who is expert in creating productive learning spaces – where every student is valued and feels they belong – focuses there. Many teachers excel at both roles – we just don’t have enough of them to staff every classroom in our country. The goal is not only to make their jobs more sustainable, but also to position them for the future.

The mission of Teach For America is to increase educational opportunity and outcomes for young people in low-income communities. She tweets @VillanuevaBeard.

In the spring of 2020, James Whitfield had just become the first African American to be named principal at Colleyville Heritage High School, located in a predominantly white Dallas-Fort Worth suburb.

Whitfield, who holds a doctorate in education, was anticipating big challenges when students returned in the fall. The Pandemic was about to make the chronic teacher shortage even worse, since it had already shut down in-person learning.

Unable to sleep one night in early June, days after Floyd’s death, Whitfield set down his thoughts in an email to friends and colleagues. He wrote about “systemic racism” and wondered what could be done to stop it.

At first, Whitfield says, “I got nothing but positive responses … from people in the community, parents, family members [and] staff members.” In the months that followed, though, pressure on him mounted as internet chatter began to heat up among those he calls “[conservative] operatives here in Texas that are trying to take over school boards.” There were indirect aspersions made about his marriage.

There are a bunch of new laws in the country that have changed public education. The critical race theory suggests that white people benefit from racism in the U.S. Other laws are aimed at prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.

A year after his email and weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbot signed a law banning the practice in public school classrooms, Whitfield was accused by the school board of promoting the idea. He denied the charge, but soon after, the board voted not to renew his contract, which expires in August 2023. In the meantime, Whitfield is on paid administrative leave.

The statement issued almost a year ago by the school district and Dr. Whitfield said they believed they were in the right.

Many schools are struggling to hold on to the teachers and staff that they have as the nation’s classrooms become increasingly divided. One recent study estimates there are more than 36,500 teacher vacancies across the country and more than 163,500 teachers are either not fully certified or not certified in the subject they are teaching. Those figures are conservative, because data from more than a dozen states could not be collected, according to the study. Meanwhile, a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office says “[negative] perception of the teaching profession and perceived lack of support for current teachers” are “among key recruitment and retention challenges.”

Further, in a survey published by the Rand Corp. earlier this year, more than a third of teachers and 60% of principals reported being harassed during the 2021-2022 school year “because of their school’s policies on COVID-19 safety measures or for teaching about race, racism, or bias.”

The situation has a negative impact on students too, says Lindsay Marshall, a former teacher who is now a history professor at the University of Oklahoma.

“It was very clear to me in the classroom that I was not only engaging with my students, I was engaging with their whole world,” Marshall says. The relationship between students, teachers and parents is broken when politics gets in the classroom.

Perhaps no other state has become more embroiled in the controversy than Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has spearheaded efforts to reshape the public school curriculum to reflect his conservative values. The Parental Rights in Education bill was passed by the Senate and the strategy of the governor’s weighing in on local school board races was passed by the House. The “Don’t Say Gay” law prohibits teachers from discussing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Questioning (LBG) topics with students in Kindergarten through grade 3 unless they are appropriate for age and state standards.

Michael Woods is a special education teacher with nearly three decades of experience at Santaluces Community High School in Palm Beach County. He has helped organize local Pride events, even though he is a student at school. But “I don’t openly discuss it with kids,” he says.

Woods doesn’t understand the theory that teachers are trying to instill liberal ideology in students. “If I could indoctrinate kids to do something, it would be to bring a pencil to class and to do their homework,” he says jokingly.

The new law could result in the revocation of an educator’s teaching certificate if they are found in violation, “bypassing all the safeguards that we’ve had for decades and decades that were guaranteed by law,” Woods says.

The issue can affect both ways. Some educators have recently made headlines for going public on their way out the door in protest of their schools’ alleged use of critical race theory or sensitivity to LGBTQ issues.

He’s not the only one: Professor Frank McCormick, superintendent Matthew Hawn and the COVID-19 shooting victim in Sullivan Central High School

Frank McCormick taught history for 11 years at a high school before retiring midway through the 2020-21 academic year.

He says he “started off pretty progressive, politically,” but that he gradually became disillusioned after witnessing what he describes as a “very dysfunctional, very toxic” environment at the school.

Over the years, McCormick says he witnessed “increasing politicization” and an ever-bolder liberal ideological agenda among administrators and fellow teachers, especially after the 2016 election. He went public with his concerns at the school board meeting last year, and he said that the superintendent was a member of a bureaucratic class of fraudsters and enriching herself at the expense of an impoverished community.

McCormick resigned in January, just a few months after Tony Kinnett, a now-former STEM coordinator and head instructional coach for the Indianapolis Public Schools, posted similar criticisms of his school in a video on Twitter.

Kinnett was asked in January to testify before the Indiana House on a bill to ban any teaching that would make a student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress … [due to] sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin or political affiliation.”

Since his departure, Kinnett has appeared on Fox News and become a regular contributor to The Daily Caller and the conservative magazine National Review. He also started his own website, Chalkboard Review, which says it promotes “diverse perspectives in education.”

Matthew Hawn, a 16-year veteran of Sullivan Central High School in northeast Tennessee, lost his job after ending up on the wrong side of the debate over critical race theory.

During a discussion in his contemporary issues class about Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager armed with an AR-15 rifle who shot and killed two people and wounded a third at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., Hawn “made the statement that white privilege is a fact,” he says.

At the time, the school — which has since become a middle school as part of a consolidation — was in the midst of hybrid learning due to COVID-19. An angry parent contacted school officials after they discovered that the video was uploaded to the wrong class. He took down the video.

The teaching of contemporary issues, at a time of such massive polarization, would prove to be a pitfall for Hawn moving forward.

Months later, when the topic of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol came up in Hawn’s contemporary issues class, Hawn assigned an essay from The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates titled “The First White President,” a critique of the presidency of Donald Trump as, among other things, “the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/13/1131872280/teacher-shortage-culture-wars-critical-race-theory

From Pedophiles to Padeloids: What Happens When Kids Talk About Parental Rights in Education (with an Emphasis on the Capitol)

The classes he teaches are controversial, he says. “I think the most controversial ideas are in many ways the most fun to teach because they are intellectually stimulating.”

In the discussions that followed, some students recognized that the violence at the Capitol was not protected speech. Others brought up the issue pushed by then-President Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. Generally speaking though, “kids are a lot better about talking about politics than adults,” he says.

He says he has heard things that are said about teachers. When he once defended LGBTQ students, he was publicly berated by members of the community as a “pedophile and a groomer.”

Since Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law went into effect, Ingram says he’s “very aware of what the punishment can be right now, which is me losing my certification as well as the civil case against me.”

“On the one hand, I feel like this job is more important than it’s ever been,” he says. I would be dishonest to say that I’m content here.