Parents have good reason to oppose CRT indoctrination

 Jarrett Stepman:

According to “free-speech advocates,” a dark and sinister conspiracy threatens our country’s public schools: Curriculum transparency.

NBC News has published a lengthy exposé on how parents, citizens and state lawmakers are demanding more transparency and seeking an end to the teaching of critical race theory and extreme gender ideology in public schools.

The nerve of those people.

The piece starts off on the wrong foot, with a distortion of what opposition to CRT in schools is about. Tyler Kingkade, an NBC News national reporter, begins by saying that Republican governors and lawmakers have “fought to limit discussions of race in public schools.”

Opposition to CRT is not about limiting discussions of race or history. It’s about preventing educators from foisting a particular ideology about race — one premised on the idea that some races are inherently oppressors and others oppressed — on students.

Teaching about history and current events is good; preaching a kind of neo-segregationism to students is bad. Most parents understand that. 

As the NBC article notes, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, and others have used public documents to expose the fact that CRT and similar ideas are being peddled in countless public and private institutions, including K-12 schools.

As Rufo has said, those who stand in opposition to this movement have barely attempted to defend CRT on its merits. Instead, they denounce transparency and parents who aren’t going along with the program. In many other cases they’ve simply denied that CRT exists in schools.

Oh, but don’t you dare try to find out if it does!

We hear a lot of talk these days from a certain crowd about “democracy” and how it’s always one vote or election away from disappearing forever.

Yet how are these attempts to decrease transparency and parent oversight in schools anything but anti-democratic?

The sudden surge in engagement of parents and concerned citizens across the country in typically sleepy school-board elections is a sign that democracy is alive and well.
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If anything, the battle over CRT and schools demonstrates how American institutions have been corrupted to obey insular, progressive activists and teachers unions now wedded entirely to left-wing ideology.
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The proponents of CRT are dishonest in their arguments about what they are doing and what parents are opposing.  The CRT proponents make semantic arguments about what is really being taught and deny the obvious.  They also wrongfully imply that objecting parets oppose a discussion of race and hisotry.  That they cannot make an honest case for CRT or against the parents real point of view suggest they are more wedded to indocrination than to an honest disagreement.