Ask the consultants
Wall Street Journal headline:
How Teachers Are Secretly Taught Critical Race Theory
I bet they’re not. I bet what they’re taught is a mishmash of trendy stuff from people like Robin DiAngelo, some of which is useful and some of which is bullshit. It may be some sort of bastard child of Critical Race Theory but I strongly doubt it’s Critical Race Theory itself, since that’s taught in law school, not third grade.
The Journal’s reporting is not very careful.
Randi Weingarten left no room for doubt. “Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools,” the American Federation of Teachers president said in a speech last year. Even if that’s true, a Pennsylvania father’s battle with a school district demonstrates that public-school teachers are being trained in the deeply divisive racial ideology—and defensive administrators are playing semantic games to allay parental concerns.
But it doesn’t, at least not according to this story. Robin DiAngelo and similar hucksters aren’t Critical Race Theory. They’re human resources professionals and “consultants” and the like, not lawyers or legal scholars or academics of any kind. CRT is academic; consultancy jargon is another beast, even though there’s some overlap. To put it as briskly as possible DiAngelo is a cheap knockoff, not the thing itself.
In 2018 the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District near Philadelphia signed a contract with Pacific Educational Group, a California-based consulting firm. According to the school district’s website, the partnership’s purpose was “to enhance the policies and practices around racial equity.”
Signed a contract. What is this about? Money. It’s not Critical Race Theory, it’s just trend-peddling for money.
The district assured parents in an online update last summer that no “course, curriculum or program” in the district “teaches Critical Race Theory.”
Benjamin Auslander didn’t buy it. The parent of a high schooler in the district, he wanted to see the materials used to train teachers. Mr. Auslander, 54, made a formal document request but was denied. Officials told him the materials couldn’t be shared because they were protected by Pacific Educational Group’s copyright. His only option was to inspect them in person—no copies or photos allowed.
There’s your problem right there – not the dreaded CRT but a sinister profiteering “educational group” declaring a copyright on school content. That’s absurd, and should not be allowed. If parents want to read their kids’ school books more power to them. teacher training materials I’m not sure what I think.
Our examination of those materials indicates that Tredyffrin-Easttown staff are being trained in critical race theory.
Being trained in it? Or having random snippets of it dangled at them for no clear reason? More the second, is what it sounds like.
Documents emailed from 2019 to 2021 by Pacific Educational Group to district administrators in advance of various training seminars cite critical race theory explicitly. A rubric dated Feb. 4, 2020, encourages participants to “Deconstruct the Presence and role of Whiteness” in their lives.
But Whiteness Studies isn’t the same thing as CRT. Furthermore it’s not an inherently or obviously bad thing to point out, even in a classroom, that being white has some definite advantages. It does, after all, so why not mention the fact?
A March 17, 2020, presentation lists “aspects and assumptions of white culture” in the U.S. Some are negative, such as “win at all costs,” “wealth = worth,” “don’t show emotion,” and in reference to food, “bland is best.” Others are seemingly universal principles such as “cause-and-effect relationships,” “objective, rational, linear thinking,” and “plan for future.”
There we go – that’s that stupid list that showed up at the The National Museum of African American History and Culture via DiAngelo a few months back, and created a big stink. The list is stupid and bad, and it’s not Critical Race Theory.
School staff’s ability to use “critical race theory . . . to inform racial equity leadership and analysis of school policies, practices and procedures” is considered a sign of the successful “internalization and application” of Pacific Educational Group’s framework.
Why are schools asking for-profit “consultancies” for the content of their teaching? Why aren’t they asking scholars instead? Including scholars of Critical Race Theory?
> Others are seemingly universal principles such as “cause-and-effect relationships,” “objective, rational, linear thinking,” and “plan for future.”
The barely-subtextual subtext here is that black people* can’t plan for the future, can’t think rationally, and don’t understand cause-and-effect relationships. How did this kind of breathtaking racism ever manage to pass itself off as anti-racist education? It’s difficult to imagine that the people who came up with this claptrap sincerely believed that they were advancing the cause of racial equity; it would honestly make more sense if the authors were a cadre of perfectly self-aware white supremacists pulling a Sokal-tier con.
*I say “black” because this is the obviously the unstated binary other to “white” here. I very much doubt the authors intended to imply that rational thinking is alien to East Asians.
I know, it’s absolutely poisonous. I went ballistic about the museum thing.
One nitpick: you write
“If parents want to read their kids’ school books more power to them.”
But the excerpt you quoted above it says that this is a reference to teacher training materials, not the books kids actually (are assigned to) read:
It’s amazing how steps to reduce blatant, murderous racism (“Black Lives Matter”, “Critical Race Theory”) are frenziedly [if that ain’t a real word, my apologies to the genuine writers here) condemned as being “divisive.”
And then there’s this corporatization of education that seems to be the main culprit here, as you show.
Screechy – oh yes, so it does. I was reading too fast. I’m not sure what I think about parents demanding to read training materials. I guess I don’t really think it should be Secret, but on the other hand there are a lot of trumpy parents out there, but then again there are some dubious education policies too…
From my experience, most of what they teach us in teacher training is just someone getting a bee in their bonnet and producing idiotic materials that schools eat up…for awhile, until the next idiotic thing comes along and they move to that. I have been “trained” in what color I am (not in the terms of white/black, but in terms of what color of personality – they said I am a green), what sort of shoe I am, what my Myers-Briggs is, and something I can’t remember the name of that was peddled as being “actually scientific”…and it wasn’t.
Then there is the yearly training on Title IX, most of which is now taken up by LGBTQ – with an emphasis on the T. Antiracism training that perpetuates stereotypes. Anti-sexism training which focuses not on sexism at all, but sexual assault. Important, yes, but it misses the underlying problem that causes it! Now, of course, we have to recognize that men are assaulted, too, so they manage to alternate stories about young women being assaulted with stories about young men who are being propositioned by their instructors Yes, it happens. But it isn’t the more common situation, and they have minimized the real problem for the problem the MRAs want then to focus on. Now we also have training on diversity, which can be anything, but seems to again be focused on the T.
It’s all a grand scam; companies have found ways to make money “training” teachers, and schools have thrown the money at them, money that could be used much more effectively by actually promoting real professional development instead of noisy quackery.
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CRT is what people who don’t want to address racism call any mention of structural racism and white advantage. Or as I like to call it, American History. Teaching about the destruction and looting of prosperous African-American communities like the Tulsa Massacre, (which I was shocked to find many of my college+ educated, progressive friends and colleagues had never heard of until HBO’s Watchmen) or how the interstate highway system was built through middle class African-American communities, creating dislocation and economic damage on a massive scale, or how Social Security and the GI Bill were designed to exclude African-Americans from their benefits, becomes “CRT” because white kids may learn and understand how the system is historically so stacked against African-Americans in particular, and they might think life in America is unfair, and if they’re white they might feel badly that they have benefited from such a gamed system.
What they’re really afraid of though, is not damage to the delicate psyches of white children, but that those children might be motivated to change the system
This, I think, is a distinction without a difference. Several instances come to mind where it seems justified to say that something is being taught despite not being taught as it would in a university. If I were to say that a school is teaching Christian Theology, it would be quite strange to hear as defense, “We’re not teaching Christian Theology, because that’s taught in seminary, not elementary school.” It would be at least as befuddling to hear that whatever is being taught isn’t Christian Theology because it’s only parts of Christian Theology. Like, sure, kids are being taught that Jesus Christ died for their sins and that the only way to achieve salvation and avoid eternal damnation is through Him, but Aquinas isn’t on the syllabus, so it’s not Christian Theology. And anyway, we’re teaching predestination, which is part of Calvinist Theology.
Don’t you think?
As if history centered on Dead, Rich, White Men wasn’t ever “ideological.” As if sanitizing the facts of dispossesion, genocide and slavery upon which the “settlement” of North America (and the rest of the “New World”) was based was not ideological. This approach used to be passed off as neutral and objective, when was anything but. To some, like Trump, anything that calls into doubt the Greatness of America is anti-American, and to be denied as exaggeration or fabrication. A bit of rebalancing, along with an honest reality check is certainly not out of line.
Yes, it’s so much worse to point out racism than it is to act in a racist way. Same with sexism. Pointing it out is rude and offensive; can’t women just go along to get along? To have one’s prejudices and bigotries exposed is more harmful than it is to live under the consequences of those prejudices.
On a number of occasions, in a number of places, I’ve seen the concept of land acknowledgements derided as simple “wokeness,” lumping it in with demands for cusom pronouns and “inclusive” language. I think that the former is something quite different than the latter. It introduces the idea that history isn’t history. It’s not something we leave behind in the past, but something that forms and informs the present.
I became much more aware of this some years ago in the context of the 2013 World Figure Skating Championships, held in my home town of London Ontario. Outside the skating venue there were all sorts of displays and entertainment. One tent featured information about the First Nations living in Southwestern Ontario. One of the display panels in the tent featured the title “We are all Treaty Peoples.” It was a reminder that the relationship between the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario on one hand, and the Chippewas of the Thames, the Oneida, and the Munsee on the other, are not things of the past, but current and ongoing. For these indigenous Nations, the treaties they signed are not dead letters, but living documents outlining the obligations and rights to which all parties agreed at the time they were drafted and ratified. That one group of signatories has largely forgotten these rights and obligations is a hinderance and drag upon those who remember. That the terms of the agreements have been repeatedly ignored or violated by the same, forgetfull side is an ongoing disgrace. If we fail to live up to the commitments made to the Peoples who offered to share their lands with our ancestors on the strength of their word and bond, how can we claim continued title to these lands? The Nations who remember those broken promises live with the consequences of that betrayal every day, while the oath-breakers go on their merry way, heedless of the obligations that they inherited from their forebears. We are all treaty peoples. To be reminded of this is not a bad thing. It is not “woke”, but the foundation of justice long overdue.
YNnB #10
As I like to say, if you really want to know a person’s ideological bias, look at what they’re trying to pass off as the “unpolitical”, “non-ideological” position. I.e. what are questions not asked, the ideas not challenged, the assumptions that are so deeply ingrained that they’re no longer even recognized as assumptions (as opposed to something akin to a law of nature, just the way the world is, the only way it can be etc.)?
That having been said, I’m not convinced that CRT is all about providing a more complete and accurate understanding of the history and present of race relations etc. (just like there’s more to gender ideology than the idea that trans people should be able to live their lives in peace, free of oppression or persecution etc.). For all I know it might be, but – once again for all I know – it might not, and it’s getting increasingly hard to even know where to start in order to find out.
As much as I hate to admit it, the post-truth project of making people doubt everything is indeed starting to work in my case. Despite what movement skeptics™ might like to think, “following the facts” or “letting the evidence speak for itself” is usually not a practical option. Life is simply too short, and the brain capacity of even the smartest individual alive too limited, to start from zero and do all the actual research yourself. You can’t do without a minimum of trust, and trust has been fatally undermined.
I stlll have the opinion that schools should be teaching students how to analyze competing claims critically rather than shoveling facts at them. Yes, they need to have a grounding of relatively solidly established facts. But they also need to have a Zinn/Loewen style understanding of how to find perspective in the way that history is taught, so that the Charge up San Juan Hill is understood in context, or why the Phillipines were denied their independence by the United States due to realpolitik concerns and their strategic location.
Students should be encouraged to understand why there were riots following George Floyd’s murder, and what is the relationship between the governments of St. Paul and Minneapolis to African-Americans or to the way that metropolitans areas in general have moved school districts, redlined, built freeways through certain neighborhoods, in order to favor one race or another. If all they learn is about the Shining City on the Hill they are going to end up posting “Those people are just detroying their own neighborhoods” when they unfriend me on Facebook.
There are facts, and there are perspectives, and the perspectives do mean that people can look at the same set of facts and still logically come to different conclusions about the meaning of those facts. That’s not post-modernism, that is observable truth. When it comes to teaching civics, our pupils need to learn what other perspectives are so that they don’t perpetuate misunderstandings.
Nullius @ 9 – I think that could be the case, yes, but I’m skeptical that it’s the case with CRT and the war on CRT. It looks to me as if a hell of a lot of people are labeling all mention or discussion of race and racism as CRT and hastening to throw rotten eggs at it. It also looks to me as if a lot of opportunistic people and “content providers” are hopping on what they see as a CRT bandwagon and pushing a dopy muddled destructive version of it.
Ophelia, that’s fair enough. Far too many people do interpret the faintest sniff of race-related history as CRT and do so without understanding what CRT is all about. That certainly does muddle things. It’s only that whenever someone says “that’s taught in law school” I hear “just look at the trees”.
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