Editor:
The Biden administration is a go-for-broke bunch (on your dime): Pack the Supreme Court, open the borders, empty the nation’s treasury and push for federal control of elections.
These all work for the same outcome: consolidate power.
In education, their plan is: replace reading, writing and history with a school poison pill that undermines and removes parental control, dislocates civic life and the constitutional republic.
It travels under the name “culturally responsive teaching and learning” – but is more well-known as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which uses the totally discredited 1619 project, treats children differently on the basis of their race alone, undermines parental authority, and brainwashes children with false history.
On April 19, 2021, Biden’s U.S. Department of Education (ED) “proposed” two new “priorities” (a.k.a. rules) for public K-12 schools to remain eligible for some federal tax dollars.
These two “proposed priorities” re-define the content of both American history and civics nationally and they mandate an exhaustive set of teaching strategies that replace traditional education with what they call “culturally responsive teaching and learning” – aka Critical Race Theory. This is the most serious move by the feds to redefine public schools in U.S. history. CRT teaching practices are classic brainwashing.
This U.S. ED strategy itself is not new. Since it began in 1979, the ED has used this method of gaining federal leverage over local school districts via contingency based aid. (Adopt the program or no money). If local public schools comply, ED will fund what it requires, and ED gains more control.
Prior U.S. presidents have used federal funding as a carrot and federal displeasure as the stick to exercise some form of control and communication with state and local education departments.
George Bush (No Child Left Behind), Barak Obama (Common Core).
Biden’s current ED plan (Critical Race Theory) will exert a far more aggressive federal control over k-12 classrooms, teacher-student interactions, the teaching content itself (our own nation’s history), and student interactions.
The ED document states: “We may use these priorities for competitions in fiscal year (FY) 2021 and later years. We propose these priorities to support the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning and the promotion of information literacy skills in grants under these programs.”
Critical Race Theory looks to be a key “gatekeeper” practice and principle for states and districts to access some federal funds for the next few years.
It may be that schools across the nation could be financially limited in their ability to access federal education funds without full compliance with this conditional bribe from ED. (See http://www.regulations.gov/document/ED-2021-OESE-0033-0001).
Critical Race Theory teaches that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every interaction and person in terms of race. Those who teach and follow CRT are pre-eminent racists, pure and simple. They pursue what they call their religion, “antiracism,” through the use of race-based policies.
In one teacher training for these CRT systems, a teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” The answer: Ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students.
“You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teacher-trainer told a group. “White parents’ children benefit from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).”
Therefore, in Equity Education culture, teachers are obligated to subvert parental wishes and beliefs.
Districts that use this system have an “Equity in Action” plan which teachers must use that directs them to override parents in the pursuit of this “antiracism” false religion.
Teacher strategies include forcing students to accept radical “solutions,” like race-based collective identity.
Chris Rufo has said, “It’s telling first-graders that they should be divided by oppressor and oppressed, forcing fifth-graders to celebrate black communism and simulate black power marches.”
Parents everywhere in the U.S., and definitely in Oregon, should not assume that their own local district is immune to these CRT trends.
This new political brainwash-education is spreading everywhere, courtesy of the Biden ED, mainline and social media, higher education, sold-out corporations and others.
We must wake up, stand up together and speak up against it.
We also need to help our local districts and monitor what they plan to do in these challenging days for education. Get to know their plans. Ask them how you can help.
Critical Race Theory is a terminal threat to education as America has known it.
It is a precursor of a continental propaganda machine the likes of which our nation’s households and youth have never encountered and for which many have not been preparing.
Let’s prepare.
Pete Ready
Albany