Critical race theory arose from the critical studies family and seeks to promote what its adherents believe is a pervasive and inescapable racist legacy in the United States legal system. The theory has been packaged for children in elementary and secondary schools, and it teaches them that America is fundamentally racist.
Frank McCormick, an Illinois high school history teacher, told “Fox & Friends” that he decided to speak out about what was being taught at his school because parents are being “gaslit into this lie that CRT does not exist in [K-12] education.”
“It’s not explicitly taught,” he explained, “but it’s used as a lens through which curriculum and lessons are filtered… based on…presumptions that racism is… systemic [in America].” Critics claim that applying the theory’s concepts to K-12 school curriculum is a colossal failure.
In an op-ed, Erec Smith, an associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania, said that while “third-graders aren’t reading legal theory from the 1980s written by people in their 1980s,… their teachers have likely read the literature, and when trying to put this theory into practice, things go horribly wrong.”
Smith argued that CRT should be opposed by both parties because it is “adamantly opposed” to the foundations of liberty – “free speech, equality, individuality, and the concept of merit.” Tony Kinnett, a former Indiana school administrator who was fired after exposing CRT curricula at his school in a video posted on Twitter, also stated that parents are being blatantly misled about CRT.
Furthermore, some left-wing K-12 teachers openly admit to supporting and attempting to teach CRT concepts to their students. David Rosas, a current assistant principal at Castle Bridge School in Washington Heights, New York, told Chalkbeat that the contentious issue “is not something I will avoid… Critical race theory pervades everything I do.”
During a school board meeting, Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti publicly admitted that CRT was embedded in the school curriculum. Despite these facts, the denial of CRT in K-12 has reached some of the highest levels in American politics.
The fascination with CRT, according to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, is merely a tool of the right to win a culture war, a viewpoint shared by the National School Boards Association.
Kinnett explained that as part of his Master’s degree program, he was taught CRT and how to incorporate it into lesson plans in K-12 classrooms.
Kinnett went on to say that one of the CRT concepts taught in schools is “telling.” “Every problem is caused by White men, students are taught. And that… everything Western civilization has built is racist capitalism and a tool of white supremacy – those are the main points of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s book Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, verbatim.”
The goal, according to Mike Gonzalez, a CRT expert at the Heritage Foundation, is to start a rallying cry for revolutionary changes. “The… Marxian belief [holds] that the purpose of theory is revolution, not just intellectual debate,” he wrote in “The Critical Classroom,” a book about the verticals of CRT in American society.
Another case in point was when a third-grade teacher in Cupertino, California, allegedly instructed students on how to “deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege.'”
According to City Journal, during a diversity training, teachers at Cherokee Middle School, a middle school in Springfield, Missouri, were given a handout and instructed to locate themselves on a “oppression matrix.” The training also denounced “socially unacceptable” White supremacy, which included “education funding from property tax, colorblindness, calling the police on black people, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) as Halloween costumes, not believing experiences of BIPOC, tone policing, [and] white silence.”
