Under the combined influence of Donald Trump and Governor Gregg Abbott, a considerable number of Texas parents have become convinced that their public schools have become hotbeds of Marxism and malignant “critical race theory.” Any discussion of racism is interpreted to mean CRT. Opponents of CRT oppose any recognition of racism in the past or present. This story in The Texas Monthly documents the mass hysteria now sweeping the Republican Party.
It describes a meeting in one of the state’s most successful schools: high test scores, high graduation rates, high college acceptance rates, award-wining teams. Yet the parents are furious because the school hired a diversity consultant from Teachers College, Columbia University!
About 99 percent of the 2021 senior class at Westlake High School was accepted to college, superintendent Tom Leonard tells the audience at the June 22 meeting of Eanes’s board, recapping another year of high achievement. The robotics team won a state championship, he adds, which could improve the school’s third-place standing in the Lone Star Cup, awarded to the state’s winningest schools. Westlake also won a state football championship, and the boys’ golf team won state too, as it has four years running. By the standards of Texas public schools, Eanes is an idyll.
Soon after Leonard stops speaking, however, loud yelling commences, and it continues for the better part of an hour. According to most of the 38 people who have come to give public testimony, the district’s schools have become beholden to “post-Marxist critical theory,” as one speaker puts it—“an updated version of Marxism focusing on differences between people.” The school board, says another, has opened the doors of Eanes to “antifa and BLM,” forces that “salivate after war” and “burn down” communities.
On the agenda today are two items that might seem unlikely reasons to go to battle. One is the contract of Mark Gooden, a professor at the Teachers College at Columbia University, in New York City, and, since 2020, the diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant for Eanes. The second is a rewrite of the district’s mission statement. After workshopping the document for more than a year, the board had settled on “Unite. Empower. Inspire . . . Every Person, Every Day.”
The angry parents are certain that these two items are evidence that the district has become “woke,” even anti-white.”
Mass madness.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Salem Witch Trial mass insanity. Combine with anti-vaccination and -mask mandate craziness and it’s a death cult.
a “cult” willing to be manipulated by big money interests: the signs and other anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-CRT paraphernalia used by the protestors are printed out/produced en masse and made available to those willing to play the game
Don’t forget the ed reform contribution to this attack on public schools:
https://www.masspoliticsprofs.org/2021/04/12/koch-connections-and-sham-grassroots-of-parents-defending-education/
They identify as ed reformers and some of the leaders are in fact people the ed reform echo chamber hired and promoted to push charters and vouchers.
Just “improving public education” every day, these brave warriors. They don’t actually get anything productive or positive accomplished for public schools or public school students, but they have an entire paid professional public school critics corps.
They’re now openly admitting this is about pushing vouchers and charters when they appear on Fox news. People should “flee” public schools and enroll in the schools the ed reform “movement” prefers. Mission accomplished, ed reformers. Great work.
The people of this community are being manipulated by the radical right wing money from the Koch network, Waltons and DeVos family. It is all part of the distraction to drive “worried parents” to the polls in the midterms and further undermine the credibility of public education.
perfectly understood
retired teacher
The people of this community are not being manipulated. That excuses their behavior. They are actively affirming their beliefs. Pandering to them by saying they know not what they are doing is not going to change them.
Precisely.
Once ed reformers redefined public schools as a service people could purchase it was inevitable that the loudest and most well-funded customer-parents would direct what happens in schools.
Taking the “public” out of public education has consequences. Schools are just fee for service contractors now- no community or public role at all. Why should my child wear a mask or be taught about civil rights? I “choose” the curriculum and school rules and I can choose it just for my child. I don’t have to consider anyone else at all.
A main objective is to whip parents into an irrational frenzy so they will have fear of and a loathing for public schools.
“As for who is responsible for collecting the names of these culture warriors, PDE has something called a director of outreach and that is Erika Sanzi. She is a veteran of privatization operations including, as Ms. Schneider shows, the billionaire funded Education Post. Ms. Schneider details what we know of Ms. Sanzi’s lucrative attachment to the privatization industry: $82,000 from Ed Post in 2015, $120,000 in 2016, $131,000 in 2017, and $121,000 in 2018.
Perhaps it was Ms. Sanzi who recruited another member, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Here is what the Sourcewatch project of the Center for Media and Democracy has to say: “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has deep ties to the Koch brothers. The organization has received millions in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Stand Together Trust.” The group is also a pet project of the radical right funders Bradley Foundation and a passel of other anti-democracy billionaires.”
At the time all these Right wing activists were working for ed reform orgs, those ed reform orgs were managed by influential, national ed reformers, including a former member of the Obama Administration.
Once again ed reform damages public schools. I assume it was inadvertant, although I don’t know, but could ed reformers possibly see their way clear to STOP harming pub,ic schools and public school students. I’m not even asking them to work on something productive or contribute to public schools. If they would just stop harming our schools and students that would be enough.
“Ms. Schneider details what we know of Ms. Sanzi’s lucrative attachment to the privatization industry: $82,000 from Ed Post in 2015, $120,000 in 2016, $131,000 in 2017, and $121,000 in 2018.”
The next time you read the ed reform echo chamber attacking the salaries of labor leaders – which they do constantly- ask yourself what the combined total salaries of the thousands of full time, anti public school ed reform activists is.
121k for just one. There are thousands of full time, paid ed reformers. What ed reformers are paid absolutely dwarfs the 500k each for the two national teacher union reps.
Anti-public school is a great career move. It comes with a three figure salary and virtually unlimited funding from the billionaires and all one has to do is attack public schools and promote charters and vouchers.
Wait until you hear how much money is spent on the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” industry.
But do the diversity equity and inclusion industry slam their political opponents for getting paid while pulling down a very nice salary for their advocacy work which they neglect to mention?
Ed reform operates on the assumption that all public school advocates are “self interested” while they, the “choice” advocates, are as pure as the driven snow and working “for the children”
It’s nonsense. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a lobbyist for a teacher union and a charter chain lobbyist, and the Catholic Church lobbying for public funding for their schools is not “pure” in comparison to a public school district.
I would bet the Walton Foundation head is making 500k or better. Self interested? Or just a morally superior person so therefore immune from that smear?
And no one wants to admit that DEI is becoming a problem in some school systems. And an “industry” is exactly what it is. We have the extreme left stirring controversy with the extreme right and most of us (our children, mainly) are stuck in the middle. But hey, if it’s not happening at your child’s school then it really doesn’t exist in any school…right? Of course you and I will be called right wing trolls and trump fanboys for admitting this. I’m a Dem thru and thru, but some of this DEI stuff needs to be exposed for the garbage that it is.
I’ve been called an anti-vaxxer, an “anti-masker,” a right-winger, and much worse here, so I’m used to it.
DEI is an multi-billion dollar institutional cancer. It’s Human Resources on steroids. And yes, it’s largely derived from critical race theory.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are programs intended to reduce racism and to make racial minorities feel comfortable at school. What’s wrong with that? No, it was not spawned by critical race theory. CRT was developed by law school professors in the 1980s and after who understood that racism is deeply embedded in certain laws and policies. Both speak to factual problems in our society.
Respectfully and strongly disagree on both points.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion education are not the threat, The threat is the irrational fear they elicit among certain white folks. Our society would be better off if we learned to understand and see the societal benefit of diversity, equity and inclusion. All people deserve to be treated fairly with dignity. White people are not losing anything by treating people of color with the same level of respect as they would have for other white people.
With all due respect, I suspect you are a bit far removed from what DEI actually involves.
@ retired teacher…..I’m assuming you are retired. A lot has changed in the past 5-6 yrs. Be kind and respect others is one thing, but the DEI of today is just another “curriculum/PD in a can” meant to check off a box and it really is quite awful in some districts. Just because you haven’t witnessed it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening in some districts/schools. And yes, I will admit that it gets the far right all worked up over everything….but it also gets a lot of moderate people angry, too. It goes far beyond masks/mask mandates and CRT.
Gooden does not sound like another education huckster looking to cash in on DEI. He’s a scholar from TC, and his CV is legit. He has many publications to his credit. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/mg3904/
Alarmists always warn us about how “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are very bad things.
Often when they do, it involves demonizing some hapless educator (so their lackeys can threaten them) by presenting some out of context sentences from a larger, perfectly reasonable presentation. And we are supposed to believe their hypocrisy that CRT is very, very dangerous because white children are supposedly being taught to hate themselves and supposedly taught that white people are all evil. It definitely doesn’t bother them when white students are taught that their culture is superior to all others and they aren’t perusing every sentence of every textbook to make sure there is nothing that could possibly offend someone who isn’t white. They just care about whether CRT might offend any white people and if even a few are offended, then CRT must be outlawed!
There is always a resistance to change. Imagine the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” equivalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s teaching that people should use the term “Ms.” instead of “Miss” or “Mrs.” to refer to adult female co-workers, and the outrage about how the “fem-Nazis” are taking over the country and they are teaching women to hate men. That’s what the anti-CRT folks remind me of — they want things to stay the way they always were because the way they always were didn’t bother them one bit. They thought Billy Crystal in blackface was funny. They thought calling a woman Miss or Mrs. was fine. How dare someone make them feel that they might be wrong. They know what is right and they are far too small-minded to look beyond what their own views are and put themselves in someone else’s shoes.
Who cares if once in a while a paragraph in some CRT curriculum goes overboard? Far more frequently you find examples of European-centric textbooks used in schools going overboard. Far more frequently you find the history of anyone but white folks and a few token others are the only stories that are deemed “important”.
Times change. One side feigns outrage because they believe that they way they always did things was perfectly fine, and they feel victimized by anyone telling them that they are wrong.
Did using the term “Ms.” make everyone hate men? Of course not. But back in the day, the people who remind me of the outraged anti-CRT posters here were certain that teaching people to use “Ms.” was either very dangerous to the future of our country, or a joke to be demeaned. And all they could do was attack anyone who challenged their privilege.
LisaM,
What is happening at your kids’ school that is so dangerous with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or CRT?
It would be nice if we had some specific examples of this supposed danger that our kids’ school hasn’t yet experienced but you imply is going to be in our future if we don’t fight DEI and CRT.
On the contrary, when I see anti-CRT folks here posting links to clips on this very blog, it never turns out to be nearly as evil or dangerous as the anti-CRT poster wants people to believe.
As a parent, I am far more concerned about voter disenfranchisement, racism, and white supremacy than about whether school curriculum is being made to be more inclusive and Americans are learning to be aware of their implicit biases. A fear of being told I have implicit biases doesn’t keep me up at night. A fear of the end of democracy in this country does.
FLERP!
Oh please do tell us how much is spent on the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” industry . I love big numbers . And please do tell us how the numbers were generated. If you can break down its components.
I am waiting with bated breath.
FLERP!
And you can inform us “what DEI actually involves.”
By the way multi billion wont cut it . Is it 2 billion 20 billion 200 billion .
“DEI is an multi-billion dollar institutional cancer. It’s Human Resources on steroids. And yes, it’s largely derived from critical race theory.”
Joel, it’s amazing that despite very few people even knowing what CRT was until the right wing decided to make it an issue very recently, CRT supposedly had already infected the multi-billion dollar institutional cancer of “diversity, equity and inclusion”.
Was CRT infecting the institutional cancer known as the diversity, equity and inclusion industry from the very beginning? Was that why so many supposedly right thinking white folks so strongly opposed any efforts at inclusion and diversity? They weren’t racists, or white supremacists — they were just fighting the institutional cancer of critical race theory. What does that mean? Who cares? It is a cancer the likes of which will destroy this country.
Ending democracy is no big deal. What’s it matter that people who aren’t white have a harder time voting? The real danger is that there are evil efforts at inclusion and diversity happening that will destroy this country. And CRT has been infecting that movement for decades right under our noses!
No one outside of law schools ever heard the term “critical race theory,” but once Trump denounced it, it became a subject of mass hysteria.
NYC public school parent
FLERP! hasn’t gotten back to me with a number. I can’t hold my breath
much longer.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to provide extra security because of right wing lunatics looking to disrupt schools? . And being that these people are synonymous with the anti vaxxers protesting in the schools, do you have any idea how much these Troglodytes have cost the American economy in the 6 months since the vaccines have been widely available.
But I am patient so I’ll wait for the answer from my fellow New Yorker.
Then he might want to speculate on the how much the drug wars fought on the backs of minority Americans have cost the American people . Perhaps he can explain why stop and frisk was conducted outside High Schools through out the City saddling thousands of minority youth with criminal records ,for minor drug possession. Yet not outside my High School in the burbs, where I assure you the drug use was as high.
RE; DEI (not CRT). The connection is to biz mgt. Equality and diversity professionals were employed in corps under affirmative action laws, which came under attack during Reagan years. The movement continued, based on presumed biz advantages of diversity/ inclusion. Typical of bureaucracy: a new concept gets assimilated into mgt, develops as a specialty, spawns consultants, trickles into non-profits, sometimes to K12. (ESSA ‘accountability systems’ are a spin-off of ’80’s MBO.)
Examples of DEI concepts being mis-applied or poorly implemented in K12 will occur– it was developed for adult biz orgs. And baked into DEI is hiring a diverse workforce. But there’s no serious national attempt to integrate pubschs. Or even hiring teachers of color for student bodies that are max POC.
So the DEI movement in schools focuses on the piece designed to help a diverse workforce work well together. Even with very un-diverse student bodies, we can [& do] improve curriculum to raise awareness of multicultural US, history of racism, etc. Making minority students feel acknowledged/ visible/ included is obviously desirable, and improvement no doubt needed there. Problems will arise when methods appropriate to adult workplace are imposed unvetted, with little consideration given to their affect on youngsters.
Here’s one of the paid ed reformers themselves, slamming a labor union head for earning a salary.
Neglected to mention that the Education Post, an ed reform propaganda outfit, was paying her more than 100k that year for her anti-union campaigning:
“Her organization, for which she is paid half a million dollars to run, has been holding students and families hostage since the summer. As she was busy writing the Biden campaign’s talking points on education and cheering him on as Mr. Science, she was also instilling terror into her members about COVID-19 and doing everything in her power to keep school buildings closed.
And who can forget that she and her counterpart at the National Education Association enjoyed a red carpet reception at the White House on the 2nd day of the Biden administration? The students in the cities where the AFT reigns supreme haven’t been to school since March of 2020.”
So how much are the thousands of full time critics of public education making? They’re supposedly all about transparency and they all lobbied to make teacher rankings public. They slam public education advocates for getting paid. Are all these thousands of full time charter and voucher promoters working for free? Of course not. Ed reform pays quite well. A couple of op eds reciting the ed reform mantra a week will bring you 3 figures.
https://sanzi.substack.com/p/no-the-union-president-is-not-the
I think people should get paid for the work that they do, but it is the height of hypocrisy for the VERY well compensated ed reform echo chamber to complain about what public school advocates make. The combined total of ed reform salaries is in the tens of millions. It’s a lucrative career choice and it’s not a lot of work- bash public schools and cheerlead charters and vouchers and you’re employed for life. Leave one ed reform org and transfer easily to the next- they’re all pushing the same agenda so it’s seamless. At this point it’s the same 150 people playing musical chairs. Decades go by and public school policy is still directed by the NCLB crew.
Did you see the huge drop in NEAP scores? It hasn’t phased the echo chamber at all. In fact, they order us to double down on privatization, because ed reform can’t fail, it can only BE failed, by public schools.
Under ed reform management public education in the US is declining. Can we possibly find and hire someone who isn’t beholden to this belief system? Or do we stick with this same crew for another 20 years?
How did Westlake High School become this oasis of enlightenment in an otherwise GOP/red state presided over by that knucklehead, Abbott? It’s a miracle of sorts. Maybe there’s hope for Texas but then again, maybe not.
The post-referenced Westlake High School in Texas may be the school by the same name located “west and adjacent to Austin”.
Here’s another of the hundreds of ed reform groups – I assume they’re all getting paid- they “demand transparency” but only from public schools. Charter and publicly funded private schools get no such demand from these fierce transparency warriors:
“50CAN
Oct 15
ThreadOne month ago, we issued a call for transparency from school districts across the country on how the billions of federal stimulus dollars are being spent.
Parents have a right to know.”
The biggest charter chain in Texas is currently suing to keep financials secret from a newspaper. Raises questions because this same charter chain is under federal investigation. One would think the ed reform transparency hawks would be outraged, but you won’t even read about it on the echo chamber. It’s buried.
I guess in that case parents don’t have a “right to know”.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
More evidence of the Chief Traitor dropped dead today, that madness is not going away.
Trump made insanity seem normal.
Had Andrew Johnson been successfully impeached we would be in a far better place.
And for more cheer think of what a blogger will say 155 years from now.
CRT is yet another Republican riff to hijack basic critical thinking and get those endorphins flowing for its anti-democracy insurrectionist base.
There’s a typo in your first reference to Teacher’s College.
You are right! I’ll fix it.