The Parents' Revolt, By J.L. Reiter
In the recent election of Glenn Youngkin as governor Virginia, it was evident that Democrats had greatly under-estimated the backlash against progressive ideology in education and the organizing power of parents, who to their dismay are crossing the ‘intersectional’ lines of identity that are supposed to unite the Left. Parents of all colors want their children to be educated. They mostly believe that, absent proof of incapacity, abuse, or neglect, they should make the decisions on their children’s behalf, not the state.
There are three main reasons why parents are mad: First, schools have been locked down, and children have been forced to wear masks, far longer than was warranted by any sensible risk analysis. Second, while test scores continue to drop every year, the divisive ideology of ‘critical theory’ has dribbled down from its home in Academia and hit K-12 classrooms hard. Zoom-schooling showed parents what they had been missing, and they don’t like it. Third, and related to the second reason, schools are increasingly throwing in the towel on grading, discipline, and admissions requirements, choosing to believe that declining outcomes and group disparities in can only be due to racism.
Let’s look at each of the three issues. First, in the early days of Covid, when little was known about the disease, any precaution seemed justifiable. It quickly became evident, however, that the novel coronavirus was mostly dangerous for the elderly and those with underlying diseases or weakened immunity. Even taking the highest estimates, Covid never made the top ten causes of death for children. It is now obvious that the risk to children under 18 is extremely low unless they are seriously ill to begin with. Of reporting U.S. states, children were 0.00%-0.25% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 3 states reported zero child deaths. The death of any child is tragic, but public authorities have to make decisions based on risk/benefit in populations, not individuals. If one child in a school with 500 pupils is deathly allergic to cotton, it makes more sense to home-school that one child than to ban anyone in the entire school from wearing cotton clothes.
By the time all adults in the U.S. who wanted the vaccine could have had it, there was no longer a justification for masking in schools. Some states, like many countries, realized this. Others are still requiring masking of children. The power of cognitive bias is strong. Expecting experts like Tony Fauci of the NIAID and Rochelle Wolensky of the CDC to admit that they were wrong about masking children is unrealistic, when they’ve staked their reputations on two years of repression in the name of ‘saving lives.’ Teachers unions have gone all-in on lockdowns, masking, and virtual schooling which, it is abundantly clear, has been disastrous. Kids with attentive parents at home, good internet, and computers have done badly. Kids without those things, often the poorest and most in need of classroom structure, have done much worse.
The second bad idea mobilizing parents is the teaching of race essentialism, i.e. that the most important thing about everyone is their color. Lumped together as Critical Race Theory, because that is the ideological font of most of it, these ideas are being pumped into classrooms overtly through books and materials, and covertly through on-the-job training done by expensive consultants at public expense. CRT looks at every subject, not just history but English, math, and science, through a ‘critical lens’ that results in a disgust for most of America’s past and its traditional values. It introduces into K-12 schools Marxist concepts of power and oppression that divide children by race.
Faced with a growing awareness on the part of parents, Progressives first tried to deny it was happening at all. Every news article and editorial parroted the same line: CRT isn’t being taught in schools or is woefully misunderstood. According to a variety of Washington Post columnists, CRT “is not taught in public schools but has been used by educators to shape how they teach and which programs they prioritize,” is “a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, [and] is not actually being taught in those schools at all,” is “a set of academic theories about teaching racial history that are not actually on the state’s public school curriculums,” is a “concept from legal scholarship [that] isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools,” a “phantom menace [and] an academic construct that is not even part of Virginia’s K-12 curriculum,” and “an academic approach used in some college and law school courses to examine racism’s role in U.S. history.” Post columnist Eugene Robinson calls those who don’t agree with him “lazy journalists” who don’t understand that “what is being taught [in K-12 schools] is not critical race theory but simply truthful American history.” The denials are hollow, and parents are not fooled. Elementary schools in the USSR and Cuba didn’t have to teach Das Kapital to imbue their students with the basic concepts of socialism, and schools in the U.S. don’t need to cite Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancik to base their lessons on CRT.
Even if they haven’t the patience to wade through the turgid writings of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, parents in places like Loudon County, VA - many of them highly-skilled immigrants working in the nation’s top weapons, health, and other scientific establishments around Washington - can read their children’s homework assignments, look at school websites, and listen in to their classes. From this, they see what Andrew Sullivan calls “a tsunami of evidence” that CRT forms the basis of much classroom teaching, because teachers are indoctrinated in CRT and related ideology in college and bring it with them to the class. Chris Ruffo (at the Manhattan Institute), James Lindsay (New Discourses), and Helen Pluckrose (Counterweight) have written concise summaries of CRT. Parents at some private schools have documented teaching and training materials that are based on CRT and related ideology, such as this one from Atlanta’s Westminster School - https://wokeminster.com/critical-race-theory/.
Nicole Solas, a parent in Rhode Island, has waged an inspiring one-woman campaign against race essentialism in low-performing Providence-area public schools. Indiana public school teacher Tony Kinnett founded the Chalkboard Review and shares evidence such as a training session by young BLM activists who told public elementary school students that “white supremacy and capitalism… really harms black and brown people.” Another Midwestern public school teacher, Frank McCormick, shares similar materials on his site Chalkboard Heresy, such as a tweet by Kimberly Chase of the “Chase Literacy Group” claiming that “It is a consequence of white supremacy that our children, BLACK children, have consistently suffered from low reading achievement.” This is classic CRT: all disparate outcomes are caused by racism, no other variable (parental involvement, poverty, time spent on homework, student attitude) need be considered. Chase and countless others make fortunes off taxpayer-funded trainings, workshops, and speeches to the converted in state schools. Even the American School Counselors Association believes that “the systemic and institutional racism underlying violence toward people of color and relegating them to generations of poverty permeates every facet of American society, including the educational system.”
The third divisive concept, which is linked to the second, is the attack on standards, test-based admissions, and grades. There is ample evidence that our public schools are failing those who need them most. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about 1/3 of U.S. grade school children are performing at or above “proficient” level in reading, and math scores are no better. For those that cannot afford private school or to move to areas with better-performing public ones, charters or limited-admission public schools are a lifeline. One of the best is Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax, VA, a selective STEM school which used to admit based on a difficult test which resulted in a student body over 70 percent Asian-American and only 1 percent black. Fairfax County is 60 percent White, 20 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, 17 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent Black. The CRT-inspired framework preached by Ibram Kendi and others says that any discrepancy between groups of people, broadly speaking black, Hispanic, white, and Asian, can only be due to racism. The school board thus decided to end admissions based on the test in favor of a ‘holistic’ approach, including caps on any one feeder middle school, that would allow them to engineer a more ‘equitable’ intake. Asian admissions at TJ High went down to 50% for this year. Meanwhile, a group of parents opposed to the change in admissions sued. In a ruling last month, the judge said the school board’s new policy was “racial balancing for its own sake,” and thus “patently unconstitutional.”
Round Two to the parents, but this case isn’t over. Oddly, it pits mostly white, suburban liberals against immigrant Asian parents, in a fight over the admission levels of black and Hispanic children. Meanwhile in New York City’s storied competitive public schools, the Department of Education released a new admission system which is no longer much based on test scores or grades and, according to one parent group, is “now essentially a lottery system masquerading as a selective process.”
It’s not just entrance requirements that are being eliminated in the name of equity, but grades. Last year, data from California showed that “three of four African-American boys in California classrooms failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing.” The questions should be: why, and how do we fix it, in everyone’s interest; but according to Chris Chatmon of the African-American Male Achievement program at the Oakland Unified School District, “Part of this may be structural, in having texts that aren’t relevant to the experiences and legacy of African-American boys.” So, the curriculum is at fault.
Black Lives Matter at School has 13 Principles, which include “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement” and “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” but say nothing about working to improve academic achievement. They blame “a rapid decline in the number of Black Teachers” in nine large U.S. cities on “racist policies in schools and biased skills exams.” So, teacher exams are at fault. Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, “School districts and principals hire consultants to help staff, teachers and sometimes students navigate conversations about implicit bias, White privilege and microaggressions.”
Any teacher can tell you that poor class discipline means no one learns. Unfortunately, kids don’t always misbehave in exactly ‘equitable’ percentages of race and sex. The answer, for a St. Paul, Minnesota public school district, was to recommend no longer suspending students for any offense. A middle school in the same state has decided that henceforth “grades will not include behaviors, attitude, tardiness to class, whether the assignment was turned in late or on time,” and for good measure, eliminated the ‘F’ and failing altogether. Does anyone actually believe this will improve academic results?
The National Education Association, a teachers’ union with three million members, probably does. It’s Center for Social Justice recommends to teachers that “rather than use the “intent doctrine” often practiced by our courts, which narrowly and wrongly construes racism as that which involves provable intentionality, we need to use an “impact standard,” where disparate impacts are often the evidence of disparate treatment.” But as Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal puts it, “you can’t dumb down admissions without also dumbing down the curriculum… teachers and administrators will be under pressure to make classes less demanding.”
Virginia’s new Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, won election on a promise to fight back against woke ideology in schools. His Executive Order One to his new state Superintendent for Public Instruction was to end previous governor Northam’s EdEquityVA program, which according to his administration “shifts school culture from excellence and opportunity to equitable outcomes for all students,” and the Virginia Math Pathways Initiative, which inter alia would have eliminated advanced high school math. It’s early days yet in Virginia, and other states are not far behind. The battle lines are now drawn between those who want to improve public schools by finding ways to boost achievement, and those who want to improve results by lowering standards and eliminating accountability for failure. The outcome is not certain. One thing is highly likely: similar arguments are not going on in countries with which we must compete militarily or economically, who have yet to lose their collective minds.