33 Comments

This article/analysis is 100% spot-on.

The seemingly honest belief by many conservatives that they can just pass a rule telling overwhelmingly-progressive teachers to not bring their politics to the classroom, and that said teachers will just nod and go along with that, shows how poorly said conservatives understand the situation they are in.

Just because *you* would silently assent and obey the letter of the law the best you could, doesn't mean that *they* will.

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Good analysis but I don't agree with the conclusion.

Elite private schools are among the most radical in terms of teaching race essentialism. If conservatives tried to splinter off and create a "conservative private school", its students would be treated by universities the same way that employers treat students from Liberty University.

There's literally no way the right can win other than grassroots taking control of school boards and influencing curricula directly.

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So what you want to do to ban teaching America's racist history is bankrupt public schools so that the poor and lower classes can't access education, which conservatives have long called "the great equalizer". And this is all to prevent American children from learning how America's institutions have been so racially unjust such that minorities are disproportionately negatively impacted. So in order to prevent people from learning why it's so hard for minorities to get on par in this nation, your want to prevent minorities from having any chance of getting on par by defunding their public schools. Got it.

If you and your fellow Republicans really think that *this* is the argument which will win you back the suburbs of DC, Atlanta, Detroit, NYC, Chicago, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Denver, RTP, Austin, San Antonio, DFW, Houston, Richmond, Boston, Hampton Roads, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and Reno, as a liberal, I will GLADLY take that fight. If you think you're going to win back majority-minority Gwinett and Cobb Counties in Georgia by telling poor minorities that they don't deserve to have fully funded public schools so that rich white people don't have to have their children learn about this nation's racist history, I will gladly meet you on the battlefield of electoral politics.

This isn't the winning message in the suburbs you think it is. Take it from an affluent suburbanite who lives outside of Pittsburgh.

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First, I would like to congratulate you on the article. Your analysis is the best I've read on this subject since the beginning of this campaign against CRT. But I think you underestimate the problem of indoctrination — I mean left-wing indoctrination — in private schools, even in "conservative" Catholic and Christian schools. Teachers working in these schools have the same training as teachers working in public schools; they came from the same schools and the same universities; they had the same "education". In other words, everyone was equally indoctrinated. You mentioned Bari Weiss' article on elite schools. There is not much difference between these elite schools and the others. Educators in general have been hijacked by politics and ideology everywhere. Everyone sees education as a way to cure society of all its illnesses, understanding by “illnesses” what the left defines as such; and when they close the classroom door, when they are alone with the students, away from the eyes and ears of the principals and parents, they work hard to “cure” their students from these illnesses. In fact, the problem is not CRT, but indoctrination. And indoctrination only happens thanks to the secrecy of classrooms. Therefore, to end indoctrination, it is necessary to end the unnecessary and unjustifiable secrecy of the classroom. Lessons need to be recorded (not necessarily filmed) so parents can know what their children are hearing from teachers. When teachers know that their words will be heard by students' parents, they will tend to avoid those overly controversial topics that have so troubled families.

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Why not both?

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Fund private schools, defund public schools, it really is that simple. As the daughter of a teacher, I know you would see the monster react with true fear if you could decrease public school attendance by 20%. This is the fight to choose.

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Agree 100%.

The Gay Men's choir of SF told you what they all believe,

they're going to convert your children and they don't care what you have to say about it.

Why would parents subject their children to teachers who seek to muzzle them and restrict their breathing? Why would any parent comply KNOWING this harms your children's health?

Why would any parent allow their children to be taught by someone obsessed with your children's genitals? Why would any parent allow their children to be influenced by someone who hates white people and hates the country?

Most teachers blindly ran out to get the vaxxxxines questioning NOTHING.

I've seen many teachers die and become paralyzed and very sick,

yet they still say the children must be vaxxxxinated.

This is a sickness. A delusional disease most teachers are afflicted.

Do you believe these teachers would not inject your children and then ask forgiveness later for not telling you? YES, they would, because in their minds, they are saving the world and your child, from you.

The General Counsel of PBS was just one of many liberals who spoke of rounding up all whites and conservatives and throwing them in re-education camps. In fact, AOC and several others from Obama's crew had created a database of everyone they sought to round up and imprison. There was so much backlash, Obama's digital czar had to hide his socials and hide his website. Do you believe he deleted the database? NOPE.

What were these people's crimes? They are nationalists and many of them white.

This is their crime.

Majority of teachers are on board with this type of thinking.

They all believe this. It's a sickness. Anyone that obsessed with controlling others' thoughts and beliefs is disturbed and should NOT be around anyone's children.

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It's easy to suggest that states wave a magic wand and provide funds for vouchers for private schools by defunding public education. But there is a finite number of quality private schools out there and they tend to keep a lid on enrollment numbers. And for every voucher applicant, there are 3 families lined up behind ready to pay full tuition. Private schools have an incentive to be selective. It means they don't have to meet state education standards, nor provide resources for kids with learning disabilities (unless of course, you have insurance to pay for that). This is fine as long as we're willing to acknowledge that private schools are not in the business of educating everyone equally. They're in the business of educating selective parents with the means. Pre-elite college feeder schools in essence. With regards to vouchers and charter schools, it's a quasi-private school model just funded with public funds. Charters can be highly selective but must provide services that public schools do but this doesn't mean they perform better or provide a more 'conservative' education agenda (whatever that means) than high-performing public schools. Again, you have limited seats for hundreds of applications.

Here in New Orleans, one can try to enroll their child in one of the top charter schools but it's via lottery. So you might have 150 applicants for 3 seats. This repeats over several schools you rank as your choices. So you also apply to private schools in the hope of getting one of the rare seats, playing the long game of enrolling a child in Pre-K so they have a guaranteed seat for the next 10 years. It's not just that public schools need fixing but the private and charter systems need fixing if the idea is to make 'conservative' education more popular or make education choices more accessible.

So the question is are conservatives willing to go out on a limb and publicly say they want to completely defund free public primary education and then provide the resources and means to create a brand new education system that is conservative enough to their liking? Which I guess means we only teach our children that the Founding Fathers were heavenly beings sent to create America by God, Adam and Eve are real but Adam and Steve are figments of your imagination, the racists are anti-white, and America has only ever done good deeds, and every child is coerced into daily prayer and chapel service.

I'm hard-pressed to understand what public education systems could do to restructure themselves to please or appease conservative critics. I've watched over the last 40 years conservatives attempt to defund/underfund public education at all levels. Even when we get conservative ideas like the 'No Child Left Behind Act' which was an attempt to hold only public school teachers accountable for the failures of children, it was decidedly unpopular by everyone because it results in just teaching to the test. Which led to resource cuts for the arts and humanities and physical education, which ironically are courses still provided in private schools. So either those classes are beneficial or just not important enough for kids in public schools.

Again, I think the conservative critique of public education has less to do with what they're teaching and more to do with the fact that public education exists at all. CRT is flawed in so many ways and deserves criticism but it has just become another in a long line of "reasons" for conservatives to spend endless amounts of energy concern-trolling about where public education is going. When I suspect, the reality is, most conservatives would be completely happy if we just got rid of public education altogether if it's not teaching conservative ideology and pedagogy.

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All true, and yes, the answer is all public funding for education travels with the student to any school of their parents' choice.

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The attack has to be on the funding methods. It has to be money-follows-the-child. Paying property taxes for education, then peeing again for private schools that don’t get economies of scale, is not possible except for wealthy parents, who are necessarily a small minority of parents. Get access to that money will be the most brutal political struggle anyone has ever seen, and the teachers unions are holding most of the cards. Then the less, if anything is going to happen in this domain, that’s how it has to be done.

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“Neither Robin DiAngelo nor Ibram X. Kendi, the two thinkers that seem to offend conservatives the most, identifies as a Critical Race Theorist. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers just announced a campaign to bring Kendi’s teachings to every student in the country, and they don’t appear to be deterred by CRT bans.”

Liberals are allegedly more more honest in your view but here’s an example of another repulsive ideology being foisted on young minds under the cover of a mere technicality. Perhaps my head is too filled with anecdotes about dubious and/or fabricated social science scholarship promoted or adopted by the MSM and/or the Leftist cognoscenti, that a charge of “bias” often seems too charitable (e.g., Stephen Gould’s book on Morton’s skulls).

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“I can understand both positions.”

As in, sympathize with CRT? If so, please explain. CRT just seems to be race communism.

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Still looking for the state that puts the money in the hands of parents and lets public schools compete for it.

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Yes, unquestionably true. Public school teachers are the problem in more ways than described in the article, and public school teaching won't improve just because of new laws, rules, or mandated curricula. The teachers will still be who they are, with the same competencies and politics they have now.

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People will say that this is the same as the witch hunts against communists in our most important and influential institutions in the 1950s. The thing is though, if we were successful in the 1950s, we wouldn't still be trying to root out all the cultural marxism in our institutions today.

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Good article, but I still think banning CRT in schools is incredibly important, for one simple reason - people want to keep their jobs. A teacher who chooses to violate a CRT ban will be risking his/her career. And even if a teacher tries to disguise pro-CRT views using other words for CRT's neo-racism, that will be readily apparent to now observant parents.

If you think potential job loss doesn't matter, consider how this has gone in pro-CRT places, where we've now seen a great number of institutions make speaking up _against_ CRT a firing offense (in effect they've got an anti-CRT ban, or a pro-CRT requirement). As an educator myself, I can tell you it's working like gangbusters to mute any opposition to CRT.

That silence will vanish if an institution has a CRT ban, and even if it's only 15% of the teachers (which I think is a very low estimate), this will have a pronounced effect. CRT cannot stand up to scrutiny. As with the Emperor's clothes, having even a few teachers point out the naked absurdity will go a long way with the students, who will now at least know that this issue is actually controversial.

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