Month: July 2021

Last night I was a guest on KET’s Kentucky Tonight program talking about critical race theory and its place in Kentucky schools. Fellow guests included Rep. Joe Fischer, who recently introduced legislation that would restrict teaching certain CRT concepts in schools (I wrote about the bill here), Sen. Gerald Neal of Louisville, and Dr. Andrea Abrams of Centre College. (You can watch the full program here).

I appreciated host Renee Shaw’s attempt to have a meaningful discussion about critical race theory, as opposed to the intense and often extreme views expressed about CRT in the media and online. Unfortunately, a viewer could be forgiven for feeling confused at the end of the show, because it was clear that the panelists were often talking about totally different things.

I tried to point out the deeply troubling philosophical underpinnings of critical race theory, while my fellow panelists argued that what I was describing wasn’t CRT at all. Instead, they seemed to claim CRT is entirely benign, consisting of teaching more about America’s sometimes neglected history of racism, sharing different perspectives on the topic, and in general just having a good conversation about race and how we can make things better.

Of course if that’s what CRT is, there would be no fuss, as nearly everyone can agree those are important and even necessary goals. But that’s not what critical race theory is.

CRT rejects objective truth in favor of subjective narratives

Critical race theory is an offshoot of just plain old critical theory, a philosophical perspective that emerged in the mid-twentieth century from the schools of structuralism and post-modernism. These philosophies, which can be found, in part, in the writings of French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michele Foucault, started out as a kind of takedown of every idea that had come before. These authors were attempting to critique every grand explanation for the meaning of human life and the organization of human society. Whether it was against Christianity or Marxism, post-modernism is infused with the idea that there is no objective reality out there – or at least if there is, we can’t objectively know it.

Instead, there is only the sense that we individuals make of the world, our personal, subjective narratives. There is no big-T truth, just “my” truth and “your” truth.

Of course, like most things, there is a kernel of, well, truth here. We do all experience the world subjectively. But most people assume there is a reality out there, and that to some extent it is knowable, through some combination of reason, inquiry, and perhaps revelation. In fact, the entire modern liberal order – democracy, individual rights, equality before the law, the rule of law…depends on rational human beings being able to talk their way to governing compromises, instead of the more historical, tribal way of dealing with conflicts: that is, the stronger tribe violently beating the weaker tribe into submission.

CRT rejects discussion and reasoning in favor of imposing its assumptions on others

But to critical theorists, language is violence and a tool of power. This is because in the 1960’s, Marxism got looped back into the discussion through the work of philosophers like the German American Herbert Marcuse. Understanding that a pure critique of truth gets you just about nowhere, thinkers like Marcuse adopted Marx’s idea that basically all of human history and social phenomena boil down to e class warfare: oppressors systemically depriving the oppressed of their just desserts.

Critical race theorists took this concept and simply injected race in place of Marx’s understanding of class, but the message is the same: History is always told from the perspective of the winners, and so our entire cultural heritage – all of that democracy and freedom and individual rights and equality before the law – is just a narrative, and an illegitimate one at that, designed to keep the oppressed in their place.

If reasoning and argumentation and democracy are illegitimate tools of oppression, especially if they are nothing more than subjective narratives, they can – and in fact, must – be rejected by the oppressed, who are then justified by removing the “oppressors” and replacing them by any means necessary, including violence and coercion. The privileged will never be persuaded to give up power. A new regime that enforces equality of outcomes for all must be imposed. 

This is not paranoia and hyperbole. It is the explicit goal of every Marxist regime throughout history (with horrifying results). And it is the implicit – if not sometimes explicit goal of CRT.CRT actually rejects “conversations” about race and “sharing perspectives”

Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist, perhaps the most popular critical theory book available today. He’s as much a spokesperson for the CRT movement as anyone. And Kendi makes it clear he is not interested in having a conversation about race, but rather imposing his “antiracist” views on those who disagree. His own words, from How to Be an Antiracist: “I had to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds….Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy…it is a suicidal strategy.”

This is why Kendi believes that teachers must “literally teach their students antiracist ideas” (as he understands them), because any other narrative “is to effectively allow their students to be educated to be racist.”

This is not sharing our perspectives, learning from each other, welcoming diversity (certainly not diversity of opinion). It is not studying neglected aspects of America history. It is adopting one point of view, one highly problematic explanation for social problems, and imposing it on anyone who resists.

As Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, “This is indoctrination, not education, and it is being unapologetically defended as such.”

CRT rejects the entire liberal democratic order

Like their Marxist fathers, the actual advocates of critical race theory see the very founding principles of American democracy as obstacles to their agenda. Whereas Martin Luther King, Jr. looked to America’s founding documents and ideals as the moral, political, and legal inspiration for the entire struggle for civil rights, CRT rejects those ideals as empty tools for white supremacy.

Richard Delago – a prominent CRT scholar, makes this clear in his own definition in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, co-authored with Jean Stefancic:

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

CRT law professor Andre Douglas Pond Cummings puts it this way, when he says that critical race theory “questions liberalism and the ability of a system of law built on it to create a just society. An interest convergence critique posits that white elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when such advances also promote white self-interest.”

So what is the alternative to the liberal order of equality, legal reasoning, rationalism, and law?

We know historically the alternative is despotism, authoritarianism, and tyrannical regimes that reject individual rights in favor of the power and interest of the state. In Kendi’s case, he has advocated for an agency of unelected racism “experts” who will police politicians’ language and behavior for signs of racism and “would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

CRT reduces all social problems to a single explanation – and a single solution

These are not the ideas of someone who wants to have a conversation about race, who wants children to learn from multiple perspectives, who simply wants students to learn about diversity and the struggle for civil rights in America, as so many of our sudden champions of CRT seem to think. It is certainly not the viewpoint of someone who sees social problems as complex.

Critical race theorists like Ibram X. Kendi are explicit in their view that any difference in outcomes across racial groups is always because of the racism of white people and their systemic oppression of minorities. “Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy,” Kendi writes. There is no other explanation. End of story. There is no idea or concept that isn’t a reflection of racial power. “There is no such thing as a ‘not-racist’ idea,” he writes again. Every idea, every policy is either racist or antiracist, as Kendi defines it. There is no other lens through which ideas can be viewed.

And what is the answer to this racism? Not equality of opportunity, as previous generations of civil rights supporters would say (that’s a racist concept). Not ending discrimination. Certainly not winning over hearts and minds. The answer is more discrimination, just in reverse: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” Kendi writes. “The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Critical race theory sees life as an absolute zero sum game, as Andrew Sullivan has noted, with CRT…

you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss.

So to advance the interest of people with dark skin, those who are born with white skin must have their interests impeded. That’s the core message of CRT. Individuals don’t really exist except for the membership in an identity group. And as their identity group defines them as oppressor or oppressed, the categories of who is privileged must be reversed. There is no “treating everyone equally regardless of skin color.” CRT rejects that as an essentially racist concept. Your skin color defines you, and power must follow accordingly.

What CRT looks like in K-12 schools

This post has run long, but I think it’s important to see how the extreme assumptions of CRT described above actually play out when it is imposed on teachers and children in K-12 schools. Here’s just a very partial list of recent examples:

• The highly-respected KIPP charter school network  abandoning its longtime slogan, “Work Hard, Be Nice” because it reflects values of “whiteness” and “meritocracy” and tries to make those values normal.
• The California Department of Education’s new plan for an “anti-racist mathematics framework” that would prohibit grouping students by ability or merit and eliminate rigorous coursework.
• An elementary school in Cupertino, California, instructed third graders to rank themselves based on their power and their privilege.
• The San Diego Unified School District told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children.
• Oregon Department of Education trying to purge “white supremacy” from mathematics, with examples such as “showing your work” and “getting the right answer.”
• Denver public schools teachers were trained that “being objective,” believing in “right/wrong/good/bad,” or “being polite” are problematic features of “white culture.”
• A school in Las Vegas has a graduation requirement that white students confess their racial guilt – that they identify all the ways in which they are privileged by virtue of their skin color.
• A New York principal writing a letter to parents that calls on parents to “subvert white authority,” become “white traitors” and “abolish whiteness”
• Philadelphia elementary school where fifth graders were made to celebrate what the teacher called “black communism”
• Missouri middle school forced teachers to identify themselves on an “oppression matrix”
• The Buffalo Public Schools teach students that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism and force kindergarteners to watch a video of dead black children warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” who might kill them at any time.
• Affinity grouping where black and white kids are separated into different rooms to learn about and discuss their separate roles as oppressors and victim.

These may be relatively isolated incidents, but they are increasingly common examples of how weird it gets when educators try to force the overly-simplistic, neo-Marxist, fundamentally offensive assumptions of CRT on children and their fellow educators.

We can fight racism without critical race theory

Concern about CRT is not some kind of conservative backlash against conversations about race and diversity. Political liberals – to the extent that they actually believe in classically liberal values like reason and common sense and equality of opportunity and the rule of law – should be as equally alarmed by the implications of CRT in our schools as anyone else.

If you believe that it is overreach to ban the teaching of CRT assumptions in schools, then fine. But please consider which of the above ideas you are okay with children being taught, and how, and at what age. And please consider whether any of it actually helps us better meet the needs of all of our students, regardless of their skin color.

We can fight racism without endorsing the assumptions of critical race theory. Curricular materials can be culturally responsive without assuming CRT as a fact. In fact, critical race theory actually makes it harder to have meaningful conversations about the changes in attitudes, curriculum, and instruction we need to close achievement gaps and do better by all kids.

Feel free to disagree about whether Rep. Fischer’s bill is a good idea. But please understand what critical race theory really means before you do, and what place it should have in your child’s school.

Over the last year American schools have seen an explosion of teacher training and classroom instruction based on critical race theory (CRT), which explores how racism is supposedly perpetuated in every aspect of society. Several state legislatures have moved to ban classroom instruction that reflects some of the more extreme and pernicious assumptions of CRT. Earlier this week Kentucky state representative Joseph Fischer introduced Bill Request 60, which prohibits local school districts or individual school councils from including or promoting a series of concepts in any course, curriculum, or instructional program.

Specifically, the bill would bar teaching or instructional materials that assume or suggest the following:

• One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
• An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
• An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex;
• Members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
• An individual’s moral character is determined by his or her race or sex;
• An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
• An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex;
• Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race;
• The Commonwealth or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;
• Values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs can be assigned to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex;
• Promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government; or
• Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.

Most Kentuckians would readily agree that most of the views expressed above are reprehensible and have no place in the state’s classrooms. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, however, voiced what sounded like opposition to the bill, arguing that “I think once you start legislating what can and can’t be taught in schools, especially in the framework of politics, it gets really dangerous.”

Of course, Kentucky law and regulation already establishes a framework of educational standards that provides a basis of what gets taught in our schools, although it does not, to my knowledge, prohibit any specific concepts from P-12 classrooms. But which of the above viewpoints does Governor Beshear believe the children of the Commonwealth should be taught? Does Governor Beshear believe that teaching an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, should be allowed?

Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass, always a predictable parrot of the Governor’s views, voiced his own opposition to the bill, saying that it limits “free speech” and is a “politically-driven effort to manage our local classroom teachers.” But does Commissioner Glass really believe a “local classroom teacher” should be teaching kids that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex?”

Beshear and Glass’s reactions are typical of the defensiveness we have seen from political Leftists in response to efforts to challenge or curb CRT. On the one hand, CRT defenders claim that CRT doesn’t actually promote these kinds of extremist views. But if that’s the case, why the fuss if Kentuckians, quite reasonably, want to stipulate that such views have no place in the state’s classrooms? (In fact, Rick Hess and Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute have repeatedly documented how these far-Left assumptions routinely surface in CRT programs and are central to CRT itself).

On the other hand, CRT defenders want to claim that these views aren’t, in fact, extreme but are quite reasonable and somehow essential to making our schools less racist. That sounds like the view of Jefferson County Public Schools superintendent Marty Pollio, who told the Courier Journal that Rep. Fischer’s bill would somehow interfere with the district’s efforts in “expanding the curriculum to better represent the student population we serve” and that it would “potentially disrupt our plans to reduce the achievement gap in JCPS.”How does he figure that?

Most of the minority families in Pollio’s district would strongly disagree with the views prohibited by Bill Request 60 and would strongly agree that they have no place in our classrooms. Furthermore, a curriculum can be culturally diverse without promoting the assumptions of CRT. And most importantly, the divisive and wrong-headed assumptions of CRT actually make it harder to close achievement gaps, as I wrote recently for the Chalkboard Review.

Kentuckians are not wrong to be concerned about the underlying (and sometimes explicit) assumptions of critical race theory and how they might influence classroom teaching, including its tendency to making sweeping, racialist generalities about white people that, if applied to any minority group, would be considered disgusting. But one of the most toxic elements of CRT is its assertion that if you challenge any of its assumptions, you are simply proving the point that you are a racist. One cannot take exception to CRT extremism based on legitimate and reasonable concerns; you must be “politically motivated” and opposed to racial equity. 

Of course this isn’t true. Even though real racial progress in this country has been made (something CRT advocates are loathe to admit or flat-out deny), actual racial bias on the part of educators probably continues to exert some impact on student outcomes. The question is how do we best address that problem? Superintendent Pollio may be right that curriculum makes some difference in that effort, but a culturally responsive curriculum – like the lessons offered by the group of Black scholars and activists 1776 Unites demonstrates – doesn’t have to embrace the racist assumptions of CRT. In fact – it should challenge the notion that people can be classified as victim or oppressor based solely on their skin color.

Furthermore, the best antidote to the exceedingly low expectations too many educators have for poor and minority students isn’t shaming based on their skin color, but challenging them to offer more rigorous instruction for all students. As I wrote for Chalkboard Review:

Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they recognize the pattern and tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments, and they immediately want to help their schools do better…

Most teachers and school administrators really do care about their students and doing better by them. They know achievement gaps exist and that closing them is at least partly within their control, even – and especially – if they reject the totalizing assumptions of critical race theory. And they know that becoming more effective in their teaching practice is the most powerful way to get there.

Governor Beshear and Commissioner Glass want you to believe that you have to accept the extremism of critical race theory to address issues of racial equity in schools. This is not true. They are misleading you because they endorse the ideology at the heart of CRT and value virtue signaling to their Leftist political allies more than having a real conversation about how to improve the learning experiences of all students – something CRT will not do.

Kentuckians are right to reject critical theory and its teaching in our schools and to insist that we get back to a meaningful focus on improving education for all students.

Personalized learning has been a hot topic over the last decade and the challenges of education during the COVID pandemic have made it even more timely as educators have struggled to address student learning needs. The tendency of schools to approach instruction through a one-size-fits-all lens has never been more visible to parents and the public.

A team of researchers based at Western Kentucky University has just published an article in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership highlighting our work on a four-year, federally-funded grant to implement personalized learning in 111 Kentucky schools. The article describes our effort to create an Innovation Configuration Map that helps teachers understand what personalized learning really is and assess their school’s progress in implementing personalized learning strategies.

The WKU team were evaluators for a $42 million grant awarded to the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and the Ohio Valley Education Cooperative (OVEC) in 2012. While the grant included several components, the overarching goal was to promote personalized learning in 111, mostly rural, schools. As we describe in the journal article, schools had wide latitude in selecting how they wanted to approach personalized learning, and in general educators have yet to develop a common understanding of what we mean by the term.

The WKU team explored research literature on constructs and strategies that seemed most closely related to the idea of personalized learning, including self-regulation theory, growth mindset, mastery learning, self-determination theory, and more. From there, we constructed an Innovation Configuration (IC) Map. Researchers Hall and Hord (2006) originally developed IC Maps as a way of helping organizations track their implementation of various change initiatives.

Our Personalized Learning IC map included four clusters/strands that described changes in the learning process, the classroom climate, and in the behaviors of students and teachers. Additionally, for each of these clusters, various indicators described the kinds of changes that might come about as a result of implementing personalized learning along a five-point continuum from continuing the status quo (no change) through implementing and finally sustaining the change intiative.

Because we lacked the resources to independently assess all 111 schools using the IC Map, the WKU team also developed a self-assessment manual for school-based leadership teams to evaluate their own implementation of personalized learning using the instrument. Then we selected six schools that reported high levels of implementation for site visits that ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the schools’ self-ratings, suggesting to us that the Personalized Learning IC Map possessed some degree of validity. Schools self-assessed with the instrument for two years and researchers found that across both cooperatives schools deepened their implementation of personalized learning.

Our article suggests directions for future research and practitioner implementation using the IC Map. We are eager for others to explore the IC Map and use it both for research and to support their personalized learning efforts. You can find the instrument and the self-assessment manual on our Rock Solid Evaluation Services website. These tools may be used with our written permission. And of course I urge you to read the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership journal article for a more thorough description of the entire process. You can direct any questions about this research to me at gary.houchens@wku.edu.

The development of this Personalized Learning IC Map and the entire evaluation project for the GRREC/OVEC grant was a massive team effort. I want to especially recognized then-graduate assistants Dr. Trudy-Ann Crossbourne-Richards, who did the lion’s share of the literature review upon which the IC Map was based, and Dr. Heather Arrowsmith, who developed the manuscript describing our work. WKU colleagues Dr. Jenni Redifer, Dr. Tony Norman (now dean of education at Morehead State University) and Dr. Jie Zhang (now with the University of Houston) were essential research partners on this project. I commend them all, and also the leadership of GRREC and OVEC and the 111 schools that participated in the grant.

One final thought, and speaking just for myself: I believe we need far more empirical research on this topic. I have had a long-standing professional interest in personalized learning, but I am generally quite skeptical that the casual way in which it has been approached in many schools will have a lasting effect on student achievement. The work of UK educator David Didau has illustrated how hard it is to accurately assess what students truly know and are able to do at any given moment, and that reality may point us toward much more traditional modes of teacher led, whole-class instruction, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. It also suggests that a content-rich curriculum may be far more important in the long-run than faddish, low-impact strategies for “personalization” that may have little grounding in theory or research.

I’m not ready to give up the quest for more personalized approaches to student learning, especially when they are wedded to content-rich curriculum. But I want to see far more empirical research on which strategies have the highest impact and how those compare to more traditional methods. I hope our IC Map will contribute to that effort.

Reference: Hall, G.E., & Hord, S.M. (2006). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Update, 4/29. I made a five-minute video as a companion piece to the essay described to below. In it I describe what critical theory is, how it can be useful, but why it has to be rejected as the single lens through which we address issues of racial achievement gaps:

In my latest essay for The Chalkboard Review, I argue that racial bias may be a real phenomena among educators, and it may partially explain the persistence of achievement gaps based on race. But indoctrinating teachers in critical race theory or imposing CRT in the curriculum isn’t the answer. In fact, CRT actually prevents a meaningful exploration of how implicit bias shows up in schools and how we might do better by students.

Research from education advocacy group TNTP, billed as “The Opportunity Myth,” shows that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds regularly receive classroom assignments that are below grade-level expectations. In fact, the Opportunity Myth study found that in 4 out of 10 classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment). 

Does racism play a role in this abysmal display of low expectations? Perhaps. The biased belief that students of color are incapable of completing rigorous assignments almost certainly does. But a fair number of minority teachers and administrators would also have to be guilty of this assumption.

Is white privilege at work in this pattern? Perhaps – to the extent that teachers assume white students are capable of high achievement and therefore challenge them with rigorous work. So racial prejudice may indeed make a difference in student outcomes. But what do we do about that? And does that explain everything about these differences?

CRT advocates would say we have to expose these implicit biases in educators—presumably the minority teachers with low expectations for students of color also hold those views because of some mysterious pattern of white supremacy—and insist that students receive more “culturally responsive” instruction like the CRT-approved but historically inaccurate pablum of the 1619 project or ethno-mathematics where concepts like finding the right answer in a math class is an alleged reflection of “whiteness.” 

Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they recognize the pattern and tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments, and they immediately want to help their schools do better.