…& this is why I was asking a few days back how each person was defining CRT because I think that’s the core of this debate.
School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.
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and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice….
Debates about critical race theory are coming to your district, board room, and classroom. Here's what you need to understand about the academic concept—and how it's portrayed in political circles.
www.edweek.org
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them.
What I have posted here so far does not state that CTR
IS or ISN’T taught in K-12.
While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.
Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools
has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.
The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover. It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech. It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms.
…& again this is why I was asking a few days back how each person was defining CRT because I think that’s the core of this debate.