AFT President Randi Weingarten Defends Critical Race Theory as "Honest History"

 

Disingenuous defenses of critical race theory

By Christopher F. Rufo, NY POST, July 9, 2021

The latest defense for teaching our children to be racially divisive? It’s free speech!

Last week, The New York Times published an opinion piece by commentators David French, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Jason Stanley, who presented themselves as a heroic “cross-partisan group of thinkers.”

They derided as “un-American” laws passed by states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas and New Hampshire that prohibit public schools from promoting the core principles of critical race theory, including race essentialism, collective guilt and state-sanctioned discrimination.

These authors imagine themselves the steady hand in a grandiose morality play, defending liberal-democratic freedoms against the threat of illiberalism, wherever it comes from.

But in practice, they are enablers of the worst ideologies of the Left and would leave American families defenseless against them. Their three core arguments — that critical race theory restrictions violate “free speech,” that state legislatures should stay out of the “marketplace of ideas,” and that citizens should pursue civil-rights litigation instead — are all hollow to the core.

In reality, they would usher in the concrete tyrannies of critical race theory, which explicitly seeks to subvert the principles of individual rights and equal protection under the law. Despite the superficial ideological differences between the four authors, they serve a single function: to prevaricate, stall and run interference for critical race theory’s blitz through American institutions.

Randi Weingarten

Amid critical race theory controversy, teachers union chief vows legal action to defend teaching of ‘honest history’

By Hannah Natanson, Washington Post, July 6, 2021

The president of the nation’s second-largest teachers union is taking a strong stand against a recent spate of laws that restrict public-school lessons on racism, vowing legal action to protect any member who “gets in trouble for teaching honest history.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, warned in a speech Tuesday that conservative lawmakers, pundits and news sites are waging a “culture campaign” against critical race theory. The theory is a decades-old academic framework that asserts racism is woven into the history and thus the present of the nation, helping shape how institutions and systems function.

In her remarks, Weingarten said that critical race theory is not taught in U.S. elementary, middle and high schools. The theory is taught only in law school and in college, she said.

“But culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as [critical race theory] to try to make it toxic,” Weingarten told a virtual professional development conference for union members. “They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

What is critical race theory, and why do Republicans want to ban it in schools?

Republican-led legislatures — driven by intense conservative advocacy and media coverage inveighing against critical race theory — have sought to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history in the classroom. At least five states, including Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas, have passed bans on critical race theory or related topics in recent months. Conservatives in nearly a dozen other states are pushing for similar legislation.

According to Weingarten, her organization is already “preparing for litigation [to counter these laws] as we speak” — although her spokesman, Andrew Crook, said the union has yet to identify specific targets. Weingarten said that the American Federation of Teachers, which has about 1.7 million members, has “a legal-defense fund ready to go.” Crook said this fund — specifically meant for lawsuits related to critical race theory bills — totals $2.5 million and comes in addition to the $10 million that the American Federation of Teachers makes available to fund lawsuits annually.

Weingarten also called for reopening all classrooms next year and announced that the American Federation of Teachers is dedicating $5 million to a “back-to-school campaign” to help ensure in-person learning is safe. She called the coronavirus vaccines “game changers” and said 90 percent of her union membership been vaccinated.

“Schools can reopen this fall in person, five days a week, with mitigation measures, ventilation upgrades and social, emotional and academic supports for students,” she said.

The furor over critical race theory, which is rapidly consuming the nation as the latest front in America’s culture wars, has its origins in the summer of 2020 and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

How one Virginia county became the face of the nation’s culture wars

Many school districts nationwide were already pursuing equity initiatives when Floyd died. But his death — and subsequent national demonstrations against systemic racism — fueled a fresh round of efforts from school officials to promote racial justice by reexamining the role of police, holding bias trainings for employees and reconsidering the way that history is taught.

But it also generated a growing backlash. Conservative activists have seized on images of assignments or short clips of video classes to argue that teachers are indoctrinating students with critical race theory, which they call divisive and inappropriate for schoolchildren.

Even those who acknowledge that critical race theory is not actually being taught to students warn that school systems’ attempts to grapple with concepts such as systemic racism and white supremacy will negatively affect children by trickling through to the classroom and teaching students to view one another solely in terms of race. Detractors also insist that White boys and girls in public school today are learning to hate themselves as historical oppressors.

But in her speech, Weingarten argues the opposite — that school systems will harm children by failing instruct them fully about the darker parts of America’s history. The new laws limiting what educators can say about racism will “knock a big hole” in students’ understanding of the nation and the world, Weingarten said.

“We want our kids to have an education that imparts honesty about who we are,” she said. “We want to raise young people who can understand facts, study the truth, examine diverse perspectives and draw their own conclusions.”

Weingarten’s advocacy comes shortly after the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, passed a resolution asking its members to “fight back against anti-[critical race theory] rhetoric.” The resolution also declared that, in teaching topics including social studies and history, “it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed” by critical race theory.

City Journal Criticizes Teaching Critical Race Theory in Public Schools and Universities

 

Critical Race Theory and Academic Freedom

State-based legislation banning the teaching of the toxic ideology is philosophically and legally justifiable.

Nate Hochman, City Journal, June 17, 2021

Recent red-state bans or restrictions on the use of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools and universities have been denounced by mainstream media. While most of the bans primarily target CRT’s racial essentialism—prohibitions on “assigning fault, blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex,” according to a bill signed into law in Iowa last week—the new legislation is regularly described as an attack on “diversity” or “racial sensitivity” training. According to New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, the reforms amount to “outright government censorship; for Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris, they show the GOP’s cynical desire to spark “another battle in the culture wars.” A recent MSNBC headline goes further still: “GOP Pushing Bill to Ban Teaching History of Slavery.”

Beyond the hyperbole, substantive critiques of the new legislation usually allege that curricular restrictions violate “academic freedom.” Insofar as this contention originates on the left, one could regard it as a cynical manipulation of language. After all, progressives have had little to say about free speech in education for at least a generation; that they have suddenly rediscovered the virtue of an open marketplace of ideas now is convenient.

At the same time, however, a significant number of genuine defenders of academic freedom, on the left and right, have also voiced opposition to the bans on CRT-based curricula in taxpayer-funded schools. Their views deserve to be taken seriously. These critics object to the anti-CRT laws on first principles, contending that a ban on teaching a particular ideology or doctrine in public schools undermines free speech and related constitutional rights. “The federal courts should reflexively invalidate anti-CRT laws on First Amendment grounds,” writes First Amendment law professor Ronald Krotoszynski in the Washington Post. “Educators cannot do their job if state governments attempt to ban the teaching of ideas they fear.”

But the dogmatic insistence that political “neutrality”—a fuzzy idea, by any measure—be strictly adhered to in all government policy, in lieu of legislators ever promoting a substantive vision of the good, represents a fundamental misinterpretation of academic freedom in a publicly funded setting. This argument is particularly perplexing in the context of taxpayer-funded grade schools. The idea that banning specific topics in these schools’ curricula is government “overreach” misses the fact that public K-12 programs are monopolistic, government-run institutions; a change in their curricular requirements does not expand state power in any substantive way.

This misunderstanding is clearly visible in the writings of figures like Acadia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, a self-described “mainstream liberal” who “care[s] deeply about classic liberal norms like free speech and academic freedom.” Sachs argues that the recent anti-CRT laws are condemnable for their “use of state power to suppress ‘woke’ speech and viewpoints.” And yet, the debate over legislative interventions in woke K-12 curricula does not actually consider the use of state power to suppress private speech rights; it deals with the question of whether state employees should be allowed to teach woke doctrine on the taxpayer’s dollar. Are policymakers proscribed from ensuring that tax dollars are not used in ways that harm the taxpaying polity? For Sachs, such intervention is tantamount to using “the blunt instrument of the state” to infringe on the rights of public educators. But if crafting public education policy and overseeing its implementation is not the role of the state, then whose is it?

Krotoszynski suggests an answer in his Washington Post editorial, where he approvingly quotes Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter’s characterization of teachers as “priests of our democracy,” who “cannot carry out their noble task if the conditions of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them.” Leaving aside whether CRT actually promotes or detracts from “critical thinking,” do teachers’ purported positions as “priests of democracy” elevate them above democracy itself, as conducted through democratically elected state legislative bodies, tasked with overseeing public education? The idea that it is “unconstitutional and a violation of academic freedom,” in Sachs’s words, to restrict public K-12 schools from teaching something like the New York Times’s 1619 Project—the revisionist “reinterpretation” of the American Founding specifically targeted by bans enacted in Arkansas and Iowa—would suggest that public educators should be insulated from accountability and democratic oversight, operating instead as private citizens outside the purview of the very state legislatures that pay them.

This is the final problem with the idea of political “neutrality” in public school curricula. Public school teachers are not private actors, and a public school curriculum is not a neutral or free marketplace of ideas. What one teaches and does not teach in this setting is an unavoidably political decision, using public funds to favor certain concepts and theories at the necessary exclusion of others. A public educator teaching the 1619 Project is not a private voice in a free marketplace of ideas, but a specific—and taxpayer-endorsed—state employee, acting as an extension of the state itself. To assert that a curriculum is somehow less “political” in the hands of a teacher rather than a legislator is to accept the notion that teachers are not servants of the public good, but masters of it.

One could object to the CRT bans on pragmatic grounds, such as the concerns that some have raised about the use of overly broad language in some versions of the legislation, but the legitimacy of the new laws on principle depends not on whether the government should “ban” or “suppress” certain viewpoints in the public square but on whether CRT serves a genuine pedagogical purpose in public schools. Why does the 1619 Project—debunked by historians for a number of blatantly ahistorical claims—have an inviolable claim to publicly funded classrooms? Does its demonstrably false assertion that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery have a place in a U.S. history class any more than creationism has a place in biology courses?

Sachs argues that his “interest isn’t defending Critical Race Theory, it’s defending free speech and academic freedom.” David French, a prominent conservative critic of the bans, tweets that “defending the right of free speech is [not] the same as defending the content of that speech.” But teaching a specific ideology in a taxpayer-funded curriculum is not a mere exercise of neutral “free speech” or “academic freedom.” To defend it in this context is, in fact, a defense of its content, or at least a defense of the idea that its content is legitimate enough to be backed by state funds and taught to our children. And to make that argument is to defend government-run classrooms teaching a doctrine that explicitly undermines the American constitutional order.

Nate Hochman is a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a recent graduate of Colorado College.

Photo: Image Source/iStock

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U.S. Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Case on Teacher Free-Speech Protection

U.S. Supreme Court

By Mark Walsh March 19, 2018

Washington

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the appeal of a former New York City teacher who traced her dismissal to a clash with administrators over whether it was appropriate to teach her 9th grade students about the "Central Park Five," a group of teenagers convicted of the brutal 1989 rape of a female jogger but later exonerated in the notorious incident.

Lawyers for the ex-teacher, Jeena Lee-Walker, had urged the justices to grant review of her case to decide whether public school teachers have First Amendment free speech rights in the classroom. They argued that the federal appeals courts are in disagreement about whether a key 2006 Supreme Court decision removing First Amendment protection from most on-the-job speech by public employees applies to educators.

 The 2006 case, Garcetti v. Ceballos , had involved a prosecutor's office and the court's opinion left some uncertainty about whether it would apply to "scholarship or teaching." Many lower courts, with some exceptions, have applied Garcetti to educators in a way that denies them any First Amendment protection for their teaching. 

Lee-Walker's troubles began in 2013 when she was a 9th grade English teacher at the High School for Arts, Imagination, and Inquiry in Manhattan. An assistant principal conducted a classroom observation and noticed a lesson about the Central Park Five, which Lee-Walker was using to teach about the dangers of rushing to judgment and what that meant for black males.

The five black males convicted in the 1989 rape served 10 years in prison before they were exonerated after the actual perpetrator confessed and his story was supported by DNA evidence.

The assistant principal, Christopher Yarmy, questioned whether there had been a rush to judgment and asked Lee-Walker to offer a more balanced lesson, court papers say.
The conflict over the Central Park Five lesson subsided, but Lee-Walker contends she was labeled as obstinate and insubordinate, leading to her eventual non-renewal as a probationary teacher. She sued administrators and the New York City school system alleging that her dismissal was retaliation for exercising her First Amendment rights in the classroom.

A federal district court agreed that Lee-Walker's free speech rights were violated, but it granted qualified immunity to the defendants. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York City, in 2016 affirmed the qualified immunity finding on different grounds. That court noted that it had not yet decided whether Garcetti applied to classroom instruction and thus there was no clearly established law upon which administrators would understand that Garcetti had removed such protections from the teacher. 

The teacher's Supreme Court appeal in Lee-Walker v. New York City Department of Education (Case No. 16-4164) asked the justices to resolve a circuit split over First Amendment protections for classroom instruction.

The advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Lee-Walker.

"The First Amendment bears a special relationship to the classroom, where academic freedom is essential to facilitating the marketplace of ideas," the brief said. "Despite this important relationship between the First Amendment and academic freedom, the law governing the limits of public educators' freedom of speech in the classroom has been left in a state of uncertainty" since Garcetti, it said.

The New York City school system and the individual defendants did not file a response to the appeal and the high court did not request one.

The justices declined the appeal without comment.

 

Recent Decisions on the First Amendment