SIX: Caught in the crossfire: K-12 education and anti-CRT measures

Publication Date:
07 Aug 2024
Pages:
47–54
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447371410.ch006
Restricted access
Rights and permissions Cite this chapter
Buy article/chapter (
GBP  £20.00
)

Few topics in education have dominated the news since 2021 as much as efforts to ban critical race theory (CRT) from public schools in the United States. The larger problem is the widespread effort to impede public education, stifling students’ opportunities to think critically about our nation’s history and denying them their right to a complete education. In September 2020, after protests over the police killing of George Floyd prompted new conversations about structural racism in the US, the Trump administration issued a memo to federal agencies directing them to identify and cancel any staff trainings that focused on CRT or “White privilege.” Weeks later, President Trump issued Executive Order 13950, prohibiting federal agencies and recipients of federal funding from teaching “divisive concepts,” including the idea that the US is “fundamentally racist or sexist.” Trump’s focus on CRT likely originated with a 2020 Fox News interview of Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative scholar, who warned of the “cult indoctrination” of CRT and the “danger and destruction it can wreak”; Rufo helped draft the Executive Order. Conservative think tanks, thought leaders, media figures, and politicians operationalized and conflated “divisive concepts” to mean “CRT”—a college-level analytical framework rarely taught in K-12 schools that examines how race and racism intersect with other forms of social identity, power, and oppression. The theory, which emerged in the mid-1980s in American law schools, holds that racism is not simply expressed on a microlevel but, rather, is deeply rooted in the nation’s laws, policies, regulations, and institutions.

Content Metrics

May 2022 onwards Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 159 159 24
Full Text Views 71 71 71
PDF Downloads 20 20 20

Altmetrics