Back in June, Elizabeth Schultz, a former FCPS School Board member who lost her last bid for election, published an OpEd in the Fairfax Times promoting quite a few oft-repeated, rabid-right talking points about Critical Race Theory and ominously said CRT is being taught in Fairfax County Public Schools. She is not alone in glomming onto a quick soundbite as a way to attack the other political party and liberals. Lots of politicos all across the country who are trying to hold onto or return to power are doing it.
I did not see the article until the other day, but her points are so distorted that I can’t let her piece or this question go unanswered, even if it’s a couple of months later.
The points she put forward were:
- Our local schools do teach Critical Race Theory to students.
- It is a Marxist theory that promotes race as the most important thing about an individual.
- That CRT is the same thing as equity, justice, diversity, and culturally responsive learning.
- That FCPS incorporated CRT into its curriculum through a curriculum rewrite in 2018 by Colleen Eddy and Fairfax County supervisors adopted it through its OneFairfax program.
All of these points are, well- not really true- at least the
way Schultz and her friends distort and misrepresent them.
Critical race theory is a very specific collegiate and legal
form of analysis. It is part of a collection of graduate level Critical
Analyses studies that can range from Economic (sometimes Marxist, sometimes
Capitalist), to Feminist, to Racial, or other perspectives in their focus. The
most notable thing about Critical Analyses is that each type looks at an
unsolved problem from a perspective that has been traditionally overlooked and
looks at aspects of a situation that have been left out of the problem-solving
cycle.
Critical Analysis can influence how teachers and policy
makers choose what they teach and how they teach it, or determine what policies
are most fair, but it is not a good choice for direct K-12 instruction because
it requires understanding words like structural determinism, epistemology, and
deconstructionism- among a lot of other philosophical and critical analysis
terms.
It is true that Gloria Ladson-Billings, the president of the
National Academy of Education, and author of The Dream Keepers recommends
teachers learn Critical Race Analysis to better their understanding of
pedagogical choices, but nobody is proposing to teach 7 year olds
post-modernism and deconstruction.
Once teachers or decision makers apply the analysis, they
are able to see how laws, regulations, and societal norms have affected people
of a particular category. Insights from looking at policies through the lens of
race can be fairly obvious.
For instance, anti-slavery can be thought of as the original
application of critical race analysis, even though the term CRT would not be created until 1989 at a workshop
led by Kimberle’ Crenshaw. In the 19th
century, anti-slavery people looked at how slavery was affecting black people
on the ground in real terms and determined it was a harmful legal institution
to them- Yes, it’s just that simple.
Today, we apply CRA when we ask ourselves how our zoning ordinances or subsidized housing rules affect communities predominantly of color. Or how our school boundaries and funding formulas affect families of color or poverty. We also apply Critical Feminist Analysis when we ask how does this policy or practice affect young mothers or elderly women. Thinking and analysis is not something to be afraid of, but a problem solving tool to be used among others.
Though CRT/CRA does examine how views on race have been
embedded and highly influences our cultural practices, it does not propose that
a person’s race is the most important or only thing in forming anyone’s
character, intellect, personality, or actions. Institutional racism may hamper
a person’s chances of getting healthcare, an education, finding higher paying jobs, and
acquiring property and financial security, but certainly other family and
personal conditions are important in creating the intersections of values,
traits, and opportunities that combine to make up our lives. It does look at
how individual racism becomes more pervasive, invisible, and powerful when
embedded into societal rules.
For instance, if a businessman/plantation owner believes
s/he is dependent on free labor to stay wealthy, s/he might move heaven and
earth to protect that ability to have free slave labor, and when those slaves
are deprived of pay for their labor, their daily lives suffer from the limits
that imposes.
Society wide that structure affects the whole race of people
who are enslaved, and affects their descendants, who also do not have access to
that money they could have earned without the structural racism of slavery.
Eventually that view, embedded in government policy, led to a bloody and
divisive war that had massive destructive effects for the plantation owner as
well.
Similarly, critical race analysis might reveal that today’s
tax codes, pay scales, and access to property skew the economic potential of
most people of color and continues to affect the opportunities of black and
brown families. CRA also asks if there is a way to ameliorate the negative
consequences of structural bias and racism.
So, No. Racism as the most important thing in an
individual’s life is not what CRT/CRA is about, but it is apt to reveal how
insidiously destructive policies built on bias are.
According to Ms. Schultz, efforts to address cultural and
racial diversity and to create a school system equitable to all began in 2018
with a rewrite of the social studies curriculum. (Right before she lost her seat on the board
in 2019).
I don’t mean to demean Colleen Eddy’s work, but in reality,
Fairfax County schools had been grappling with meeting the needs of an
increasingly diverse student population for about 20 years before that, and the
2018 rewrite Ms. Eddy oversaw was a reflection of what had already been
happening in the classrooms across the county.
I know this because in 1998 when I was a FCPS parent of
elementary students and began teaching, individual schools were already
adapting toward a world view, rather than a one-ethnicity view. Elementary concerts were featuring songs from
a variety of cultures around the world, and picture books were being
incorporated with heros of varied ethnicities.
As early as the late 1990’s schools in the county were
adopting programs like International Baccalaureate which incorporated a more
global cadre of creators into the curriculum in lieu of only western-centric
authors, art, and ideas. Those programs
also seeped into the general curriculum of our schools, so that all students were
getting a wider education.
Deliberate choices to expand the curriculum toward a more
diverse and inclusive canon were not initiated to address the concerns of poor
or black or brown families, but to address the concerns of those economically
stable and well educated families who knew their children needed a wider
education to become well-functioning adults in the broader society of the 21st
century that would include many nationalities. They were driven by parent
involvement.
In truth, though, those expanded horizons resonated with the
colors and cultures of the students we were seeing in our classrooms, and
enabled students to be excited about a curriculum that reflected them and their
heritages. White students were not left out,
but all students got a more universal view of what it means to be human in this
world.
Because the county’s population continued to diversify, and
because those program changes were so successful at building a highly regarded
system, by 2018 those changes were becoming codified in the central office to
reflect what was already happening across the county.
Similarly, the Board of Supervisors had a growing awareness
that the county was developing pockets of economic disparity which threatened
the unity and common prosperity for the county. They knew they were looking at
a growing level of diversity, and an economic disparity in which the average
family income on one side of the county was about half what it was in other
parts of the county. Without a problem
solving model taking that into account, Fairfax ran the risk of becoming a
bifurcated rich-poor economy with haves and have nots that would change the
reputation which had built a highly attractive community. One Fairfax was a
reflection of that awareness.
So, much as Ms. Schultz and many of her friends would like
to frighten us all about the threat of Critical Race Theory, there is nothing
to fear from a step on the problem-solving wheel that asks, “Have we taken the
needs of all our residents/students into consideration?”
Do we really want to be two, or three, or five Fairfaxes? Or two, or three, or five nations?
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