Education Week - January 19, 2022 - 12

How the Critical Race Theory Debate
Is Rewriting Social Studies Standards
Fallout from the fight over CRT
stands to alter history education
with subtle-but material-
changes to teaching expectations
By Stephen Sawchuk
S
piked drafts. Allegations of political interference.
Confusing terminology. And thousands of angry
comments: The volatile debate over how to teach
about America's racist past is wreaking havoc on
states' processes for deciding what students will
learn about history and social studies.
In state after state, commentators and politicians
contended that proposed expectations for social studies embedded
" critical race theory " -even as the educators sitting on the panels writing
the new standards defended them for providing an honest, if sometimes
challenging, view of America.
Education Week reviewed hundreds of standards and thousands of
pages of public comment relating to the standards-writing processes in
South Dakota, Louisiana, and New Mexico, all of which took up revisions
in 2021, and interviewed writers, educators, and state officials. Across the
three states, we found:
n None of the three states' drafts mentioned the term critical race theory,
but in written comments, people attacked dozens of standards in Louisiana's
and New Mexico's drafts for purportedly embedding it.
n In South Dakota, state officials removed about 20 references to Native
Americans from the draft submitted by the standards-writing panel-
then scotched the draft altogether.
n The critiques about CRT in Louisiana led the writers to recast some
standards and to delete others. And public comment protocols in Louisiana
were changed out of fear for the writers' physical safety.
n The teaching method of having students take civic action to address
classroom and local problems-an approach some conservatives contend
is indoctrination-was mysteriously cut from both Louisiana's and
South Dakota's drafts.
n About 1 in 10 of some 2,900 pages of comments on the New Mexico
standards referenced CRT, often citing language in the draft about " social
justice, " " group identity, " and " critical consciousness. " Those terms
also attracted confusion from district leaders wondering how those tenets
should be taught.
The findings illustrate how the fallout from the confusing and often
misleading debate about CRT stands to alter history education in U.S.
schools through subtle-but material-changes to day-to-day teaching
expectations.
" Standards provide teachers with cover to teach hard things-controversial
things, " noted Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, an instructor and
student-teaching supervisor at the University of New Orleans, who was
among the writers of Louisiana's draft. " If we don't have standards that
support deep inquiry about things that may not be the easy topics to
cover, then teachers aren't going to do it. "
And the discord stands as another testament to how the country's polarization
has affected K-12 policymaking at large.
" The uncivil discourse centering around these issues is detrimental
not only to the process, but really, it's also detrimental to these embedded
ideas in our constitutional democracy of compromise, of listening
to each other, not always agreeing, " said Tammy Waller, the director for
K-12 social studies at the Arizona education department.
Arizonans, she noted, faced some controversies over topics like civil
rights and the LGBTQ movement when completing the state's 2018 social
studies revisions, but ultimately officials were able to complete a set
everyone could live with. That is getting harder.
" In the past I feel like we could have disagreements, and even really intense
disagreements, but in the end, it wasn't a zero-sum game, " Waller
said. " We felt like we had something bigger that we were responsible
for. "
Why standards matter
Critical race theory-originally an academic tool for analyzing how
racism manifests in public policy-has morphed into a catch-all term
wielded by critics of districts' efforts to rid schools of systemic racism.
Since the topic exploded in the national discourse last year, a media
frenzy has focused on sensational incidents, like reductive diversity
trainings for administrators on " white supremacy culture " ; a handful of
fired teachers and principals who led controversial lessons about racism;
and, most recently, on the removal of books written by Black authors
from school libraries dealing with themes of racism.
Those are important stories. But states' revisions to history standards
have attracted far less attention, even though they stand to affect millions
more students.
Unlike education expectations in reading, science, or math, history
standards serve a unique civic function. They are the starting point for
textbooks-the narratives that make up most students' first, and often
only, introduction to the American story. In theory, the discipline also
gives students an introduction to the tools historians use to interrogate,
question, and revise those narratives.
Crafting these K-12 standards is by definition a normative process. It
demands that states reach consensus about what students should know.
And implicitly, the standards either help tee up-or elide-the difficult
and subjective question about the extent to which our country's practices
have matched its ideals.
That question is especially relevant for K-12 students, who are now
54 percent Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American. Where-and
how-are these students reflected in this complex story? What does their
inclusion or erasure mean for their understanding of who they are as
Americans? To what extent should K-12 teaching reflect academic scholarship,
which has produced increasingly rich insights over the past three
decades about cultural history, especially the experiences of women,
Black Americans, and immigrants?
As currently written, the standard highlights uneven progress towards
true participation in the American democratic experiment. But several
commentators in the state suggested replacing those examples with
touchstones emphasizing expansion and enfranchisement, though
mainly of white Americans: " Jacksonian democracy, Texan independence,
Manifest Destiny, and Reconstruction, " they wrote.
What the state standards address also has huge implications for the
type of instruction teachers deliver. The current political climate means
few teachers are likely to put their careers on the line to go beyond the
text of the standards. In some 12 states, officials have passed vaguely
worded laws or regulations that constrain how teachers can talk about
race and gender. Administrators have largely advised frightened and
confused teachers by the mantra: Keep to the standards.
" Teachers are not going to stick their neck out to teach something they
think they ethically should talk about, but isn't going to be assessed, "
said Walters-Rauenhorst. " There's no upside for them. "
EdWeek selected the three states-Louisiana, South Dakota,and New
Mexico-for analysis because all three issued at least one draft set of
standards in 2021, and received public feedback on that draft.
Other states in the beginning of rewriting their standards are already
starting to see the same sort of contention. Minnesota, midway through
its own process, has faced tensions over an ethnic-studies portion of its
standards; in Mississippi, legislators filed a bill in November to outlaw
critical race theory just weeks before it posted a history draft for review.
The stories out of South Dakota, Louisiana, and New Mexico are a
preview of what these states and others can expect.
Louisiana Superintendent of Education
Cade Brumley said the public will decide
whether the state's draft social studies standards
include critical race theory.
LOUISIANA
As a draft nears completion,
a 'critical race theory'
reckoning awaits
O
ne by one, the commentators stood up
at a June public meeting, one of three
that the standards-writing committee
held to present updates. And one by
one, they condemned the state's draft history standards
for purportedly including critical race theory
or indoctrinating students.
A typical example: " There is no reason to make students
feel guilty, " one speaker said. " We should teach
the good things about this country. "
Another: " If you want to continue to talk about
slavery, [you should] go to China now. "
As they did so, Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, one of
the 30-odd educators who had given up free time to
help write the standards, felt herself growing more
bewildered.
She wasn't alone. Midway through the marathon
meeting, a fellow colleague sent an email to the writing
team. " We didn't use critical race theory to develop
the standards. Why is this being assumed? " it
read.
" We were all looking at each other, " WaltersRauenhorst
recalled. " We knew it was coming from
all the press about CRT, but it was evident to us the
speakers had not gone through the standards themselves
to try to compare them. "
There was intimidation, too: Several speakers took
photographs of the writers during the meeting. A few
standards-writers were unnerved by unsolicited messages
to their (or their spouse's) private social-media
accounts. Voices were raised. At the meeting's conclusion,
Walters-Rauenhorst and other writers were
escorted to their cars out of fear for their safety. At
the next meeting, fewer people were allowed in the
room.
CRT backlash takes its toll
Writing new standards was never going to be easy
in this socially conservative state, even as the teams
strove to make the new expectations more inclusive
of broader perspectives.
The draft standards now more frequently refer
to racial and ethnic diversity than prior expectations,
asking 8th graders to consider, for example,
" the contributions, experiences of, and limitations
on diverse groups of people, " including " women,
Latinos, American Indians, Black Americans,
European immigrants, and Asian immigrants and
"
Even young students see they're each unique and different. ... It's really more to do with
recognizing, again, that diversity is one of our greatest values, and we have it in every classroom
and to be able to celebrate and embrace that. "
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 20, 2021 | www.edweek.org
WENDY LEIGHTON, teacher and founding faculty member, Monte del Sol Charter School, Santa Fe., N.M.
Bill Feig/The Advocate via AP

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