Education Week - June 2, 2021 - 24

OPINION
INSIDE
20
What I Learned From
My First Year of Teaching
21
Why Other Countries
Keep Outperforming Us
22
Letters to
the Editor
Critical Race Theory Isn't a Curriculum.
It's a Practice
T
he concept of critical
race theory, or CRT, has
recently been vilified by
politicians as a " radical, "
" un-American, " and " racially
divisive " concept.
Several states have even
banned schools from teaching critical race
theory, with more states debating doing the
same. For example, if I taught at a public university
in Idaho rather than in Washington,
recent legislation would prohibit me from
applying a CRT lens in my classroom.
To be clear, CRT is not itself a substantive
course or workshop; it is a practice. It is an
approach or lens through which an educator
can help students examine the role of race
and racism in American society. It originated
in the legal academy-I first learned about
it as a law student-and has since been
adopted in other fields in higher education.
In the K-12 classroom, CRT can be an
approach to help students understand how
racism has endured past the civil rights
era through systems, laws, and policies-
and how those same systems, laws, and
policies can be transformed. But the vocal
opposition to critical race theory-coming
from predominantly white states and school
districts-will undoubtedly have a chilling
effect on its use in the K-12 classroom.
Banning the use of CRT robs teachers of
a valuable teaching tool. And, perhaps, that
is the point. But I have seen how applying
critical race theory as a framework for
understanding the educational inequities
harming students of color can help my
students trace the trajectory from the origins
of inequities to their current manifestations.
In the course about racial inequality in
K-12 public education that I designed and
teach for graduate public-policy students,
CRT is a valuable framework for helping
students identify how law and policy can
either entrench or eradicate historic racial
inequities in education.
Like many academic theories, CRT is
complex and constantly evolving. However,
it can be characterized by a few tenets, which
challenge many traditional understandings
of race and racial inequality. The Human
Genome Project found that humans share
99.9 percent of the same genetic makeup,
despite our different appearances. Critical
race theory recognizes that our ideas of
racial difference-which run counter to
this scientific evidence-have been socially
constructed. It acknowledges how that social
construction of race has shaped America and
how systems and institutions can do the bulk
of replicating racial inequality.
These tenets require a departure from the
popular idea that racism is perpetrated solely
by individual " bad actors. " If we confine
racism to individual bad actors, we ignore
the ways that systems and institutions can
replicate racial inequality.
This framework is particularly relevant to
education. Gloria Ladson-Billings, a leading
scholar in applying critical race theory to
Nip Rogers for Education Week
24 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 2, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion
education, explains how racial inequality
can be replicated in education: Curricula
that largely exclude the history and lived
experiences of Americans of color are the
norm. Deficit-oriented instruction often
characterizes students of color as failures
if a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work
for them. Standardized-test scores from
assessments detached from what students
learn in the classroom are widely used to
confirm narratives about the ineducability
of children of color.
Critical race theory helps us recognize how
many contemporary policies that perpetuate
racial inequality can seem innocuous or
even logical. School discipline policies that
prohibit the wearing of hair in locs might
seem neutral, but they disproportionately
impact Black students who are most likely
to wear locs. Critical race theory helps us
recognize that even policies not explicitly
predicated on race are not objective-they
can actively function to reproduce racial
inequality.
In addition, CRT recognizes the value of
centering the voices of people who have
historically been marginalized. My graduate
students are primarily well-educated
professionals, including former educators.
Nevertheless, over the few years that I've
taught the course, many of them express
surprise about their limited prior exposure to
the history of racial inequality in American
education.
In my graduate course, my students read
about how Native American children were
forcibly removed from their families and
placed in boarding schools where they were
subjected to forced assimilation, forbidden
from speaking their languages, and barred
from wearing traditional dress. One student
remarked, " How have I arrived at this point
in my education and this is the first time that
I am learning about this? "
Students in my course also read an
excerpt from Frederick Douglass' narrative
describing his various covert and creative
strategies to learn how to read and write
in the face of anti-literacy laws targeting
enslaved Black persons. One student
expressed surprise at how " actively " the
prohibition against teaching enslaved people
to read was enforced.
I teach students history not to cast anyone
as an " oppressor " or a " victim " but to
demonstrate how these past inequities
inform contemporary ones. A CRT lens helps
students recognize how racial inequality can
be maintained through laws and policies-
spanning the " Slave Codes " that prohibited
Douglass and other enslaved persons from
learning how to read or write to the Jim Crow
laws and de facto policies that maintained
school segregation to contemporary policies
like exclusionary admissions policies or
discriminatory school discipline policies.
But systems, practices, and policies can
also help to eliminate racial inequality. This
week marks the centennial of the Tulsa
Massacre in which as many as 300 Black
residents of the Greenwood district in Tulsa,
Okla., were massacred by an enraged white
mob. The massacre was shrouded in secrecy
for many years, but historians, activists,
and survivors have recently brought this
painful history to the fore. Just last year, the
Oklahoma board of education added the
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to its curriculum.
But the state's recent passage of H.B. 1775, a
bill aimed at barring the teaching of critical
race theory in classrooms, robs educators
of a lens through which to examine the
conditions, laws, and practices that fueled
such racial terror.
Many people hope that ignoring the
existence of racial inequality will make it go
away-it doesn't. Instead, we must do the
work of identifying the policies, practices,
and conditions that allow it to persist. Before
critical race theory is " canceled " or further
mischaracterized, it is important to recognize
how this framework helps educators examine
historic and contemporary racial inequality
and to equip students with the tools to help
eradicate it. 
By Janel George
GEORGE is an adjunct professor at
Georgetown University's McCourt School of
Public Policy, where she teaches a course on
racial inequality in K-12 public education. She
has worked in the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives as legislative counsel and for
several nonprofits.
http://www.edweek.org/opinion
Education Week - June 2, 2021

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