Have you recently heard the scornful claims of “progressives” who assert that critical race theory (CRT) is absolutely, unequivocally not taught in public schools? Never, no way, no how. Have you heard the suspiciously uniform proclamations that CRT is an academic theory originating and taught exclusively in law schools? Well, take a gander at this upcoming course offered at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy—a public high school:

SESSION # 34 TITLE: Introduction to Critical Race Theory in Education Research

LENGTH: 60 minutes / Three Days DESCRIPTION The three-day session will cover an introduction to Critical Race Theory concepts, the utilization of CRT in the field of education, and research applications of CRT in K12 classrooms and districts. The first 60- minute session is mainly lecture with a brief discussion focused on the tenets of CRT and the field of education. The second 60-minute session has a brief lecture on CRT in education and research, followed by small and large group discussions connecting students’ experiences with the CRT concepts and how they apply to the CRT framework. The final session will be students working in groups to design research questions and choose research methods using CRT as a theoretical framework. Students will create power points and share their ‘research designs’ with the group in the final 60-minute session. Students will be required to read journal articles and book chapters before the start of the session and during the 3-days of the course. Students will also have a small assignment outside the designated class time of the session to prepare for the group presentations.

SESSION GOALS

• To familiarize students with Critical Race Theory concepts.
• To familiarize students with CRT research applications in education.

STUDENT OUTCOMES

1. Students will be able to identify specific tenets of Critical Race Theory.
2. Students will be able to articulate different ways education researchers have used CRT to address education inequity in K12 classrooms and districts.

SESSION CATEGORIES

Academic – Session provides additional insight and inquiry into academic disciplines, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – Session promotes DEI values and perspectives.

PREREQUISITES

N/A

FACILITATOR(S)

Thandeka K. Chapman, Alumni IMSA Student

Remember, IMSA is a public school—that is, a school funded by you, the public. IMSA is using public funds to promote a highly controversial, arguable leftist theory on race and justice, which also includes controversial and arguable ideas about homosexuality and gender confusion.

By the end of the indoctrination seminar, IMSA expects students to be able to “identify specific tenets of” CRT and “articulate different ways education researchers have used CRT to address education inequity in K12 classrooms and districts.” IMSA does not, however, expect students to be able to identify dissenting views of CRT or how assumptions embedded in or derived from CRT may be wrong. In other words, IMSA is not teaching the controversy, and the seminar is not ideologically diverse or inclusive. It is biased in favor of CRT.

Thandeka K. Chapman

The woman teaching this course—and who is presumably being paid handsomely by Illinois taxpayers—is Thandeka K. Chapman, an alumna of IMSA, professor at the University of San Diego, and a “social justice” activist.

She calls herself a “Black Power Baby” whose “parents are educators and activists who utilized their resources to challenge injustices in education. Conversations about race and racism were regular dinner topics while I was growing up.”

All decent people oppose injustice. Many people, however, see serious problems in the way CRT defines injustice and with its proposed solutions to alleged injustice.

When asked, “If you could make any policy recommendation based on your own research (without regard to political possibility!), what would it be,” Chapman replied,

[M]y policy recommendation is to raise teacher salaries to be equivalent to–or above–salaries in other professions. Teachers have the most influence in students’ lives. … Teachers disseminate knowledge in particular ways, justify or demonize certain morals, values and behaviors. … Raising teacher salaries would elevate the profession. (emphasis added)

Paying more to recruit activists who are demonizing conservative morals, values, and behaviors is no solution, and paying activists more money will not elevate the teaching profession.

Depoliticizing teaching would be a good start, but leftist bias is systemic in schools and all ancillary institutions connected to schools, including the colleges and universities that train teachers, professional journals and organizations, teachers’ unions, and organizations that profit from advancing leftist ideas on injustice, systemic bias, oppression, race (and disordered sexuality). The entire system from the inside out and top to bottom is corrupt.

Regular IFI readers may be interested in who the “Chief Equity Officer” at IMSA is. It’s none other than Traci Ellis, former school board activist in District U-46 who infamously said about the American flag,

that flag means nothing more than toilet paper to me.

Ellis also referred to the Republican National Convention as the “Klanvention.” Can someone like that represent a diverse community or promote “equity” and justice?

On her school website, Ellis links to IMSA’s “Equity and Excellence” document adopted in 2018 when she was the Executive Director of the Office of Human Resources, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. What is most notable about this document filled with “social justice” education-ese is the absence of the word “equality.” There are lots of references to equity, inclusion, marginalization, cultural competence, and global citizenship (as opposed to American citizenship) but not one reference to equality.

One thing most “educators” today are not is independent thinkers. They are ideological lemmings whose rhetoric parrots whatever they read in their professional journals and hear at their conferences.

The “Equity and Excellence” document jampacked with jargon concludes with this:

The President, in collaboration with Academy departments, shall develop action plans with clear accountabilities and metrics, where appropriate, to execute this policy. (emphasis added)

This is the escape route for social justice change agents. This is the way they escape accountability for the inefficacy of their doctrinaire plans to change the world using other people’s children. They simply assert that “metrics” are inappropriate tools for measuring the outcomes they desire.

For more on the unprofessional, arrogant, and nasty Ellis who has no business involved in the education of other people’s children, Click HERE.

Some intrepid IMSA parents ought to find out how much Thaneka Chapman is being paid. And they ought to find out what teachers have been learning during professional development over the past five years since Traci Ellis was hired, because taxpayers fund professional development as well.

Anyone who teaches in public schools or has taught in public schools in the last two decades knows that ideas from CRT inform professional development and curricula. Anyone who denies that is either ignorant or deceitful.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Black-Power-Baby.mp3

Written by Scott Oakley

For the past 250 years, the United States of America has existed upon a simple yet profound truth, that all men are created equal before God. Of course, it is undeniable that America has not always lived up to this truth. But the true story of America is not one defined by our shortcomings; rather, it is defined by how we have overcome our shortcomings to realize true equality under law. With that said, why is legally recognized equality considered insufficient nowadays? According to the proponents of such a question, it is because “equity” must replace “equality” as the paramount virtue to strive for.

So, what even is equity, and why do they say it’s so much better than equality? In simple terms, “equity” is just another way of saying “fair.” For example, in the law, an equitable remedy is some form of relief other than money that is the only fair way to make a victim whole again. Doesn’t seem too bad, does it? Unfortunately, the application of equity as a social/political remedy is anything but fair, and in fact it is oftentimes actively unfair and even racist.

This unfair application derives from the circumstances in which the proponents of “social equity” attempt to apply it. Let’s use the example of college admissions to explain further. According to the proponents of this new form of so-called “equity,” the college admissions process is “systemically racist” because it usually leads to disparate outcomes among racial groups in terms of their respective percentage of the whole population. Asian and white applicants are usually accepted at disproportionately higher rates, while black applicants are usually accepted at disproportionately lower rates. Despite there being no known evidence of actual discrimination occurring, these disparate outcomes are automatically labelled racist and inequitable by social justice activists and must therefore be counteracted with policies that are “antiracist” and “equitable.” Insert affirmative action, which is a policy that actively discriminates typically against Asian and white applicants while actively favoring typically black applicants supposedly so that a more “fair” outcome may be achieved.

Now, applying this logic of “equity” to other fields all the more clearly reveals its racist and unfair discriminatory nature. Just look at professional sports. Despite constituting 60 percent of the U.S. population, white people make up just 17 percent of NBA players, while the 13 percent of the U.S. population that’s black represents almost 75 percent of NBA players. Wouldn’t the “woke” tenets of “equity” suggest an affirmative action program in the NBA designed to reduce this disparate racial outcome? They certainly would, but we can all see how ridiculous and racist it would be for the NBA to adopt such a policy. Yet proponents of social “equity” will unabashedly use this logic to support their own initiatives when convenient or necessary to support their narrative.

Long story short, the main difference between equality and equity is how they view outcomes. True equality can be viewed as an equality of opportunity that gives everyone a fair shot, but always results in disparate outcomes based on different skills, interests, and decision making. (This is “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”) True equity can be viewed as an equality of outcome that discards requisite skills, interests, and decision making, so that all involved parties are equal in the end. (This necessarily requires totalitarianism, or communism, the opposite of liberty.) Equality is a fundamentally American ideal, while social “equity” is a fundamentally Marxist ideal. If we are going to stop this slow motion Marxist revolution from toppling our great American system, it needs to start by wholly rejecting “equity” policies in favor of “equality” policies.

This article was originally published at The FamilyFoundation.org.

Written by Larry Sand

The fixation on equity is a loser for all concerned.

At the same time that the indoctrination of American students continues to work its way through the schools, its evil twin “equity” is advancing right along with it. As the race-obsessed Ibram X. Kendi explains, equity exists when “two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” In other words, if 10 percent of white kids are in a school’s gifted program, equity demands that 10 percent of black kids are also included. Kendi also claims, “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” The terms “equality” and “quality” are nowhere to be found in the equity playbook.

The gaslighting here is palpable. What Kendi is apparently saying is that we must discriminate to put an end to (alleged) discrimination. But, insane or not, this is what is happening throughout much of the country. In reliably woke San Francisco, the top-rated Lowell High School will no longer admit students based on their academic performance. Instead, the school will use a lottery to admit its students. This will, of course, discriminate against Asian students who make up 50.6 percent of its student body.

Similarly, in New York City, the gifted and talented program has been deemed unfair. Mayor Bill de Blasio and his equally reprehensible schools chancellor Richard Carranza insist that the testing program is unjust because the students who wind up in the program “don’t reflect the diversity of the city’s population.”

In Fairfax County, VA, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science, a school for the gifted, was ranked America’s No. 1 high school last year by U.S. News and World Report. But the school board recently decided to eliminate the race-blind, merit-based admissions tests to the largely Asian school, arguing that high test performance was a “barrier” to black and Hispanic students.

As dedicated followers of Critical Race Theory, the equity mob also finds a racial angle in areas unimagined until recently. In Oregon, those in charge with running – and now ruining – public education have decided that focusing on finding the right answer in math “and showing your work” is a symbol of white supremacy. Teachers are also urged to adapt homework policies to fit the needs of students of color and “challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views.”

Just last week Fox News reported that William Shakespeare is on his way to cancellation. A bunch of equity-obsessed English literature teachers told the School Library Journal that the Bard of Avon has promoted “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir (discrimination against black women)” in his writing. Jeffrey Austin, head of a Michigan high school’s English literature department, insists that teachers should “challenge the whiteness” of the assumption that Shakespeare’s works are “universal.” Washington state public school teacher Claire Bruncke has banished the Bard from her classroom in order to “stray from centering the narrative of white, cisgender, heterosexual men.”

Additionally, equity punishes the very people it claims to help.

As law professor Gail Heriot writes, one consequence of race-preferential policies is that minority students tend to enroll in colleges and universities where their academic credentials put them near the bottom of the class. “While academically gifted under-represented minority students are hardly rare, there are not enough to satisfy the demand of top schools. When the most prestigious schools relax their admissions policies in order to admit more minority students, they start a chain reaction, resulting in a substantial credentials gap at nearly all selective schools.”

In 1996, California passed Prop. 209, an initiative amending the state constitution to bar state schools from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. All the usual suspects were in a frenzy. Accusations that Berkeley was now “lily-white” were commonplace. But as researcher Elizabeth Slattery writes, while minority students did drop from 58.6 percent of the student body to 48.7 percent at Berkeley, the others didn’t drop out. They went to institutions like UC-San Diego, UC-Riverside, and UC-Santa Cruz. These schools are all part of the University of California system, attended by only the top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates.

Slattery notes, “At UC-Riverside, the results were impressive: African-American and Hispanic student admissions skyrocketed by 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively. Failure rates collapsed, and grades improved.”

Ultimately, the equity fanatics are leading us to a world of stupid. Woke students may feel very good about themselves, but as adults, when they discover they can’t balance a checkbook, figure out the square footage of their house or know how many ounces in a pound, they will realize they have been shortchanged.

No human I know picks a doctor, lawyer or plumber based on skin color. Instead, we choose the best person to get a particular job done. If the equity crowd prevails, your freedom to do that will be stifled, and the worst sort of groupthink and tribalism will be the norm.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.