What happens when a wave of populist energy crashes against deeply entrenched structural forces? Very little, unless that energy can be channeled strategically into structural reform.

After the COVID-19 pandemic gave parents a window into what their children were learning, a populist backlash against critical race theory led legislatures in more than a dozen states to pass “CRT bans.” But these bans were only a partial solution. To paraphrase Hemingway, public education went woke in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The sudden shift came in the wake of the death of George Floyd, when the education establishment flipped a permission switch for teachers to promote “anti-racist” activism in the classroom. While CRT bans reset expectations, they did not address the reason why so many teachers felt that teaching activism was appropriate in the first place: because they were trained to.