A group of scholars urged the National School Boards Association and local school boards nationwide to end the teaching of “any curricula that depict America as irredeemably racist.”
“The prevailing narrative of racial grievances has been corrupting the instruction of American history and the humanities for many decades, but has accelerated dangerously over the past year,” reads Monday’s letter, which did not mention critical race theory by name. “The most damaging effects of such instruction fall on lower income minority children, who are implicitly told that they are helpless victims with no power or agency to shape their own futures.”
COLORADO SCHOOL DISTRICT BANS TEACHING OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Critical race theory and other closely related ideologies argue the United States is inherently racist and that skin color is used to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between white and nonwhite people. Critics claim it delegates all white people to the role of oppressors and all people of color to victims.
The letter was posted on 1776 Unites, an organization that crafted a curriculum to counter the 1619 Project. The scholars represent a nonpartisan group of black-led writers, educators, activists, and thinkers.
Two are Ivy League professors.
The scholars are “focused on solutions to our country’s greatest challenges in education, culture, race relations, and upward mobility,” they said.
It is problematic teachers allow racial grievances to dominate almost every classroom, despite data showing only a tiny portion of students can meet proficiency standards in civics and history courses, they said.
“These dismal achievements in gaining an understanding of democratic citizenship, government, historical facts and perspectives across time are low across all student backgrounds and virtually unchanged from the benchmarks established two decades ago,” they said.
The scholars proposed school boards use a lesson plan similar to 1776 Unites and provided three tenets for existing curricula: continuity, not rupture; dignity, not grievances; and resilience, not fragility.
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The group “stands in unqualified opposition to any curricula that depict America as irredeemably racist; teach that the legacies of slavery, racial segregation, and other appalling crimes are insurmountable; or fail to provide examples from history of black achievement against the odds.”
