Textbook manipulation

Rufo’s celebration was over July’s notice announcement for the Education Department’s yearly American History and Civics competitive grant program. The Biden administration’s original proposal, announced back in April, stated that applications focusing on “systemic marginalization, biases, [and] inequities” in history and civics instruction would be given funding priority. Among the resources suggested in its background material were those offered by the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History, the New York Times Magazine’s factually challenged “1619 Project,” and Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi, the renowned “anti-racism” guru and sophist.

The pushback to the department’s priorities was strong and swift. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, representing 37 of his GOP Senate colleagues, sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona blasting the grant program rule changes, calling them an attempt to reorient the bipartisan programs “away from their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”

“Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps,” he wrote, adding, “If your administration had proposed actual legislation instead of trying to do this quietly through the Federal Register, that legislation would not pass Congress.” The department was inundated with thousands of public comments denouncing the effort.

Following the furor, the Education Department made an apparent change of course in the final notice for the grant programs that was released in the Federal Register last month. Gone were any explicit references to Kendi or the 1619 Project, and the desire for grant application projects to focus on systemic bias and marginalization was downgraded from a “competitive preference priority” to an “invitational priority” with no bearing on the grant competition.

This might all sound like a positive, if confusing, development. In Rufo’s words, a step toward “WINNING” against the “woke” racial identitarians. And while I would not call raising the alarm against divisive indoctrination a “defeat,” I am here to pour a few buckets of cold water on any would-be celebrations. If the experience of history is any guide, without careful and prolonged watchfulness, this little episode will end in a costly Pyrrhic victory.

Yes, the Education Department walked back some buzzwords, but the structure, function, politics, and personnel involved remain the same. “Despite dropping mentions of the 1619 Project and Kendi, it’s also clear the department’s overall view about what the grants should support hasn’t fundamentally changed,” wrote Ed Week’s Andrew Ujifusa following the notice. “For example, the April proposal for these grants highlights instructional approaches that ‘take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history,’ as well as those that ‘contribute to inclusive, supportive, and identity-safe learning environments.’ The Monday notice repeats that and other language verbatim from four months ago.”

The focus on systemic bias-centered projects has been demoted, officially. But, as Ujifusa points out, the now-classified “invitational priority” still remains on the call for applications. It is still clear that the same bureaucrats who wrote the first notice of priority hold that priority — and they are the ones awarding the grants.

The American History and Civics competitive grants in question involve roughly $5.3 million this year and fund two distinct programs: 1) academies for history and civics teachers and 2) “national activities.” According to the notice in the Federal Register, “the Academies Program supports projects to raise student achievement in American history and civics by improving teachers’ and students’ knowledge, understanding, and engagement with these subjects through intensive workshops with scholars, master teachers, and curriculum experts.” The “national activities” are aimed at fostering “information literacy skills” and the promotion of critical thinking.

Furthermore, it is important to specify just who is applying for these grants. Though they are allotted for K-12 history and civics learning and instruction, the pool of eligible applicants is restricted to outside entities: “An institution of higher education, or nonprofit educational organization, museum, library, or research center with demonstrated expertise in historical methodology or the teaching of American history and civics; or a consortium of these entities.” No prizes for guessing what side of the political spectrum the overwhelming majority of denizens in such organizations fall on.

In practice, the in-group signaling has already been done. And even if one does not assume the worst motives and intentions of those handling the competition selection process, what remains open and obvious in the text of the application notice is worrying enough.

It no longer mentions Kendi or the 1619 Project by name, but nearly every section invites their influence and citation. The Academies Program is a teacher development program ready-made for Kendi or Robin DiAngelo to hold court on racism and white privilege to an audience of enraptured K-12 teachers. After all, are they not putative “scholars” and “master teachers”? The Pulitzer Center, very much a “nonprofit educational organization,” is the outfit that paired with the Times Magazine to create the 1619 Project classroom curriculum. They easily fit the Academies’ bill as well. Or what about the Museum of African American History, which touts itself as “the only national museum devoted exclusively” to educating the public on matters of race and racial history? That would be a CRT jackpot, as the Smithsonian museum already features Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist on its “Talking About Race” resource page for teachers in addition to producing its own resources about how “hard work,” “progress,” and “objectivity” are “assumptions of white culture.”

When I say “nearly every section” invites taxpayer funds to be spent on some CRT figurehead, it’s not hyperbole: The one remaining “competitive priority” included in the July missive is a notice that “using the Resources of the National Parks” will award up to three points on one’s application. And wouldn’t you know it, even the National Park Service offers materials to help high school teachers lead guided readings of How to Be an Antiracist.

It’s a safe bet that many, if not most, of these taxpayer-funded grants will pay for Kendi, DiAngelo, or someone like them to teach high school faculty and staff their racialist, postmodern dogma. Rep. Virginia Foxx, even while applauding the parents and families who spoke out against the original grant proposal, conceded, “I am doubtful that Secretary Cardona plans to abandon the administration’s crusade to push Critical Race Theory in our public schools.”

Rufo, in response to my pushback against his celebration, stated, “Celebrating incremental progress points is important, while of course, not the whole game.” I am more than happy to celebrate incremental progress (kind of the name of the game for conservatives), but this attitude assumes with too great a certainty that progress has been made. And outside of rousing the troops, I simply don’t see it.

Instead, what this fracas has revealed is that Joe Biden is more than happy to follow in the path of his old boss, Barack Obama. Take how the Obama Education Department used emergency recovery dollars and federal grant programs to coerce and cajole states to adopt the Common Core State Standards. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess wrote in his 2014 retrospective of the Common Core failure:

“In 2009, with funding from the nearly $800 billion federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration created a $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ program in which states could compete for federal funding by promising to fulfill certain requirements. As legislated by Congress, the funds that fueled Race to the Top were intended to help states ‘enhance the quality of [their] academic assessments’ and ‘take steps to improve [their] academic content standards.’ In the hands of the Obama Department of Education, that became a requirement that states competing for Race to the Top dollars pledge to adopt ‘college- and career-ready’ standards. The Education Department made it clear that the surest way to meet that requirement was to adopt the Common Core and to promise to use one of the federally funded, Common Core-aligned tests.”

Compare this to how the department is acting today. The Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015 in large part as a congressional response to Obama’s education overreach, greatly limited the federal government’s authority over state curricula, standards and frameworks, and testing decisions. This means that the Department of Education is prohibited from dictating to states what curriculum to use, for history, civics, or otherwise. However, through use of grants such as the American History and Civics programs, as well as other funding streams, the feds can put their thumb on the scale in terms of setting the ideological and pedagogical agenda for public schools and teachers.

In the Obama era, that meant signaling toward Common Core-aligned standards frameworks without explicitly requiring them to be adopted. As Hess points out, “college- and career-ready” became the byword. For Biden and his mandarins, those terms have become “equity” and “systemic bias” and the like. And though these terms and concepts can have meanings and significance apart from the party line, whether real or imagined, they always only seem to go one way. “The Department recognizes the value of supporting teaching and learning that reflects the rich diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students,” Cardona wrote in a blog post. One doubts he means to value the personal history and contribution felt by, say, a student misguided by his bigoted parents to believe in “War of Northern Aggression”-style myth.

Even “civics” itself has become a cipher for a loaded leftist agenda. “Action Civics,” explains Stanley Kurtz, “conceives of itself as a living laboratory in which mere civic theory is put productively into practice. Students, it is held, best acquire civic know-how through direct political action, for example by protesting in favor of gun control or lobbying for legislation to address climate change.” This “civics as activism” has grown in influence in Left education circles and was championed often during the Obama administration by Secretary of Education John King, who was fond of urging students to “do democracy.”

Calls for “civics education” can and should have bipartisan appeal. But too often today, that mantle is coopted by those educators seeking to indoctrinate partisanship through purported civic action. In the classroom, action civics can look like the scene at Catherine Cook School in Chicago, where activist educators sought to introduce a kindergarten class “to the concepts of prejudice and discrimination” by subjecting them to “shared experiences” over the course of a few weeks. As Rick Hess and I recounted back in 2017: “First, in the ‘Great Locker Lock-Out,’ the kindergarteners would arrive at school ‘to find their [cubbies] taped off’ and closed to them. Afterward, students would participate in ‘repeated discussions’ to reflect on how the lock-out ‘connects to the many ways in which groups of people have felt/currently feel discriminated against.’” Further “experiences” included segregated playground time, where some students were denied use of equipment or relegated to one corner of the grounds, and a “sit-in protest” that was mandated in order for the kindergarteners to receive their cubbies back. This is some educators’ idea of teaching civics to 6-year-olds.

Following much in Obama’s footsteps, Biden’s administration is trying to smuggle in this extremist agenda through stipulations and nudges included in emergency recovery funds in addition to specific teacher-training grants. The American Rescue Plan COVID-stimulus package included $122 billion for the Department of Education to distribute to state agencies for disbursement to their local school systems. At least 20% of these local funds must be spent to address learning loss through programs that consider “students’ academic, social, and emotional needs,” the rescue plan states. While this sounds all well and good — pandemic-related learning loss due to continued school closures is a significant issue that will hamper today’s generation of students in profoundly negative and yet unseen ways — what constitutes social and emotional needs and related support matters significantly. To the Biden administration, it apparently means more critical race theory.

As reported by Fox News, in its COVID handbook, intended to help schools reopen after the pandemic and recommend how they should use their related Rescue Plan funds, the Education Department hyperlinked to resources from the Abolitionist Teaching Network, which is led by Georgia professor Bettina Love. Love is a leading proponent of this type of action civics, who teaches that America and the American school system, in particular, is designed to “spirit murder” black children. Traditional civics to Love is “code for comply, comply, comply.” Instead, she teaches, “history tells us that dark folx’ humanity is dependent on how much they disobey and fight for justice.”

The Education Department’s COVID reopening handbook linked to the Abolitionist Teaching Network’s “Guide for Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning” (after this was discovered, the administration claimed it had been linked in “error” and subsequently removed the linked passage). The guide, like much of Love’s work, argues that truly equitable social and emotional learning requires things such as the removal of “all punitive or disciplinary practices that spirit murder Black, Brown, and Indigenous children,” providing “free, radical self/collective care and therapy for Educators and Support Staff of Color,” and “a commitment to learning from students, families, and educators who disrupt Whiteness and other forms of oppression.” This, it’s worth remembering, happened apart from the attention generated by the American history and civics program changes.

Celebrating incremental progress is all well and good, but not if it means taking your eye off the ball because you think it already went over the fence. The apparatchiks inside the Biden administration are proving that they’re determined to smuggle a thoughtless, civilization-rotting dogma into public school classrooms whether parents want it or not. What remains to be seen is if we are willing to keep paying attention.

J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.