Word started spreading on NextDoor, via text message and in Facebook groups. “High alert!” as parents cautioned one another that Plano school trustees would be voting to buy teaching materials that spread the ideas of critical race theory.
Dozens of parents came to protest outside of the May school board meeting, many carrying signs decrying “CRT” and urging trustees to vote against a specific agenda item. Several testified, calling critical race theory an ideological cancer and a way of making kids feel bad.
By the end, board members appeared shocked.
The agenda item in question was a contract renewal for an elective college preparation course that helps students develop study skills. The AVID program has been in Plano — and many area districts — for more than a decade.
David Stolle, now the Plano ISD board president, told parents there was a disconnect between what the trustees were voting on and their concerns.
“How we got from renewing a contract on AVID to critical race theory — dozens and dozens of emails about critical race theory … is beyond me,” he said. “I don’t understand it.”
The episode demonstrates the way that the concept of critical race theory — even the insinuation of it — has come to dominate local school board meetings, trustee races and legislative debates in post-Trump America.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, after hours of debate on how Texas should teach issues of race and racism in its public schools, the Senate passed legislation aimed at banning critical race theory. The revised bill, approved on an 18-13 party line vote, heads back to the Texas House, which approved similar legislation earlier last week.
Friday afternoon, Ken Paxton of Texas joined 19 other state attorneys general in sending a letter to the education secretary expressing concerns about critical race theory in schools.
Critical race theory is an academic framework that probes the way policies and laws uphold systemic racism.
“At a fundamental level, it exposes the racism and oppression in our contemporary society,” said Jonathan Chism, a history professor at University of Houston-Downtown, a co-editor of Critical Race Studies Across Disciplines. “It endeavors to resist it.”
Critics interpret it as fueling racial division and victimization and, for white students, causing them to be ashamed of their race. It’s an opinion championed by former President Donald Trump and pumped oxygen by the conservative media.
In Texas — one of several state governments considering bills intended to target critical race theory — the House sponsor grouped his legislation with other issues intended as wins for the Republican base, such as limiting abortion and voting rights. Much of the language in both the House and Senate bills was pulled verbatim from a 2020 executive order by Trump, restricting diversity training and the use of critical race theory in the federal government.
“At a time when racial tensions are at a boiling point, we don’t need to burden our kids with guilt for racial crimes they had nothing to do with,” Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, declared after a divided House approved his bill.
The majority of public school students in Texas are children of color. Many districts have taken steps in recent years to make their coursework more inclusive and examine policies in order to interrogate racial disparities — like why Black children are underrepresented in advanced classrooms, overrepresented in discipline statistics and lag behind white peers on standardized tests.
Some education leaders were prompted by the murder of George Floyd and the national reckoning over racism it ignited a year ago. Others attempted to make changes after incidents involving their own students. Plano ISD, for example, is still grappling with the aftermath of the racist bullying and abuse of a Black middle school student by his white classmates.
The current critical race theory debate “misinterprets the intentions of those of us who are working to build more inclusive schools,” said Richardson ISD Superintendent Jeannie Stone.
Equity and diversity work isn’t partisan or anti-American, Stone said.
What is critical race theory?
Critical race theory isn’t a simple — or single — idea.
It emerged decades ago as a method of legal analysis, centering race and racism at the heart of understanding the country’s systems and policies. As an interpretive prism, it has largely existed only in the realm of academia.
The theory was born from the writings and lectures of Harvard University’s first Black law professor, civil rights attorney Derrick Bell, who explored why the gains made by the civil rights movement in the 1960s had stalled or lost ground a decade later. The legacies of slavery and Jim Crow still persisted, Bell argued, and would continue to do so.
“The goal of racial equality is, while comforting to many whites, more illusory than real for blacks,” Bell wrote in 1992 in the introduction to one of his seminal works, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. “For too long, we have worked for substantive reform, then settled for weakly worded and poorly enforced legislation, indeterminate judicial decisions, token government positions, even holidays.”
Among the tenets of critical race theory are that racism is commonplace; progress for underrepresented groups is encouraged only to the extent that changes benefit the status quo; and that concepts such as color-blindness and meritocracy are myths to be rejected.
Those ideas aren’t unique to critical race theory, said Jason Shelton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington and the director of the school’s Center for African American Studies. Instead, they are shared by scholars in a wide variety of academic disciplines — from sociology to political science to history, he said.
“Yes, racism is part of the social fabric of American life, but let me also say that [concept is] in a great deal of sociological theory as well,” Shelton said. “Critical race theory is sort of being singled out here.”
Critical race theory does have critics within academia who say it promotes fractiousness among racial and ethnic groups and weakens the bonds that allow for civic engagement.
“When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” wrote Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez in a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Recently, however, pundits and politicians — largely conservative — have conflated critical race theory with a host of other concepts such as diversity and inclusion efforts, anti-racism training, social justice activism or multicultural curricula. Some have even labeled it as explicitly anti-white.
“It’s frustrating to me to hear some of the politicians, in particular, misrepresent what it is,” said Yolanda Flores Niemann, interim chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of North Texas. “It doesn’t say white people are bad, or white people should feel guilty. It does say that if you were white, you benefited from the government having racist policies against these other people.”
Trump repeatedly took aim at the concept during his term. Past members of his administration continue to encourage conservative lawmakers to reject critical race theory and to promote a “patriotic education” for students. The three words often float across the chyron on Fox News.
“Since he lost the presidency, many of his followers are galvanized to continue the attack on CRT and anti-racist efforts,” Chism said. Many people want to believe America’s problem with racism was solved by the civil rights movement rather than face systemic oppression, the Houston professor said.
After claiming a seat on the Carroll school board — running in opposition to the district’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — Southlake attorney Hannah Smith said that her election showed that voters did not want “racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers.”
The district took on such efforts after videos of Carroll students chanting the n-word went viral in 2018 and 2019.
In an interview with Fox News, Smith said that families are drawn to Southlake because of the “unity” around being a Carroll Dragon, the school’s mascot.
“When the mainstream media was saying that we are an awful town, people are racist, our kids are racist, our schools are systemically racist, it just wasn’t right,” Smith said.
The New York Times’ The 1619 Project, which won the Pulitzer Prize, also fueled conservative rage. The series of essays sought to reframe American history around slavery’s consequences and the contributions of Black people.
Lawmakers like Toth label it a work of fiction. Like an earlier House version, the Senate bill reintroduced a ban on teaching of The 1619 Project.
Educators also could not teach that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality,” under his bill.
That constitutes a whitewashing of the country’s painful history, many Democrats and education groups countered. Several of the Founding Fathers owned slaves.
“I agree that we should not be judged on the color of our skin,” Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, told the Senate sponsor, Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola. “But unfortunately, that’s the plight of African Americans, Latinos and minorities in this country.”
Exasperated lawmakers also questioned the need for the legislation at all, beyond politics. No agency in Texas compels an educator to teach critical race theory, Rep. Jarvis Johnson, D-Houston, said during debates. “This author is literally legislating nothing.”
Lawmakers in at least 15 states introduced bills seeking to restrict how teachers discuss racism, sexism and other social issues, according to Education Week.
While several of these bills were introduced with the stated intention of banning critical race theory in classrooms, they don’t explicitly invoke those words within the legislation. That’s also the case in Texas.
Instead, the bills use vague language with a laundry list of concepts that are barred, such as the idea that a person is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, either consciously or unconsciously.
Also concerning to the dozens of Texas education groups and leaders who oppose the bill are the provisions that could limit teacher training on racism; prohibit private funding for some curriculum development; and keep students from earning extra credit or course credit for public policy work. Educators say the provisions would have a chilling effect on social studies classrooms and disrupt anti-racism work.
Advocates have implored lawmakers to ask themselves: Do you even know what this bill would do?
During a contentious House debate on the bill that stretched until 1:30 a.m., Rep. Mary González, D-El Paso, slammed Toth, saying he wasn’t educated on the subject he sought to police or the wide-ranging impact of his legislation. He told her that he hasn’t read any books on critical race theory, only papers.
“We are making very real decisions about access to educational resources without even having a full understanding of what we’re talking about,” González said. “I can speak to this because I literally spent 10 years getting a Ph.D. in this, in which I have seen the opposite of what you describe happen.”
The Senate debate was as passionate.
Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, said that some of the language in the bill was focused “on things that we think we’d like to avoid.”
This bill says, to teachers and schools, “don’t you dare teach that to our children,” she said.
Democratic senators expressed frustration on how the bill made its way to the floor, saying it stifled debate and public testimony. It was a last-minute addition on Monday to Hughes’ Senate State Affairs committee agenda, and as a result, only a handful of public speakers gave testimony. In contrast, 90 educators and organizations voiced their opposition to the legislation in the House committee.
“I feel like we left out students, and teachers, and parents, and educational experts, and historians, and it just seemed like it was rushed through at the last minute,” said Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston.
The Senate bill also stripped over a dozen writings from the curriculum standards that schools are required to teach, texts from historically significant women and people of color that were added by Democrats to the House version.
West did manage to get an amendment on the Senate bill, adding — among other items — the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution to the list of required texts.
Plano’s fight
When Plano parents researched the AVID program, they found web pages related to “culturally relevant teaching” — which shares the initials CRT. It aims to help teachers with strategies for effectively educating students from diverse backgrounds.
“Failure to see and acknowledge racial differences makes it difficult to recognize the unconscious biases everyone has,” some AVID materials circulated read. “Those biases can taint a teacher’s expectations of a student’s ability and negatively influence a student’s performance.”
Plano school officials clarified that those materials are not part of students’ curriculum but are resources available for teachers. Critical race theory is not taught in their schools, they insisted.
Many educators who are pushing for stronger diversity and equity work say simply not talking about racial disparities doesn’t make them go away.
The reasons behind the academic gaps between students of color and white students must be tackled head-on and honestly, they say.
In Dallas ISD, for example, all employees are going through training on unconscious bias and dismantling racism. The legislation moving in Austin could put that at risk, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said.
“If this law does pass, the stakes get very high, very quickly,” he said.
In a recent training session, teachers peppered Amber Sims — a founding member of Dallas’ Imagining Freedom Institute and Young Leaders, Strong City — with questions on what the bill could mean in their classrooms.
Students want to talk about systemic racism and how it presents itself in their lives, they told Sims, and teachers want to help.
“We’ve just got to continue to do the work,” Sims said. “We’ll continue to find loopholes and allow students to talk about what they want to talk about.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
