Critical Race Theory

[mister_coffee]

As far as I can tell, Critical Race Theory is a boogeyman used by the right to justify burning books.

[PAL]

Agree Rideback and Ray thanks for bringing this up. Here is what is bugging me about it all. What it's called. And it is being used as you say wrongly.
One of the articles said, Ethnic Studies, and I think that would have been easier for people to grasp for say, high school level. CRT sounds and is college level.
Just like "defund the police". Who is coming up with these names of things that can be used, mostly by the Right, to turn the definitions into something they are really not.
There are other examples where people have shot themselves in the foot just because the terminology has not been thought out and the possible repercussions the words have.
I still will recommend the book, "The Coddling of the American Mind". It addresses some of this.
Another question, is there any such thing as race? We are humans, with the same genetic make up, are we not? Race is separating. People are just different colors. So what. But that is not the reality. Different colors of people bother some people, because they were raised to believe that people, other than the white "race" were inferior. Those beliefs run deep so there has to be a re-educating and that is a big challenge.
Pearl

[Rideback]

https://www.vox.com/22443822/critical-r ... ontroversy

[Rideback]

The problem is not with CRT. The problem is that it has now been turned into a label by the Right who want to stir up their base. It's use in town hall meetings in order to create violence, ban books, suggest book burnings, fire teachers and administrators is based on the disinformation that it is taught in K-12 classes. It is NOT. It is taught in law school.

Elements of CRT; in the form of more comprehensive history lessons that include Black, Native American, Asian history here, probably should be taught in K-12. But that's a different story alltogether.

For now, the Right is cheering on this new label, using it broadly to instill & unite their base's hatred, violence & fear because when you think about it, they have no policies (literally no platform was adopted in '20 at the Rep Nat'l Convention) and success stories they can tout. Labels are their glue, their shorthand to keep that base in a state of anger where they can't pause to use their noggins.

[pasayten]

Thanks Jim... I do remember housing mortgage "redlining" back in the day...

Also remember Seattle School "busing" programs...

Busing in Seattle: A Well-Intentioned Failure
By Cassandra Tate Posted 9/07/2002 HistoryLink.org Essay 3939

In 1972, the Seattle School District launched the first phase of what became a decades-long experiment with mandatory busing to integrate its schools. Initially limited to a few thousand middle school students, by 1981 nearly 40 percent of all the district's students were being bused for racial reasons. School officials defended busing against several legal challenges but gradually scaled back the program in response to waning public support. The district's own data showed that busing disproportionately burdened children of color, undercut academic achievement, inhibited parental involvement, contributed to so-called "white flight," and did little to reduce racial isolation in the schools. By 1999, when race-based busing finally ended in Seattle, it was widely regarded as "one of those well-intentioned social experiments that don't work" (Morrill interview).

A Racial Dividing Line

The roots of Seattle's long and still unfinished effort to achieve racial balance in the public schools lay in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 1954 case of Brown v Board of Education. In that legendary ruling, the court held that segregated schools are inherently unequal and unconstitutional. Seattle lawyer Philip L. Burton (1915-1995) cited Brown in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against the Seattle School Board in 1962.

Decades of discrimination in housing had created an increasingly segregated school system in Seattle. The Lake Washington Ship Canal had become a de facto racial dividing line, with students of color concentrated in schools south of the canal. At Garfield High School, for example, 51 percent of the students in 1961 were African Americans, compared to 5.3 percent of the students in the district as a whole.

The NAACP lawsuit was settled out of court in 1963 when the School Board adopted a program allowing students to voluntarily transfer from one school to another to ease racial imbalances. However, the effort resulted in little movement of students of color into North End schools and even less movement of white students into South End schools.

"Magnet Programs"

The board next tried the idea of enticing white students to minority schools by implementing "magnet programs," beginning with Garfield in 1968. This, too had limited success, at least initially.

In the late 1960s, civil rights activists were split on the issue of how the School Board could best promote integration and, with it, intercultural empathy and understanding. One side, represented by the Central Area Civil Rights Committee -- a group of established African American leaders -- advocated closing predominantly black elementary schools in the South End and moving the students to predominantly white schools in the North End. Another side opposed most desegregation plans because they put the burden of integration on black students. Some people called for the expansion of special programs to encourage voluntary transfers. Others believed more coercive measures were needed to overcome years of ingrained patterns.

Faced with the threat of further legal action from advocates of integration, the School Board took its first tentative steps toward mandatory busing on November 11, 1970, adopting a Middle School Desegregation Plan that involved busing about 2,000 middle school students. Implementation of the plan was delayed for two years by a lawsuit filed by Citizens Against Mandatory Busing, the first of several anti-busing groups that would be organized during the coming years.

The specter shadowing the board during these years was the possibility of federal intervention. Federal judges had shown increasing willingness to impose their own desegregation plans on cities around the country during the 1960s and 1970s, despite often fierce local resistance. In Boston, for example, a federal judge took control of the school system and ordered a massive cross-town busing plan in June 1974. When buses from black neighborhoods pulled up to high schools in white neighborhoods that fall, police had to escort the black teenagers past a gauntlet of angry white people throwing rocks, bottles, and insults.

The Seattle Plan

In April 1977, civil rights groups again threatened to file a lawsuit if the Seattle School District did not initiate a more effective integration program. "We had tried 'separate but equal' over the years and we know that separate is not equal," Lacy Steele, then president of the Seattle branch of the NAACP, recalled. "It never has been and never will be" (Siqueland, 23). The School Board responded with what became known as the Seattle Plan, expanding the busing program to include all the schools in the district. The plan was approved by a vote of six to one on December 14, 1977. The action made Seattle the largest city in the United States to voluntarily undertake district-wide desegregation through mandatory busing.

The Seattle Plan was launched on a wave of optimism and good intentions, with support from a broad coalition of political leaders and community groups, including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Urban League, the Chamber of Commerce, the Municipal League, the League of Women Voters, the Church Council of Greater Seattle, and both the outgoing and the newly elected mayors. It went into effect in September 1978 with little of the contentiousness and none of the violence associated with mandatory busing in other parts of the country. "We have not had anything near the controversy we anticipated," said Dan Riley, the school district's director of student relations. "We haven't had any screamers. We've had some seethers -- a stew kind of boiling -- but no significant tantrums" (The Seattle Times, 1978).

However, six weeks later, an anti-busing initiative sponsored by the Citizens for Voluntary Integration Committee (CiVIC) passed with the approval of 61 percent of the city's voters (and 66 percent statewide). The initiative was declared unconstitutional, in a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, but the vote showed that acceptance of busing was neither as broad nor as deep as its advocates had hoped. "No one should be lulled into believing that because schools opened peacefully, without violence, that there is support for this crazy busing nonsense," said Robert O. Dorse, a Seattle businessman and president of CiVIC. "This only means that Seattleites are law-abiding and have faith in our democratic system" (The Seattle Times, 1978).

The plan was based on a complicated formula that defined segregation in terms of the ratio of white to nonwhite students in the school district. In 1977, 65 percent of the district's students were white; by 1995, the proportion had dropped to 40 percent (where it remains). This led to a gradual increase in what, officially, constituted segregation. In 1977, a "racially imbalanced" school was one where more than 55 percent of the students were children of color. By 1995, a school could be up to 85 percent nonwhite and still be considered integrated.

"White Flight"

The percentage of whites in the Seattle schools had been decreasing since the 1960s for a variety of reasons, including the end of the post-World War II baby boom, lower birth rates among whites, comparatively higher birth rates among people of color, and increases in immigration, especially from Southeast Asia. Additionally, expansion of highways made suburbs more attractive to middle-class families seeking an escape from high taxes, crime rates, and other problems in the city.

But it was also clear that some white parents were taking their children out of public schools in Seattle simply because they did not want them bused out of their neighborhoods. In the first year of district-wide busing, the number of white students dropped by nearly 12 percent compared to the previous year, reducing total enrollment by 10 percent. Both the percentage of white students and the overall number of students fell steadily during the years of mandatory busing.

In an effort to reduce so-called "white flight," the district added more and more "options" intended to appeal to middle-class parents, from "alternative" classrooms to programs for gifted students. The number of schools offering such options increased from 27 in 1977 to 57 in 1982. The increase added to the costs of busing (the district spent more than $3 a day per student to bus options students, who came from all over town, compared to $1.89 for mandatorily assigned students, who came from the same neighborhood). It also had the effect of diluting the desegregation program. Most of the students in options programs were white. As a result, segregated classrooms persisted even in technically integrated schools.

"You'd see the top tier of classes and the bottom tier," says Donald Felder, principal of the Interagency Academy, a program for at-risk students in the Seattle school district. "In the name of trying to get integrated schools, white families were offered the best of the best if they'd bring their kids to school with children of color. Very few children of color prospered in that position. Many white children took advantage of what was offered and thrived" (Felder interview).

In theory, the Seattle Plan was a "deck shuffle," applying uniformly to all students. In practice, it amounted largely to shuffling nonwhite students from the South End to the North End. The parents of white children were far more likely to manipulate the system and avoid an undesirable school assignment, or abandon the system altogether for the suburbs or for private schools. A five-year review of the Seattle Plan showed that only about half the students in mandatory assignments were showing up; the rest were either moving into options programs or moving out of the public schools. As retired University of Washington geographer Richard Morrill, author of a 1989 study commissioned by the school district, puts it, "There were way too many escape routes" (Morrill interview).

"Controlled Choice"

The initial opposition to race-based busing came primarily from white parents living in racially homogeneous neighborhoods. By the late 1980s, the voices of dissent were coming from all sides, including some of the same white liberals and African Americans who had originally endorsed busing. Critics complained that the Seattle Plan unfairly burdened children of color; contributed to a widening achievement gap between white and minority students; undermined public confidence in the schools, particularly among middle-class parents; left some schools under-enrolled while others were over-enrolled, and was too costly and complex. In 1988, the School Board responded to the escalating criticism by replacing the Seattle Plan with a "controlled-choice" system. The new plan allowed parents to select schools for their children from within a prescribed cluster of schools -- as long as their choice maintained racial balance.

Still, the controversy continued, becoming a key issue in the mayoral race in Seattle the following year. The front-running candidate, City Attorney Doug Jewett, strongly supported a local initiative to give the school district 6 percent of all city revenue in return for an end to mandatory busing, with the money to be used to improve neighborhood schools. City Councilman Norm Rice, an African American, entered the race as a defender of busing. Voters delivered a mixed message on busing, electing Rice but also approving the anti-busing initiative. (The School Board later turned down the extra money, meaning the initiative had no effect.)

By the early 1990s, some of the most vocal critics of mandatory busing were African Americans, including the charismatic John H. Stanford (1938-1998), superintendent of Seattle schools from 1995 to 1998. In a key presentation to the School Board in November 1995, Stanford said the data showed that low-income students who attended schools outside their neighborhoods scored lower on achievement tests than low-income students in neighborhood schools. Furthermore, parental involvement in the schools was lowest among bused students, who often needed it the most.

Stanford also noted that about one-fourth of Seattle's school-aged children were enrolled in private schools, a far higher percentage than in comparable cities without mandatory busing. In some white, middle-class neighborhoods in Seattle, only about half the children were choosing public over private schools, compared to 90 percent of those in racially mixed, poorer neighborhoods. Stanford urged the board to put more emphasis on the quality of the education in the classroom and less on the color of the skin on the students. "I don't have to sit next to someone of another color to learn," he said, in an oft-quoted remark (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1999).

End of the Ride

The end of mandatory busing came as quietly and peacefully as its beginning. Between 1997 and 1999, the School Board essentially threw out zoning lines, allowing any of the district's students to attend any school they wanted -- so long as they could get into it. A system of "tiebreakers," one of which is race, was adopted to determine admission to schools with more applicants than space.

Although it involves far fewer students (applying to only about 300 students in 2001), the racial tiebreaker has proven to be almost as controversial as mandatory busing. A lawsuit filed in 2000 by a group called Parents Involved in Community Schools claims race-based school assignments violate Initiative 200, a 1998 voter-approved measure that bans racial preferences in public education, employment, and contracting. In April 2002, a federal appeals court judge agreed, and said the old Seattle Plan would be a more acceptable way of promoting integration than the tiebreaker. However, his opinion was set aside two months later. The legal jousting continues, as of September 2002, with the matter now before the State Supreme Court.

Donald Felder was among those who reacted to the judge's comment with incredulity. "Busing perpetuated segregation and inequity even though technically the schools were integrated," he says. "It was just a complete failure." Felder has worked as a teacher or administrator for the Seattle School District since 1972. He himself was bused, on a voluntary basis, when he transferred from Garfield High School to Cleveland in 1968. His three children were bused as part of the Seattle Plan in the late 1970s and 1980s. Asked to speak about the benefits of busing, he has this to say, tongue in cheek: "Children got into the routine of getting up early in the morning. They got to see Seattle's traffic problems first hand. They got to have fun on the bus ride. Some very close friendships were developed. That's where I learned to become a comedian, on that bus ride to Cleveland" (Felder interview).

[pasayten]

From the methownet BB answer to a question I had...

by Solstice » Thu Nov 11, 2021 8:21 pm

Before it goes away:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s, derived from the federal government and lenders literally drawing a red line on a map around the neighborhoods they would not invest in based on demographics alone. In the 1930s the federal government began redlining real estate, marking “risky” neighborhoods for federal mortgage loans on the basis of race.

One real world example of critical race theory.

Jim Brennan

[pasayten]

Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

[pasayten]

I have to admit that this is a subject I know nothing about... Seems to be a big deal... Guess I should look into the subject more... I also have some bright high school grandkids I can discuss it with... A thread started to talk about it on the Methownet BB, but was soon zapped just after I became interested in it... Jeesh...


NY Times
OPINION
JAY CASPIAN KANG

Can We Talk About Critical Race Theory?
Nov. 11, 2021


The national debate over critical race theory — if one can even call it a debate — has been filled with half-truths, unfulfilled definitions, and a whole lot of obfuscation and obstruction. It feels, at times, as if we’ve walked into an unfinished simulation where certain objects carry a vague resemblance to real things, but if you actually want to navigate the space, you’re going to have to take a lot of untrustworthy people’s word for what’s what.

As a journalist who covers education policy, I find myself perpetually baffled by what’s going on. The actual critical race theory argues that racism isn’t just what happens when an individual decides to hate a group of people, but rather an ideology that has been embedded in American institutions.

Its relevance to the education system should be clear enough: You don’t even have to open a history book; you just have to walk around New York City when kids get out of school, witness the deep segregation in the student body, and guess what happened. It makes sense, then, that C.R.T. does, in fact, have some influence on the ways curriculum gets written across the country in an effort to address inequality. These are all just basic facts.

Anti-critical race theory activists and politicians argue that the country’s schools have been invaded by a destructive virus of an idea that will turn children into hateful, identity-obsessed Bolsheviks. Much of this is in bad faith.

One would think, however, that Democrats, especially after the George Floyd protests, would be more than happy to defend the idea that racism exists at every level of American schooling and tout the work of educators to address inequality. Instead, many have embarked on a great campaign of denial. This is particularly strange, because significant, equity-based changes in schools across the country should be seen as progressive victories.

The problem seems to be that some small portion of what’s produced in the name of equity in schools is pretty embarrassing. That stuff, which mostly can be found in diversity trainings, then gets blasted out to the world as proof that the race hucksters are taking over the schools.

This week, in New York magazine, Eric Levitz argues that progressives shouldn’t just ignore or deflect attention away from instances when these efforts in the name of equity go wrong. One example he cites is the faulty “culturally responsive teaching” trainings in Loudoun County, Va., that made the point that white culture fosters “independence and individual achievement,” while something called “color groups” rely more on “interdependence and group success.”


As a member of what I suppose is the yellow “color group,” I find this sort of assumption both dispiriting and mildly offensive. (It’s hard to get mad at something so silly). I also see this type of language much more in my life than I did a decade ago.

I don’t want my yellow-color-group daughter to be force-fed an identity at school by teachers, however well-intentioned, who have taken these lessons to heart. (I imagine the vast majority of teachers roll their eyes at this stuff, but if that’s true, why do it in the first place?) But I also don’t want to encourage the anti-C.R.T. hysteria.


I find some of the more mainstream arguments made in the name of equity about my color group just flat out wrong, including the assertion that Asian Americans are either “white” or “white-adjacent.” I don’t know more than a handful of rational Asian Americans who think of themselves in that way, but it seems like the only people who feel comfortable publicly pointing this out are anti-C.R.T. evangelists.

So what should I do?

Levitz argues that liberals shouldn’t allow ourselves to be silenced on the off chance that the anti-C.R.T. crowd might appropriate some mangled version of our criticisms to fan the flames of outrage. His intervention, entitled “When Keeping it ‘Woke’ Gets Racist, Liberals Should Say So,” comes at a time when the entire education debate has been overtaken by what I call binary consensus building. This is when someone draws a line in the sand, oftentimes arbitrarily, and says that if you don’t align yourself completely with their solution — which in this case is denial that anything has changed in classrooms — you must be sleeping with the enemy.

I agree with Levitz — everyone who believes in equity in schools should also feel a personal stake in making sure those programs reflect their purported values. They also shouldn’t allow the terms of the conversation to be dictated by fearmongers or those who say that any deviation from unblinking support is tantamount to treason.

Diversity is now a big industry — about $8 billion per year gets spent on diversity trainings in America — and parents might be feeling blindsided by the rapid changes, many of which came after last year’s George Floyd protests. Telling those parents that there’s nothing to see here, and, by extension, not actually defending new, equity-based changes to their schools, will only lead to more confusion and resistance.

At the same time, it’s important to keep a sense of proportionality about these issues and make sure that we’re not taking minor concerns and blowing them up into full-on panics. So, how do we actually tell the difference between what’s worth criticizing in a meaningful way and what’s not?

I propose the following simple rubric for progressives. You can see it as my own curriculum for navigating this C.R.T. mess.

If you’re getting mad at an equity or antiracism idea gone wrong, make sure it’s either an actual policy or part of a curriculum or a training program. This means not getting worked up over singular examples in which a teacher says something in a classroom and then suddenly every “woke” teacher in America has to answer for them.

Try to disregard ephemera like quotes from random parents and, especially, students.

Do critically engage with school board members, especially in big cities, and, of course, politicians.

As much as possible, try to talk in concrete terms. This goes for both sides. Moral panics feed off ambiguity and confusion.

So, here are some examples of actual policy and curriculum changes that have taken place over the past few years in the state of California, alone.

The state recently made Ethnic Studies a high school graduation requirement, meaning that beginning with the class of 2030, every single public school student in the biggest state in the country must take a course that encourages involvement in social movements. As I wrote in a recent edition of the newsletter, I mostly support this bill, but I also feel like it’s fine for parents who have concerns about an explicit call for political engagement to express them. (They have, for what its worth.)

California has also proposed new, nonbinding curriculum guidelines that would expand the high-level math curriculum to include statistics or data science, encourage schools to place all middle school kids in the same level of math, and institute “social justice” themes in course material.

The University of California system dropped its SAT requirement for admissions.

Several school districts in California, including Los Angeles and San Diego, have suggested changes to grading policies, including doing away with penalties for missed deadlines. In a letter explaining the changes, Los Angeles Unified School District officials wrote that traditional grading had been used to “justify and to provide unequal educational opportunities based on a student’s race or class.”

None of these examples should be particularly controversial for progressives who actually believe in equity in education. The fact that each has come under attack from the right only heightens the need to defend, critique and improve them, rather than create an atmosphere of denial and deflection.

But what about those moments when things start getting very weird and indefensible?

San Francisco’s school board spent much of the early parts of 2021 debating the renaming of schools without saying much about reopening or even remote classroom plans. (They ultimately suspended the renaming plan after sharp criticism from parents and Mayor London Breed.)

Then came the abrupt change to the admissions practices at Lowell, a jewel of the San Francisco Unified School District which, similar to Stuyvesant in New York City, relied largely on a standardized test for entry. Last year, citing the pandemic, the school board announced Lowell would be moving to a lottery system. This February, it said those changes would be permanent and gave parents only a short window in which to prepare a response.

Many San Franciscans, particularly poor immigrant families with almost no social capital, have planned their children’s educations around the Lowell admissions exam. A coalition of parents, in response, have called for the recall of three board members, a measure that has attracted many progressive supporters, including State Senator Scott Wiener, who represents the city.

There was also the bizarre controversy around Alison Collins, a member of the school board and the wife of a wealthy real estate developer. Collins, who is Black, had been one of the city’s most prominent equity advocates. Earlier this year, some of Collins’s old tweets surfaced, one of which used a racist slur to describe some Asian students and parents and suggested they were all in the thrall of whiteness and assimilation. Collins was removed from a few school board committees and stripped of her leadership titles shortly thereafter, but kept her seat. She responded by suing the school district and the school board members who had acted against her. (Collins has since dropped the lawsuit, which was previously dismissed by a federal judge.)


It’s not hard to diagnose when a woke schooling moment goes wrong. What’s harder is analyzing whether it actually matters. With all the national media attention this incident got, are we putting too much emphasis on one city in California? (Maybe, but San Francisco is a big city.) Should we care so much about old tweets from a school board member? (Maybe not, but we should care when that school board member then wastes time and money to file frivolous lawsuits.) Should the school board have given parents more notice about the permanent changes to Lowell? (Even if you don’t support the idea of admissions tests, you can agree that these processes should be fairly timed.) Should Alison Collins be serving on any school board? (Probably not.)

I trust that thinking individuals can make these types of judgments for themselves. But I also think it would help the overall cause if progressives actually called out bad policies, or, at the very least, understood that the people who do so aren’t all “Karens” in the thrall of white supremacy. As a resident of the Bay Area, I came across these activists several times during trips into San Francisco and never saw a white person handing out fliers or asking people to sign a petition. They appeared to be, instead, almost entirely middle- and working-class Latino and Asian parents.

The recurring theme of this newsletter has been this idea of binary-consensus-building and the process by which a field of possibilities gets narrowed down to two polar, bad options. A lot of things have to seem impossible for people to accept only two choices. It’s true that the history of public education in America has always been beset by fights over race, privilege and curriculum, but what’s struck me over the last year are both the small stakes and the incredible intensity in these most recent fights.

Instead of mass mobilization on the left and the right over an issue as monumental as, say, school busing, we now exhaust the full arsenal of political messaging on diversity trainings, curriculum questions and admissions practices at elite schools that educate a tiny percentage of any given district. Liberals should know that we’re all on loser’s ground right now where almost every meaningful change, whether it’s busing, restrictions on charter schools, or reductions to the costs of higher education, has already been ceded. The last thing we should do is put our heads down and simply accept every progressive-ish policy that’s thrown our way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/opin ... heory.html