The tocsin never escapes the chem lab?!

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away… — Hughes Mearns

Baby steps. This time, at least, the Wisconsin State Journal reporter bothered to report the other side: namely, Blaska and Daniel Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

Two months ago, Elizabeth Beyer “reported” without a single attribution: “Critical Race Theory, an academic framework that focuses on racism embedded in the nation’s laws and institutions … isn’t taught in any of Wisconsin’s K-12 schools.” Today, education reporter Ms. Beyer doubles down on that Woke fiction with these three lies:

• It isn’t being taught in K-12 schools, only at teachers’ colleges.
• It’s nothing new.
• You are a dupe if you oppose it, if not racist.

CRT is “a wedge issue — “manufactured panic,” according to the State Journal.

Who says CRT is NOT taught in our K-12 schools? Gloria Ladson-Billings, who wrote the book on injecting CRT into the classroom. Literally! Spend some time turning over this quote from Ladson-Billings:

“When I say I use critical race theory as a theoretical tool, I’m talking about issues of policy; I’m not talking about what I teach eight-graders.”

Huh? Policy does not filter down into what is taught? What policy?

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No one has done more to push CRT into the classroom than UW-Madison’s Gloria Ladson-Billings, co-author of Critical Race Theory in Education. GLB calls existing school curricula a “culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a white supremacist master script.” You can tell a book by its outline:

Critical Race Theory in Education 

1. Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? — Gloria Ladson-Billings

2. Who’s afraid of critical race theory? — Derrick A. Bell

3. Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory and education reform— David Gillborn

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Then why is CRT taught at all?

Beyer defines CRT as “a graduate-level theoretical framework that examines how American political and social systems perpetuate racism.” As if the CRT genie never escapes the laboratory and jumps into the teacher’s lesson plan! Y’think “political and social systems” include our schools? Get ‘em young, as they say.

Whether “equity, anti-racism, and questions of privilege predated the theoretical framework” of CRT, as Ladson-Billings tells Beyer, is immaterial. Montesquieu and Locke informed Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. So what? Beyer herself reports that West high school prompts students to discuss “restorative justice, identity, white privilege, race and racism.” Yeah, kids. If you do your homework and get good grades, blame “white privilege.” That’s a far cry from teaching Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall.

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“If it’s not critical race theory, it’s critical race theory-lite,” Columbia University professor John McWhorter explains in the New York Times. McWhorter (himself a black man) is the author of Woke Racism; “How a new religion has betrayed black America.” McWhorter defines CRT as:

See[ing] white people as potential oppressors and black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system. This “critical approach has trickled down,” McWhorter writes, “into … education-school pedagogy and administration … and from there migrated … into the way they wind up running schools.

→ The Five Lies of CRT.

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Blaska’s Bottom Line: Give ‘em this much, the CRT deniers are clever! Beyer helpfully quotes Ladson-Billings: Anyone who dissents from the race-based CRT lesson plan is a Joe McCarthyite. Beats actually defending CRT.

What else are our schools not teaching?