Despite Denials, Critical Race Theory Is Used to Teach Your Children

Yes, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Critical Race Theory is being taught in K-12 schools.

Less than three years after a national spotlight was shone on activists pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) into K-12 education, there are still elected officials, like Texas congresswoman Crockett, who continue to deny its use in schools.

During a recent House Oversight hearing on K-12 public education, the Texas representative stated, “So we can stop with the nonsense because K-12 was not teaching critical race theory at least in this country.”

Unfortunately, this is not correct. CRT appears explicitly in courses and curriculum, though it is more commonly taught and implemented as a framework or lens with which to view all issues in society.

Generally, Critical Race Theory is the belief that American society was founded and based on systemic racism and white supremacy for the benefit of white people. It assumes that racism is a common, ordinary state of affairs and is ingrained into all of society. The term “whiteness” will sometimes be used to represent the idea of CRT.

Critical Race Theory and the ideas associated with it are being taught to K-12 students.

For example, CRT and whiteness are part of a course in Hillsborough Township School District in New Jersey. The course titled “Race in the United States” specifically states in the class guide that key content includes “critical race theory” and other tenets of CRT such as “whiteness,” “white fragility,” “implicit bias,” and “internalized racism.” The course also includes the text “Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”

An ethnic studies course at Coachella Valley Unified District in California teaches students about the “theoretical foundations of Critical Race Theory” and “to understand how race is socially constructed through Critical Race Theory.” The students use Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction as a primary text to help them come to these understandings. The required class also features the ideas of neo-Marxist Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

While there are many more examples of CRT being taught explicitly in K-12, it is more often applied to school policies, professional development, and curriculum.

In Vermont, Essex Westford School District bases its equity policy on the tenets of CRT. It posits that the U.S. economic infrastructure and evolution are attributed to genocide and slavery and seeks to “undo the harm of centuries of systemic inequalities and oppression.” The district policy states that it “operates from a decolonized perspective” and seeks to undo “revisionist frameworks that perpetuate inaccurate portrayals of people in privileged and subjugated positions.”

Milwaukee Public Schools hired the Pacific Education Group to put district administration and principals through the consultants' Courageous Conversations program. The multi-year, $292,000 professional development not only had participants learn CRT as a “theoretical and requisite knowledge base,” but it also centered on “Using Critical Race Theory to Transform Leadership and The Organization.”

In 2016, Fort Worth Independent School District (Texas) contracted with Pacific Educational Group for a multi-year agreement with a cost of upwards of $1.3 million.

In Vermont’s South Burlington School District, the fifth-grade curriculum “Reading to Raise Anti-Racists” states that the district is “helping the children develop the skills to see the world through a critical race lens.” Delgado and Stefancic write in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge that “CRT aims to use literature to form social protests and political movements against racism through a critical race lens.”

While many individuals deny CRT is in K-12 schools, there are those who openly embrace the teaching of it to students.

In 2021, Colorado teacher Bryan Lindstrom posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that “at the end of the day its [sic] just my students and me in our classroom and we will be discussing race, class and gender in my history classes, regardless of what laws and policies people want to pass. Critical Race Theory is a component of everything I do.”

Professors Theresa Montano and Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen wrote in the UCLA Law Review they “embrace CRT as a tool to disrupt the myth that educational decisions, policies, and practices are based on objectivity or neutrality.” They state that “CRT in K-12 ethnic studies serves to disrupt inequities through antiracist teaching and pedagogy.” The authors conclude the piece by proving “CRT is indeed taught in schools” and argue that “its teaching should become ubiquitous.”

The pair of professors are part of an ethnic studies consulting group that trains teachers to apply CRT and other far-left ideologies to many teachers in multiple districts. As part of their work in the Bay Area’s  Hayward Unified School District, they were contracted to assist the ethnic studies planning committee “will develop Professional Development including, [sic] Critical Race Theory, Abolitionist Teaching and Courageous Conversations.”

Critical Race Theory and its tenets are found throughout K-12 education in district policies and staff training and are explicitly taught in lessons. CRT is a destructive set of ideas that presents to students as young as five that the United States has been founded on white supremacy for the benefit of white people. It has no place in K-12 education.

So yes, Representative Crockett, Critical Race Theory is being taught in “this country.”