#TellingItLikeItIs - Critical Race Theory and Public Schools

“If kids are old enough to experience racism, then they’re old enough to learn about it. ”¹ Never have words more accurately captured the landscape of our present reality, and never have words fueled more fury during legislative testimony on the Senate floor. It is understandable that ‘telling it like it is’ and stating the ‘hard truths’ stir feelings of discomfort, denial, and anger for some. For others, these words draw both gratification and the thrill that finally bold truths are being spoken. After all, if you can’t acknowledge there is a problem, you can’t fix it.

Controversial Legislative Bills: HB 3979 and SB 3

During the 87th legislative session, debates center around the social studies curriculum taught in public schools, particularly as the curriculum relates to racism, sexism, and bias. Legislative bills, including HB 3979 during regular session, and SB 3 during special session, promote the whitewashing of history in the K-12 curriculum and continue to ban the teaching of the accurate history of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. While denying the truth of history, the bills censor our K-12 classroom teaching and silence the voices of both students and teachers. Restricting discussions about current events is to falsely believe that school curriculum lives in a vacuum and denies students the opportunity to achieve self-actualization and self-awareness. Our young people require the support and space so that they may examine how the learned subject matter applies to the world in which they live. At their core, these bills attack our constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression.

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Some argue that the social studies curriculum fairly represents history. This false view turns a blind-eye to the fact that the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), which dictate the Texas’ social studies curriculum, to a large extent disregards the histories, cultures, and identities of people of color. Some educators reference the development of the TEKS and cite the “integrity of the process” that calls for educators to develop the TEKS – words often uttered from hand-selected White faces that pull up a chair to the table. And for those token Black or Brown faces fortunate enough to receive an invitation to sit at that table, it is well-expected that acclimation to the status quo will prevail. Stated candidly: “whiteness wants blackness [or people of color] seated at the table but doesn’t want to hear dissenting viewpoints,”² and “whiteness likes a trickle of blackness [or people of color] but only that which can be controlled.”³ 

Whiteness is integral to public education and much is done to preserve this whiteness. In American Education it cannot be denied that most of the teachers, administrators, educators, policymakers, textbook writers, etc. are white. The statistical and demographic data reveal these educator demographics. Still, many insist education is practiced through a “color-blind lens,” despite all data and anecdotes to the contrary. Those who claim that public school education is objective and color-blind offering equal opportunity for all races are uninformed, ill-informed, or just downright reckless. Such beliefs serve to further drive racism underground resulting in a modern-day racism that is subtle, concealed, and insidious and equally, if not more, potent than the racism of the past.

What is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is not a curriculum taught in K-12 schools. In fact, CRT is not a curriculum at all, but rather a framework or lens through which analysis occurs and a method to understand how race influenced the historical laws of this country and continues to influence our laws still today. Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw of UCLA Law, the task of CRT is to remind “how deeply issues of racial ideology and power continue to matter in American life” and “seek to fashion a set of tools for thinking about race that avoids the traps of racial thinking.”⁴ 

CRT is a race-conscious lens through which we bravely attempt to confront the constructive framework of race analysis in American civilization. CRT challenges public education’s claims of “objectivity, meritocracy, color and gender blindness and gender neutrality, and equal opportunity.”⁵ 

As evidenced by data, systemic practices in education perpetuate racial inequality manifesting in the following persistent discriminatory practices,⁶ among others:

• Curriculum that excludes the history and lived experiences of Americans of color and imposes a dominant white narrative of history;
• School discipline policies and practices that disproportionately impact students of color with more punitive discipline and greater frequency of exclusionary discipline and referrals to law enforcement, which compromise their educational outcomes;
• Deficit-thinking and deficit-oriented instruction that characterizes students of color in need of remediation, blaming them for their failure, rather than examining policies and practices that perpetuate oppressive and inequitable systems;
• Racially segregated education;
• School funding inequities that underfund property-poor districts, many composed primarily of students of color.

The reality is that unlawful discrimination occurs every day in our schools in the application of different treatment and with policies or practices that result in disparate impact. Educators are just as likely to show racial biases as any other American adult.⁷ Educators often have different life experiences, cultural backgrounds, and philosophies than those of the students or communities they serve, resulting in the inability to comprehend the complexities of the lives of their students and be compassionate and sympathetic to their struggles. Seldom do educators receive evidenced-based, reflective professional development or training to address this very real concern. Statistical analysis may expose a clear picture of the problem, but the resolution requires a more in-depth inquiry beyond what the quantitative data offers. To begin to remedy the racism ingrained in public education requires a transformation, re-training, and re-tooling of policies and practices. What’s more, educator training and professional development is urgently needed on the awareness of implicit biases and its impacts and the dismantling of deficit thinking policies and practices.

What is Deficit Thinking?

Deficit thinking is the dominant paradigm that largely shapes American educators’ perspectives for the widespread and persistent failure among historically underserved students. Deficit thinking promotes the theory that internal deficits exist in students that manifest in limited intellectual abilities and other shortcomings resulting in lack of motivation and immoral behavior.⁸ Schools produce failures among economically deprived students and students of color and then use these failures as evidence that the problem lies with the student, their families, their genetics, their culture, and their neighborhoods, rather than the educational system and its deficit assumptions.⁹ This self-perpetuating cycle is commonplace in our public schools.¹⁰ Deficit thinking is pervasive and implicit and is nothing short of dehumanizing.

Deficit thinkers treat people as the problem. Consequently, rather than focusing on remedying oppressive and disabling systems, they focus on “fixing” people.¹¹ The responses of school districts exacerbate injustices suffered by students of color. Under the guise of better understanding poverty, school leaders offer damaging professional development riddled with deficit thinking further perpetuating the cycle of deficit thinking and promoting a culture of oppression by “blaming the victim.”¹² To achieve school policies and practices that are free from racial discrimination, there must be a call to action to examine core systemic barriers that oppress and a heroic attempt to dismantle deficit thinking in public schools.

‘If Not Us, Who? And If Not Now, When?’

We have a duty and a right to raise questions about race and racism in our society, both in our communities and within the walls of school buildings everywhere. Undeniably, racial discrimination is ingrained in public school policies and practices that privilege certain racial groups and perspectives above others. Now is the time to come together in multi-racial solidarity where race truly does not matter, but not because we claim color-blindness or refuse to see, but because we examine historical legacy and stare at it right in the eye, evaluate what it did to us and what it continues to do to us, and work together in community to remedy it – therein lies the true victory for racial justice!