The debate between educators and parents over CRT heats up!

Critical Race Theory (CRT), which has Marxist origins, is a version of America’s beginnings that is strongly at odds with the history of our country as it has been taught in public schools for more than a hundred years. The nation’s two largest teacher unions — the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — support this version.

There are charges that CRT has sneaked into public education in recent years, that some teachers are teaching it, and that some school systems are preparing to start. AFT president Randi Weingarten, who calls CRT the “honest history” of America, denies that CRT is being taught below the college level, but said her union is prepared to defend any teacher accused of teaching it.

There are teachers, administrators and school boards that agree that CRT should be taught in schools now. But many parents and many other Americans strongly oppose it, believing that CRT pits people against each other and destroys the view of their country that generations of Americans have been taught and believe.

Questions arise: Is it appropriate for one or a few teachers, or a school faculty, or a school’s administration, or even a county school board to unilaterally make such a dramatic change in the history curriculum in public schools that are supported by taxpayers without first gaining broad support of the public?

At what stage of the education process should a new and radically different view of the nation’s history be implemented? 

It seems that CRT and other new ideas are right now considered more important than other aspects of education.

As some school teachers, administrators, board members and politicians push hard to justify CRT for children as young as the early grades, the U.S. continues to falter among the world’s nations in successfully educating students in important subjects.

For example, the U.S. placed 11th out of 79 countries in science, and did worse in math, ranking 30th, according to the Program for International Student Assessment tests of 15-year-old students around the world, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018.

The U.S. scored below the OECD average in math of 489 with a score of 478. Asian nations placed 1st through 5th: Singapore - 569, Macao - 555, Hong Kong - 551, Taiwan - 531, and Japan - 527. Since only four of China’s provinces participated in the assessment, it was not included in this ranking.

The United States scored a 502 in science, above the OECD average. However, the top five scoring countries were: Singapore - 551, Macao - 544, Estonia - 530, Japan - 529, and Finland - 522.

Pearson.com, in its latest assessment, shows that the United States has a “cognitive skills and educational attainment” score of 0.39, fourteenth out of forty countries that it ranked. The top ten countries and their scores are: South Korea - 1.30, Japan - 1.03, Singapore - 0.99, Hong Kong - 0.96, Finland - 0.92, United Kingdom - 0.67, Canada - 0.60, Netherlands - 0.58, Ireland - 0.51, and Poland - 0.50.

What does it mean when our education system finishes so far down in the rankings of nations? Poor performance in languages means many or some will not be able to communicate effectively. The poor performance in math and science indicates that U.S. students are not prepared for high-tech jobs in an increasingly high-tech world.

Silicon Valley has achieved great success in the high-tech industry. That success is due to excellent software engineers. But many of them are foreign-born. If Americans are unable to perform well in these important, high-paying jobs, those jobs will instead go to people from other countries who work here, or worse, to companies in other countries.

It seems that the primary function of helping our children learn the basics of language, mathematics, science, social studies and the arts is suffering, and needs immediate attention. That is far more important than suddenly, and in some alleged cases, secretly trying to overturn the long-standing historical account of the United States, in favor of a highly disputed version of how the nation came to be.

Based upon America’s low rating in international educational performance, it seems U.S. educators have plenty of work to do to get our performance level up where it belongs, and where it once was, before they turn the system upside-down with a radical transformation of our history.

Stuffing controversial ideas — Marxist CRT, transgenderism, diversity, and other such things disguised as harmless ideas — down the throats of the children of the numerous parents who disagree with those ideas is a very divisive thing. Those parents will surely want, need and deserve better choices of schooling for their children. 

And since state and local taxes pay for much of public education, there should be a mechanism to financially assist those parents, who will likely have to pay for an alternative to public schools in order to have their children educated as they choose.

Not all teachers, administrators, schools or school systems are adopting this destructive belief system. But far too many of them are, and many people believe they are a threat to this country.