The New York Times finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids critical race theory

And the latest Take Back Our Schools episode on woke debate and book banning

I wanted to share the text of my op-ed in Saturday’s New York Post:

Schools are just teaching honest history.

That’s been the lie educators, teachers unions and the mainstream media have parroted for three years in response to the growing chorus of parents of all political stripes asserting schools are indoctrinating the nation’s children in critical race theory and leftist politics.

Now the paper of record concedes we parents were right.

In a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times, “Ethnic Studies Collides With Israel-Hamas War,” education reporter Dana Goldstein exposes the truth about K-12 education.

The article is ostensibly about the blatant antisemitism embedded in California’s ethnic-studies curriculum, which must be in all public high schools by 2025 and a graduation requirement by 2030. The legislation was pushed, of course, by the 310,000-member-strong California Teachers Association, the largest affiliate of our country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.

As Goldstein reports, pro-Palestinian activism is a core component of the ethnic-studies discipline. California’s curriculum likens Palestinians to Native Americans, refers to Israel’s founding as “settler colonialism,” categorizes Israeli Jews as “European settlers” and oppressors and harps on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.

Goldstein quotes University of California, Riverside, professor Dylan Rodriguez equating teaching Zionism to teaching creationism and climate-change denialism; he “would analogize” learning about Israel’s creation to “learning the history of slavery.”

While the antisemitism embedded in ethnic studies is newsworthy enough, it’s not the big story here.

In a 2022 white paper, “The Very Foundation of Good Citizenship: The Legal and Pedagogical Case for Culturally Responsive and Racially Inclusive Public Education for All Students,” the NEA defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of the United States’ diverse racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic studies helps foster cross-cultural understanding among both students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”

Goldstein exposes this as a lie. Ethnic studies, Rodriguez explains, is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences.” It’s “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”

Goldstein herself confesses ethnic studies is indeed “ideological” and California’s 700-page model curriculum “retains the discipline’s leftist, activist bent,” asking: “How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?”

And now the kicker: Critical race theory and systemic racism are “key concepts in the discipline,” and California’s curriculum includes “gender expression.”

The New York Times — on its cover no less — just confirmed everything parents have been ridiculed, shamed, silenced and labeled domestic terrorists by our own federal government for saying.

Lest one think the discipline is confined to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s progressive paradise and its 1.9 million public high-school students, the Times reports that states across the country are planning legislation to introduce K-12 ethnic studies.

Nor is ethnic studies confined to a single class. California schools can “incorporate ethnic studies either as a stand-along course or by adding an ethnic studies lens to subjects such as history or literature.” This is key.

American education has been thoroughly corrupted. Schools say they teach English and history, but they don’t. They use these subjects as props to promote a political agenda.

Math and science aren’t unaffected. Uber-prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy offers a course on Mathematics of Social Justice. Rice University, often called the Harvard of the South, recently made headlines for its new offering, Afrochemistry.

Ethnic studies’ ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country. It’s the foundation of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion regime implanted in our corporations, military and federal government.

It took the horrific events of Oct. 7 and the explosion of antisemitism in its aftermath for many to wake up to the toxic progressive ideology that’s corrupted our institutions and education system.

Even The New York Times has spoken. Just as it finally gave us permission to question lab leaks and masks’ utility, acknowledge the harms of school closures and gender-transition surgeries and discuss President Biden’s mental acuity, we now have clearance to talk about our kids’ political indoctrination in polite company.

Let’s hope this spurs more of us to find the courage to speak up and join the fight to take back our schools. Our country’s survival depends on it.

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Here is the latest episode of my podcast Take Back Our Schools. The podcast is available on all major podcast outlets, including Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. 

Everything Is Debatable

On this episode Beth and I speak with James Fishback, founder of Incubate Debate.

Fishback discusses how high school debate tournaments went woke in recent years and illustrates the National Speech and Debate Association’s extreme liberal bias. He shares stories of how judges are ideologically motivated and either won’t allow certain positions to be debated or dock points for non-leftist opinions.

He also talks about his recent piece for The Free Press, entitled, “The Truth About Banned Books” where he exposed the severe ideological asymmetries in school libraries around the country.

James Fishback is the founder and executive director of Incubate Debate, a no-cost high school debate league that champions merit, civility, and open debate. Incubate Debate is the fastest-growing debate league in America, having tripled the students it serves in the past year. Fishback is a former high school debate national champion, having competed 2009-2013 at Boyd H. Anderson High School in South Florida. He studied International Economics at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

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As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. Please follow me on X (Twitter) @AndrewGutmann. My campaign website is andrewgutmann.com. Support for the campaign is always appreciated!