The following is an opinion piece by members of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, Phil and Joan Harris. 

An article by Carson TerBush, published in Chalkbeat on December 15th, describes the Indiana legislature’s attempt in their next session to put in place multiple education bills to ensure that educational content for Indiana K-12 public schools is controlled.
 
This legislation is described as only intending to monitor public schools; however, the Curriculum Control Committees are designed to censor state-approved textbooks, professional instructional materials and books in school libraries.
 
If every school district creates an advisory curriculum committee, does that mean we will have 291 different curricula taught in Indiana schools? Will these “advisory” Curriculum Control Committees be reviewing all instructional materials including math, science, social studies and language arts?  With committees composed of 40% parents and 20% members of the public able to control what is being taught in our schools, why would we need a State Department of Education and certified teachers?
 
According to the author, elected school boards will have the ultimate power to accept or reject the recommendations of the committee. If so, what purpose does the committee really serve other then to attempt to censor materials they may not agree with and to pressure their elected boards to override the thinking of professional educators?
 
Is the reference to obscene language in some books an attempt to further censure ideas that allow children to grow in their critical thinking skills? It seems more like an attempt to pretend the last 30-plus years of a coarsening of the culture didn’t happen and is a repeat of the effort from at least the 1980s.
 
Is this an attempt to prevent the teaching about the history of enslaved people and the racism that is deeply embedded in our culture?

If we ignore the role that race has played in the formation of our laws and policies, which Critical Race Theory addresses principally in law schools, nothing will change. 
 
The attack is directed at every level of public education:  school boards, curriculum decision committees, library materials, and what  teachers say and do in their classrooms.
 
Teaching children to engage in problem solving and to use their critical thinking skills, and providing them with the tools they will need to be able to make judgments regarding the wide range of social issues they will encounter, is essential to preserving the health of our democracy. 
 
This proposed legislation raises the most fundamental question with regard to our public schools: What is the purpose of our public education system? One answer appears clearly in our state's constitution:

Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improvement; and to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.
 
Elsewhere, that same document refers to a "general and uniform system of common schools." The education bills currently festering in the legislative chambers of the Hoosier State will in no way meet the aims our state's founders sought for their schools and will instead hamstring that most democratic of institutions, the local school board.
 
“But what can I do?” you say. Contact your local elected representatives by phone or e-mail. Write letters to your local newspaper. Attend your local school board meeting and ask questions about how curriculum materials are selected. Support Indiana Coalition for Public Education-Monroe County and local parent-teacher organizations even if you don’t have children in school.  Democracy depends on your participation.

Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County (ICPE–Monroe County) advocates for all children to have high quality, equitable, well-funded schools that are subject to democratic oversight by their communities.

​We are a nonpartisan and nonprofit group of parents, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, and other community members of Monroe County and surrounding areas.

During the last days of the Trump administration, the Office of Management and Budget, citing the nefarious influence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), banned all government agencies from any “training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil." In a later speech from the National Archives, Trump called CRT “a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation.” 

Now conservatives across the country are sounding the alarm and trying to shackle teachers and ban books that introduce any aspect of CRT into schoolrooms. In Loudoun County, Virginia, conservative activists shut down a School Board meeting with shouting, physical intimidation, and singing the national anthem. As the Loudoun School Board stated itself, there is little evidence that CRT, as such, is being taught anywhere in their schools. What is being taught, more likely, is a narrative—and active discussion—of U.S. history that acknowledges the terrible evil of slavery and its ongoing effects in U.S. society. It’s possible that CRT informs some of this teaching, but it is likely only one of several possible conceptual frameworks used. 

Conservatives call this “indoctrination,” not education. What they seem to prefer is a bland patriotic history that papers over all conflict in the name of “national unity.” Oxford defines indoctrination as “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.”  This seems closer to what conservatives want than what they assert is really happening in schools. They believe that CRT is divisive and pits Americans against one another, putting all the “blame” on Whites. They carry protest signs that derisively interpret the acronym as “Creating Racial Tension.” Yet the racial tension in our country was established long ago, kept alive through ongoing policies and practices, and exacerbated recently by the open license given to expressions of White supremacy. CRT encourages all of us to take responsibility for coming to terms with this. 

CRT does not argue that the U.S. is “inherently racist or evil,” or that Whites are such either. Nor does it have much to do with Marx. Rather, CRT provides an honest, empirically verifiable set of concepts for understanding how and why racism has become so deeply embedded in our society and psyches. The evidence for structural racism in all of our public institutions—in law, housing, policing, education, and public health—is overwhelming, and now accepted by the vast majority of social scientists.

Hardly a study exists that does not confirm what CRT insightfully documents: Blacks face forms of discrimination and brutality—even when they have economic wealth—that Whites will likely never encounter. They also face a huge generational wealth deficit, compounded by the fact that their free labor quite literally created much of the wealth of colonial and Independent America that launched us on the road to becoming a superpower. Other variants of CRT (TribalCrit, LatCrit) extend these historical insights to America’s Indigenous and Latinx peoples. This is not a “Marxist” doctrine, which would emphasize class exploitation over race. Calling it such is a pathetic attempt to conjure one of the age-old bogeymen of American political demagoguery.
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And when you hear CRT associated with another common target of the conservative worldview, “identity politics,” you must remember this: the original dividers, those who birthed identity politics in this country, were those who created the caste system under slavery and perpetrated the genocide of Indigenous Americans. They divided the nation into the “worthy” and “unworthy,” the “civilized” and the “savage,” the “human” and the “subhuman.” The Irish, Italians, even the Jews—they were all considered inferior races until they embraced their whiteness (alas, the benefits of Jews’ whiteness remain precarious, it would seem). Contemporary identity groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys perpetuate this deeply un-American story of “us” and “them.” Is it any wonder that those whose identities have been racially oppressed now try to garner some dignity and hope from the same?

CRT is part of an educational effort to reckon with these foundational divisions, to examine how they continue to vex our efforts to fulfill the American dream of justice and liberty for all (see R. Delgado and J. Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory). In most versions of CRT, racism has indeed become a “permanent” feature of U.S. society, but it is neither inherent nor inexorable. It is permanent only until fully recognized and transformed. The point of CRT is to encourage analysis and discussion, not indoctrination. Again, from Whites we seek not blame, but civic responsibility, and a sense of solidarity. 

Even a cursory glance at the remarkably rich corpus of writings that has come to be known as Critical Race Theory should convince you of one thing: this is a deeply American scholarly endeavor to come to terms with the way racism continues to manifest in our society. I hope that more Americans will explore the insights CRT has to offer. I invite more Americans into our schools and our university classes to witness the hopeful conversations, and the hard reckoning, that CRT—among many other forms of anti-racist scholarship—has helped to inspire. 
 
—Bradley A. Levinson
​Board member of Indiana Coalition for Public Education–Monroe County and Professor of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington.