Teachers Don’t Support CRT, Either

I’ve said it before and I’m doubling down on it now. I love the Heritage Foundation. When I die, I’m going to leave them all of my money, the entire $650. They have been doing great work for many years and have recently caught my attention with another interesting finding.

Note to some readers: Please don’t bother to write me and try to discredit this organization. If you have a criticism of inaccuracies, give me facts. Don’t just blabber about how it’s a right wing organization and we can’t believe what they say. Address the message, not the messenger. Just the facts, m’am. The full report can be read at:

www.heritage.org/education/report/political-opinions-k-12teachers-results

Political activism has been growing within classrooms around our country. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Lately, it has been a hot topic of conversation since the discovery of Critical Race Theory is being taught in our classrooms. Parents have been outraged at some of the material being taught to their children. Some officials still deny that it’s happening, while parents are reading the material from their children’s book bags. Then the Biden administration tried to discredit parents by calling them “domestic terrorists”. They’ve finally had enough.

Reports still keep pouring in about teachers being political activists in the classroom. In Sacramento, California, an advanced placement teacher was taped professing support for Antifa and proclaiming that his goal was to indoctrinate students and “turn them into revolutionaries”. There were classrooms in Los Angeles that were decorated with signs that read “F— The Police” and “F— AmeriKKKa” The St. Louis area had emails discovered in which school administrators were conspiring to hide controversial lesson plans from parents. A teacher in Blacksburg, Va. released a video accusing the districts student discipline plan as one of white supremacy. So obviously, there’s some crazy stuff going on. I think most of us agree the role of teachers is to teach our children and not to indoctrinate or revolutionize them. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic would be nice.

Now parents can feel a little comfort with the results of a survey by The Heritage Foundation. The results of the survey were pleasantly surprising to me. The survey was broad and encompassing. It measured parents, the general public and educators. Teachers were slightly left of center in many areas, but their responses were not close to positions held by average liberals.

Teachers and parents agreed, overwhelmingly that more class time should be devoted to civics education. On CRT, only 30% of teachers and 26% of parents view it in a favorable light. That appears to be a positive finding.

Teachers and administrators self identified as 43% moderate, 29% liberal and 27% conservative. Fifty two percent (52%) of teachers expressed the view that black and Hispanic students have an equal educational opportunity as whites. Thirty one percent (31%) of parents and thirty nine percent (39%) of teachers indicated that students were becoming more divided about civics topics.

Ninety four percent (94%) of survey respondents believe that, in America, individuals should be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. More than half of the total participants agreed that there is no better place in the world for minorities to succeed than in America. Seventy five percent (75%) of conservatives believe this, compared to forty one (41%) of teachers and only twenty seven (27%) of liberals.

Findings also indicate that school board members are even more conservative than parents. Only 16% of school board members think that students should be taught that the birth of America was 1619, the year that African slaves first landed in the colonies, compared to 33% of parents.

A refreshing statistic from the survey, in my view, was the disagreement on the comments from Ibram X. Kendi (a controversial anti-racist CRT promoter). Only 10 percent of respondents agreed with Kendi’s notion: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Never mind that this theory violates the Constitution and previously decided cases. Many of us are still clinging to our “Guns, Bibles and the Constitution.” We also cling to the belief that racism is defined as judging one by the color of ones’ skin rather than the content of their character. And we believe that’s WRONG.

Remember when we were all encouraged, and educators were required to reinforce every child’s’ self esteem. Not doing so would be detrimental to the psychological and emotional development of every child. Now the message is, only minority children deserve positive reinforcement and white children need to feel ashamed.

Some of the positive take aways from the Heritage report are that teachers are generally moderate, local school boards are generally conservative and and most of the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) issues have little support in the public. Particularly parents who are dealing with it on a daily basis with their children. An even more positive result would be to see a movement in education to stick to teaching and to forget attempts at social engineering.