The Daily Signal - Hidden Cameras Uncover How Schools Find Ways to Teach Critical Race Theory

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Even if your state or county has banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools, it might still be being taught.  Using hidden cameras, Accuracy in Media launched a series of investigations into school districts across the country that are still finding a way to teach students a curriculum that includes CRT.  Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to explain what his organization has discovered. Also joining the show to talk about education solutions is Jonathan Butcher, The Heritage Foundation’s Will Skillman fellow in education.  (The Daily Signal is Heritage's multimedia news organization.) We also cover these stories: Authorities investigate a fire caused by a Molotov cocktail attack on a pro-life organization in Wisconsin. Pro-abortion protesters gather outside the homes of Supreme Court justices. Florida’s public high schools will observe a “Victims of Communism Day.”  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, May 10th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Virginia Allen. Even if your state or county has banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools, it might still be being taught. Using hitting cameras, accuracy in media has launched an investigation into school districts across the country that are still finding a way to teach students' CRT curriculum. Adam Gillette, president of accuracy in media, joins the show today to explain what

his organization has discovered. And also joining the show to talk about education solutions is the Heritage Foundation's Will Skilman Fellow in Education, Jonathan Butcher. But before we get to Virginia's conversation with Adam Gillette and Jonathan Butcher, let's hit our top news stories of the day. An investigation is underway of an attack at a pro-life organization in Wisconsin. On Sunday morning, someone or maybe a group of people, through Molotov cocktails inside the offices of Wisconsin, Hanson Family Action. One of those Molotov cocktails exploded, cashing books and furniture on fire. Thankfully, no one was inside the building at the time, so no one was injured. A message was left on one of the outside walls reading, if abortions aren't safe, then you aren't either. Firefighters

quickly responded to the scene and put the fire out. The attack follows the news that the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade. The White House has condemned the attack. They told the Hill that President Biden strongly condemns this attack and political violence of any stripe. And they added that protests and demonstrations must be peaceful and free of violence, vandalism, or attempts to intimidate. But Wisconsin Family Action says President Biden needs to speak out directly against the violence. The pro-life group's president Juliani Apling told Fox that we need stronger leadership that makes it very clear that we don't just disagree with the violence. We are calling for it to stop right now. Your usual podcast co-host,

Doug Blair, went to the protests at Justice John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh's homes this Saturday night. Here's what one protester told Doug about why she was protesting. I want your name, ma'am? Nikki Enfield. And why are you here today? This is bullshit. You don't get to take away our bodily autonomy and enjoy your Saturday night at home. You get to do one or the other. And what does it mean to you to be marching to the Justice's homes? This is personal. So we're going to take it to the personal space.

Okay. They did this, not us. And here's a clip from the scene at Justice Roberts's home. Keep abortion, safe, and legal. People die. And here's what it was like outside Justice Kavanaugh's home, where Doug noted that the atmosphere, was even angrier.

There were dozens of protesters present. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jen Saki, who has been under fire for refusing to condemn the protest last week, tweeted Monday that President Joe Biden strongly believes in the constitutional right to protest. But that should never include violence, threats, or vandalism. Judges perform an incredibly important function in our society, and they must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety. Florida's public high schools will now observe a victims of communism day.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday requiring public schools across the Sunshine State to honor victims of communism every November 7th or the preceding school day. The legislation passed through the Florida House and Senate with unanimous support earlier this year. We want to make sure that every year folks in Florida, but particularly our students, will learn about the evils of communism, the dictators that have led communist regimes, and the hundreds of millions of individuals who suffered and continued to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology. The Florida State Board of Education will revise social study standards to include the day honoring

victims of communism. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Adam Gillette and Jonathan Butcher as we discuss how some schools are still finding a way to secretly teach critical race theory. President Lincoln once said, Elections belong to the people. Here at the Heritage Foundation, we hold these words to be true. However, for elections to truly belong to the people, the people need to trust their results.

That's where the election integrity scorecard comes in. We created this tool so that citizens like you can discover the rules, regulations, and overall transparency of voting in your respective state. Find the election integrity scorecard in the Heritage Foundation's website at heritage.org slash election scorecard. If your state or county has banned the teaching of critical race theory in schools, well, it might still be being taught. Here with us to talk about what's really happening within classrooms is Adam Gillette,

president of accuracy in media. And also joining us today to discuss some education solutions is the Heritage Foundation's Will Skilman Fellow in Education, Jonathan Butcher. Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be with you. Well, Adam, I want to start with you. Your organization, accuracy and media, has been doing some undercovering reporting in Iowa,

a state that actually banned the teaching of critical race theory. What exactly did Iowa's law say teachers can't teach? Well, you know, we've actually done this at a number of states now, and we've released hidden camera footage from Iowa, Idaho, and Tennessee. And it really varies based on the state in terms of what the law says. But what doesn't vary is that in each and every state, administrators, equity officers, curriculum staffers, consistently tell us that these bands mean nothing to them. Okay. So you all have actually, you've gone into these schools with hidden cameras, and you've talked to these individuals. What are they telling you? What have you discovered?

So it really depends on the district. But what they tell us first of all is that they simply change the word and do the exact same thing. Some tell us instead of calling it critical race theory, they call it social and emotional learning. Other administrators told us that parents caught on to that label. And now they simply call it mental health. Some states banned the teaching of the New York Times 1619 project. Well, no problem for the administrators. They got around that by signing.

up for a news service called Newzella. Parents haven't heard of Newzella. They're not afraid of Newzella. But if you look it up online, they are a direct partner of the 1619 project. So that enables these administrators to teach the exact same content that's banned by state law without raising any red flags. It's outrageous. We see it again and again. They just change the label and do the same thing. So in other words, what is being taught really hasn't changed, even though laws have said you can't teach critical race theory. Exactly. And that's not my words. Those are the words of these administrators. They tell us they haven't had to change anything except what they call it. For example, in Iowa, they told us instead of privilege, they now call it circumstance, but they

reminded us that they could still teach that capitalism is inherently racist. They could still teach about systemic oppression. They could still teach about equity. All of the things that we equate with critical race theory, they haven't stopped teaching any. of it, they were more than happy to tell us again and again, state after state. I've been to nearly 100 school districts in these states. I haven't found one where they told me that the banning of critical race theory has affected them in the slightest. All right, well, I want to play a clip from this reporting, Adam, that you all at accuracy and media have done. This is a teacher in Iowa speaking. I think we can do a lot of this work without the label and just do the

work, right? And so I think that for me that I know that's also rub some folks the wrong way, if you will, feeling like I might not be pushing hard enough or I mean I just saying, you know, again, I've been doing this for a while. I don't have to call it critical race theory to know what we're doing, to know what kind of work that we're doing, you know, where we're moving on the needle. So that teacher says, I don't have to call it critical race theory. And Adam, you're saying that this is the same narrative. that you're getting at many schools that you all have entered.

How many schools have you all gone into? So it's actually an even bigger problem than that. We don't go after the schools because I figure, well, there's probably some bad teachers out there. They're bad apples. We go after the administrators. And to that end, we've been to nearly 100 school districts in several of the seven states that have banned critical race theory from being taught.

And whether it's an equity officer, a curriculum administrator, or, you know, an assistant superintendent, they tell us that they're not going to stop doing what they want to do. They say things like the politicians can't stop it. Heck, we were in Marion County, Tennessee. 75% of the county voted for Trump, and an administrator, they are bragged to us

that their curriculum was, quote, extremely progressive from an equity point of view. These administrators are not going to be stopped. You can call it whatever you want, but they're going to keep pushing the ideas, the tenants of critical race, theory no matter what the law tells them. Jonathan Butcher, I want to pull you in here for a second.

You're really in the weeds of this debate. You actually have just published a book called Splintered Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. You say very bluntly that states shouldn't ban critical race theory outright. That's not the answer here. And is that because of situations like this where teachers, they're just going to change the language and keep teaching what they want to? Well, that's one reason. The other reason is because the application of critical race theory, the only consequence that can follow from the use of critical race theory in any setting, including schools, is racial discrimination, right? It is prejudice. And critical race theorists designed their theory this way. They designed their theory because they thought that the civil rights movement and the civil rights act didn't go far enough. American law must be taken apart either piece by piece,

or all at once. And that's a paraphrase of a critical legal theorist named Duncan Kennedy, whose work the critical race theorist built their ideas on. Okay. So Iowa's law is very similar to a lot of the laws around the country where it will list a set of what they call divisive concepts. This is sort of borrowing from an executive order that President Donald Trump issued before the end of his term a couple of years ago. And here's what follows, and this is what's important, is that these proposals will often say, well, you may not promote or you may not, in some cases, make a part of a course any of the ideas in these divisive concepts. Now, the divisive concepts part is largely fine, right? I mean, they're saying things like America is not systemically racist, right? Or individuals should not be treated differently

based on the color of their skin or they are not guilty just because of their background, right? So those ideas are things that we can all agree with. But here's the trick, and this is what's important is that we should be saying that no individual, no teacher or student should be compelled to affirm or believe or act on any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And once you do that, once you tie it to a behavior, then once this winds up in court, we can base any charges against discrimination on a restatement of existing federal law,

of the Civil Rights Act. Okay. So then what's the path forward? What are the next steps that need to be taken? Well, some of that's happening already. So a couple of weeks ago, there's a school district up in Massachusetts called Wellesley and the A, some partners with the Heritage Foundation, a group who we do a lot of work with called Parents Defending Education,

file a lawsuit and said, look, Wellesley, you have mandatory affinity groups or you separate children according to skin color. And that's illegal. And so they filed a suit. They started the process of going through the courts. And here's the thing, the school district settled. And if I had to guess, I would wager it

was because they knew it wouldn't stand up. They knew that those practices would not hold up in court and that they would lose. So we are beginning to see that once we are able to identify the specific actions, the specific applications of critical race theory, and we can either challenge them in the headlines or with whistleblower activity, like is happening through, you know, the conversation that we're having right now or through

the work that state lawmakers are doing, these practices won't hold up either in the court of public opinion or in a court of law. Okay. Adam, as you have traveled and as you have gone into these school districts, as you've gone into schools, have you also been speaking with any parents in these school districts? Do you know how aware parents are of what's happening? How do they care about what's happening? Well, it's funny that you say that

because when we talk to parents, what I've kind of learned is that people view these school districts the same way that they view Congress. Congress as a whole, incredibly unpopular, but 96% or something of congressmen get reelected because people want to assume that theirs is the good one. It's the same thing with these school districts. Public education as a whole,

people realize there's a major problem, but everybody wants to assume their administration, their teachers are the good ones. They mean well. But again, having met with nearly a hundred of them, I could tell you, they do mean well. But what they view as best for your child is probably dramatically different

from what you view as best for your child. And they are not going to let any laws stand in their way. A common theme I heard from so many of these administrators regarding the laws is that, quote, at the end of the day, these teachers can close the doors and do whatever they want. And that was terrifying to hear, because that means there is no perfect law.

There is no, we're going to make an example of one teacher. Because as they told me, and state after state, they can close the door and do whatever they want. So politicians get a great opportunity to virtue signal by passing many of these laws. But as we've learned, as I've learned firsthand, it doesn't mean anything to these schools. So then let's talk about solutions. I mean, Adam, I want to start with you. What do you think are the actions for parents that are hearing this and thinking, okay, well, I mean, if I can't guarantee that my child isn't being taught critical race theory in school, I want to get them out of the public schools. What can they, what can they do? What are the solutions? And that's a mild way to put it, because in most of these districts, I can pretty much guarantee that your child is learning some level of critical race theory. Because after all, now nearly half, or if not more than half of the school districts, we visited. And again, in rural conservative areas, they have equity officers. These are full-time administrators.

whose job it is to get these tenants of critical race theory embedded in every facet of public education. The only solution I can see, and it's not a perfect one, but the only solution I could see is school choice, funding students rather than systems, giving parents the opportunity to pull their kids out of these schools and put them elsewhere. I'm not saying we should give up on government education, traditional public education, but I'm saying that in many of these districts, in Republican areas, there's a near certainty that your kid is going to be learning tenets of critical race theory. Jonathan, what do you think? What are our solutions here for parents?

Well, I want to echo what Adam was saying. He's exactly right. There's some high-quality polling that has followed the idea that parents do think there are problems with the education system at large, but it's not their school. So Adam is spot on. I would say that there are a couple of things, fortunately, that we can look to both in terms of policy as well as cultural responses. The first would be the proposals that I was talking about before.

We're saying that no one should be forced to believe or profess any idea, but especially something that violates the Civil Rights Act. So we can start there, and that sets up a situation where we can challenge the practices that are racially prejudicial. All right, so that's one. I would say the second is the movement towards these parent bills of rights. These have actually been around for more than a decade, but prior to now, they have been relatively short and simply said that parents have the primary responsibility for the upbringing of their children. Now, today, in states like Florida and proposals in Kansas and elsewhere around the country,

we are adding provisions to these Parent Bill of Rights that say things like schools must receive permission from a parent before any sort of medical or health service is provided to a child, including counseling services. And this gets at the issue of so-called gender transatlantic transition where children are coming to school, assuming a different gender, and then teachers are being told not to tell parents when that happens. And this is a clear violation, both of parental authority as well as arguably the FERPA in public schools. I would say third is curriculum transparency. I think saying that public schools should make their teaching content available online for parents to see it. It should not take a headline for a parent to see it. It should not take a headline for a parent

to find out what a child was doing for homework. It should be something that parents can access online. They should be able to see the worksheets, the list of textbooks, and schools can do all of these things without violating copyright laws. So that's the third. And then the fourth, of course, and I would agree wholeheartedly with Adam here, that parent choice in education, which has long been at the core of the conservative response to civil society and the problems that we see in education,

allowing parents to choose how and where their children learn. And we can do that today in a lot of different ways, right? We can do it with private school scholarships, homeschooling, learning pods, public charter schools. But the reason that school choice must be a part of this package of other things that I've listed here is, first, there are still about 49 million kids in public schools. So it is important that we recognize that public schools are still at the intersection of policy and culture. And then second, we find critical race theory in private schools as well. There have been some pretty harrowing stories about the teaching of these, frankly, racially prejudiced ideas in private schools. So I don't think that just by having school choice, we are, you know, protecting families from the ultimately what is the exposure to racially discriminatory behavior.

So, I mean, in some ways, then it almost seems like homeschooling becomes like the only 100% guaranteed way to really make sure that as a parent, you know what your child is learning. Well, sure. And homeschooling is, of course, a tremendous solution. And it's one that is a great answer for many families, but not every family. I mean, we have to be realistic about this, right? I mean, some parents have two working parents and both have careers and enjoy that, right? Some parents don't, but still may not see homeschooling as something that is a great fit for their family.

A child may have special needs that may be beyond the ability of a parent. to handle without some sort of educational therapy. A child may be gifted and talented and may need additional exposure to, you know, extracurricular activities that a parent can't provide on their own. So the point here is that homeschooling is a great answer for some, but it can't be the only thing that we say, well, this is the only way, right, that we're going to fix what's wrong with our culture. I think we have to recognize that there are a lot of moving pieces here.

I mean, that's the whole, that's the beauty, right, of our pluralism. society. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and Adam, I know that your investigation is ongoing. What do you all have coming next? Well, we're releasing content from additional states, and I really hope we can get better policy solutions, because one thing I heard, you know, many states have been pushing curriculum transparency, which I love. But another tactic told to us by these administrators is that they just bring in outside resources. Some states are now considering banning outside resources for teachers, that seems a bit much. And in many ways, it almost kind of reminded me of the gun control debate. We're going to increasingly create, you know, extra hoops for these teachers to jump through,

but the bad teachers are going to ignore the rules and the people who follow the rules aren't the teachers we have to worry about anyway. So many of these administrators said, we could simply just point to what we're doing as being in the state curriculum, and as long as we could point to it being there, we're okay, which is kind of like saying, well, we're going to teach these kids that Marxism was great, and it's all right because the curriculum says we should teach about Marxism. I don't know how you legislate against that. It's terrifying. We're going to be continuing to go after additional states, and we're also going to be working on a major investigation into that news service, New Zella. Newzella is in 90% of the school districts across the country, and they

openly partner with the Black Lives Matter organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and as I said, the 1619 project. You all can follow the work of accuracy in media at AIM.org. Also be sure to check out Adam's work and the work of accuracy and media on YouTube. And of course, keep up with all of Jonathan Butchers pieces at heritage.org and the Daily Signal. And also be sure to check out his book, Splintered Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth. Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being here today. Really appreciate this conversation. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you all so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

Be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. And please leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcast. And please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening. We'll be right back here with you all tomorrow morning. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kay Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair.

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