Calm down. SLO County schools aren’t teaching children to hate white people

What a tough time for teachers.

They just finished a grueling year of online instruction.

Now, just as things are getting back to normal, they find themselves at the center of a quasi-controversy over what they can and can’t teach.

A small minority of vocal parents in San Luis Obispo County — aided and abetted by some far-right school board members — is demanding that critical race theory be banned from the classroom.

But here’s the thing: Critical race theory, or CRT, is not included in the local K-12 curriculum and is generally studied at the the college level.

Nonetheless, on Tuesday night, both the Paso Robles and Lucia Mar school boards heard from outraged parents.

In Paso Robles, they wanted the school board to pass a resolution banning the teaching of CRT — though they were outnumbered by opponents of a ban.

At the South County meeting, parents opposed adoption of CharacterStrong, a curriculum that teaches social awareness, relationship skills, decision making and positive traits such as patience, kindness and respect. Parents saw it as an overreach and feared it would include elements of critical race theory.

Among other concerns, parents worried their children would be subjected to Marxist doctrine; taught that all white people are oppressors; encouraged to rebel against their parents; and robbed of their childhood innocence, all on account of CRT.

“They’re comin’ after your kids, everybody,” one man warned at the Paso Robles board meeting.

Exactly what is CRT?

Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, describes CRT this way: “Critical race theory studies racism at the systemic level, examining how policies, laws and court decisions can perpetuate racism even if they are ostensibly neutral or fair. Since its emergence in the late 1970s and 1980s, the discipline has expanded to include researchers in sociology, education and public health.”

It’s also an academic theory that has been misrepresented to the point of absurdity. One speaker at the Lucia Mar meeting likened it to an evil Pied Piper.

Like wearing masks and getting vaccinated, CRT has devolved into another political battle. Republican lawmakers have been pushing hard for a ban, and some states already have outlawed it in schools or are considering it.

In San Luis Obispo County, a ban is yet another “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist here — not unlike the call for a ban on mythical vaccine passports, or demands for restrictions on voting to prevent all those mythical cases of election fraud that never happened.

Sadly, teachers are being undermined — and even insulted — at a time when they most deserve our support.

According to one South County parent who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, most teachers are “ill equipped to recognize CRT agendas,” as if teachers are uninformed pawns of some evil cabal.

In Paso Robles, a speaker supported putting cameras in the classroom so that parents could watch the ethnic studies class the school board recently approved.

If parents aren’t happy with what’s being taught, what then? Do they barge into the classroom, demanding equal time?

School board action

Fortunately, neither the Paso Robles nor the Lucia Mar school board caved to parental demands.

In the South County, concerns over CharacterStrong, which is being added to the high school curriculum, were deflected by Trustee Dawn Meek, who assured parents that she had vetted the content carefully and found nothing objectionable.

“It is clean as a whistle,” she said. “I could not find anything in these slides I would have a problem with.”

Other board members agreed, yet a motion to approve the curriculum barely squeaked by on a 4-3 vote; the dissenters thought the public should have more time to review the material, even though it had been available since June 8.

In Paso Robles, the board declined to act on a resolution that would prohibit the teaching of critical race theory.

The resolution was drafted by Board President Chris Arend — the same trustee who has in the past said that systemic racism was a myth and chastised bilingual speakers for making their remarks in Spanish, for the benefit of non-English speakers in the audience.

“Speak in a language we can understand,” he told them.

The board might reconsider Arend’s resolution — or a watered-down version — at a future meeting.

That would be a mistake.

The board’s job is not to micro-manage teachers by explicitly stating what they can and can’t say.

That’s not only a blow to academic freedom, it’s also a vote of no confidence in a professional staff that deserves better — much better.

We need to stand by our teachers — not a small group of parents and school board members like Chris Arend who want to turn their personal, fringe beliefs into public school policy.

They have a political agenda they want to impose on thousands of students, and they have consistently shown they will wield their bias like a bludgeoning stick.

The truth is, critical race theory is a non-issue in our schools, and it’s a waste of time and energy to entertain ginned-up fears about its potential as a threat.

Responsible board members know this and should not allow themselves to be bullied into treating this so-called controversy as any more than it is — a political ploy that has no place in education.

This story was originally published June 24, 2021 at 7:00 AM.