Educators Will Teach ‘Truth About Oppression’ Despite CRT Attacks
Margaret Thornton is a visiting assistant professor at Old Dominion University
in Virginia. Her research interests include equity-focused school leadership
development, school leadership for detracking, and critical race theory:
This coming academic year, I will be working at a state institution, and I,
like many educators, am more in fear of my job, but I also know I owe it to my
students and the students they ultimately serve to tell the truth about
oppression and what we can do about it.
I have been lucky to serve at a private institution of higher learning for
most of the time the most recent whitelash against critical race theory has
been happening, but this has not insulated me from the effects of such a
racist attempt to silence educators who are willing to tackle tough topics.
Many of my own students are public school educators, and they report feeling
both threatened and demoralized by the resistance to teaching honestly about
our country’s history and present. We should be clear that speaking openly
about race and racism is not, in fact, critical race theory. CRT is a legal
framework for understanding racist systems and how to advocate changes to
those systems within legal frameworks. Studying CRT can be incredibly useful
for educators trying to understand how systems harm students and how to undo
that harm. CRT also does not lay the blame for racist systems at the feet of
individuals but rather at systems that cause those harms. Some reactionaries,
however, have proved very adept at bastardizing this theory for their own
anti-public-school gains.
Earlier this year, the new governor of my home state of Virginia set up a “tip
line” by which parents were encouraged to email to the state education
department instances of educators teaching “divisive concepts.” I was curious
to see what these “tips” looked like, so I filed a Freedom of Information Act
request that was summarily denied. In the course of the reporting about my
trying to get my hands on what should have been public information,
administrators at my current institution were harassed by a racist seeking to
have me “punished” for asking for what should have been public records. Even
knowing that everyone at my institution had my back, I was filled with fear
and dread, but I know I must continue the pursuit of truth. I also know that I
have immense privilege that allows me to push back against attempts to stop
educators from teaching the truth.
Keisha Rembert is an award-winning educator who is passionate about
anti-racism and equity in schools. Currently, Keisha is a doctoral student and
an assistant professor of teacher preparation at National Louis University:
Resistance is my nature. The attacks on critical race theory in the classroom
have only made me more emboldened to teach and lead class discussions using
CRT tenets.
I am fortunate enough to live in a state that has not enacted policies making
my decision to double down a threat to my employment, so I can resist without
that risk, which I understand is a privilege. It is a privilege I do not take
lightly and will not squander.
The fight against CRT affirms for me that those who can must now more than
ever. It may sound hyperbolic, but I feel like liberty is on the line. If I
don’t teach my students to critique American society, systems, structures, and
history through the lens of race and understand why it is necessary to do and
the implications of doing such, I cannot say with certainty we are ever going
to exist as a truly free nation.
Eva Thanheiser is a professor of mathematics education at Portland State
University in Oregon. Her work focuses on collaborating with teachers,
students, parents, and community members to develop and implement anti-bias
mathematics education that allows students to connect mathematics to their
world. evat@pdx.edu:
Attacks on CRT and educators teaching about systemic racism have been a focus
in the news and of legislation about what teachers can and cannot do lately.
As such, they permeate education at all levels.
With mathematics, there is a notion that mathematics is politically neutral;
however, this is simply not the case. Mathematics is a powerful tool that is
used to harm people. Books like Outliers have helped more people understand
how culture, family, and experiences contribute to achievement. There are many
more books out there such as Weapons of Math Destruction, Invisible Women, and
Data Feminism, for example which lay out how destructive mathematics is to
encode racism and sexism into data collection and analysis procedures.
So how does mathematics fit in these dialogues? Why am I arguing that
mathematics is not politically neutral? I see mathematics as a human construct
(something that people create and do), which allows us to make sense of and
influence the work around us. This means we make sense of societal issues such
as the overrepresentation of minoritized communities in remedial mathematics
classes as well as in the U.S. prison system. Using a lens of CRT in the
mathematics classrooms allows us to ask and seek answers to relevant questions
related to injustices that relate to race.
To dig into this example a bit deeper, let me start with a foundational
assumption about the world. If opportunities were equal and the justice system
impartial to its citizens according to race, we would expect the
remedial-mathematics classes as well as the prison population to represent the
U.S. population at large. Making assumptions like this then helps us to use
mathematics to determine if our assumptions are true and make meaning. Thus,
if 13 percent of the U.S. population is Black, then 13 percent of the U.S.
prison system and 13 percent of remedial-math classes should be Black. This is
proportional reasoning (a central focus of middle school mathematics.)
Recently, my daughter and I read the book Stamped: Racism, antiracism, and
you: A remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the beginning by
Reynolds, J., & Kendi, I. X. In that book, there is a line, “Today, the
United States remains nowhere close to racial equality. African Americans make
up 40 percent of the incarcerated population.” (Reynolds & Kendi, 2020, p.
xii). What questions might one ask oneself when reading this? And what part of
that is mathematics? Here are a few questions:
Back to the question of whether attacks on CRT or education affect what we do
in the classroom. Yes, they do as they require a lot of explicit explanation
of why we need to know and understand math deeply and contextually to
understand exactly what the numbers mean that we get and how to question them.
In my eyes, ethically we cannot teach math without context. Mathematics IS
understanding the world, and without it, we cannot understand the level of
unfairness and then harness mathematics to do something about it.
Courtney Rose, Ed.D., is an educational consultant, culturally
relevant/responsive educator and the founder of Ivy Rose Consulting through
which she offers both individual and group services that foster critical
dialogue, collaborative learning activities, and the exploration/development
of innovative strategies to humanize teaching and learning. She currently
serves as a visiting assistant teaching professor in the Urban Education
program at Florida International University:
Before I get into the answer to this question, I want to acknowledge that my
position as a university-based teacher educator who teaches courses
specifically designed to explore some of the social and political policies,
practices, and narratives that have shaped, and continue to shape, experiences
in schools may position me, or give the perception that I am positioned,
differently within the education landscape and dominant dialogue on this
subject.
However, working at a public institution in a state where legislation was
passed in direct response to critical race theory debates including in higher
education, certainly places me in a position to reflect on how this will
impact and shape my own practice.
As Gloria Ladson-Billings explains in a video (Gloria Ladson-Billings –
Critical Race Theory) posted to The Brainwaves Video Anthology’s YouTube
channel, CRT emerged as a “big explanatory framework” through which graduate
students might analyze and make sense of social phenomena, particularly
through the examination of how conceptualizations and constructions of race
impact legal systems and policies. That being said, CRT is just ONE of many
theories that students, scholars, educators, etc., can use to frame their
discussions and explorations of social structures, norms, practices, and
phenomena.
Given that developing a deep understanding of disparities along a number of
identity markers, including race, is a core objective in all of my courses, I
do explicitly teach and discuss many different theories that have informed and
shaped policies, practices, narratives, and outcomes within education,
including CRT.
Considering that the majority of my students are pre- and in-service teachers
either preparing to enter or already holding positions in public schools, I
feel as though it is my job to equip them with the necessary knowledge and
skills to a) clearly understand what theories like critical race theory
actually say and how they have been applied to and within education and b)
determine for themselves how they can apply the theory in the development and
implementation of their practice.
While they may not find CRT to be the most thorough or effective framework, I
feel as though it is my job to provide them with as many perspectives and
tools to use to dig through the nuances impacting and shaping education so
they can ask the critical, fully informed questions and begin to identify
effective long-term solutions for change. In other words, to pull back on
covering CRT at all would be a disservice to my students, especially within a
political climate that requires a clear understanding of it in order to
navigate through district and state mandates passed in the midst of these
public debates and attacks that place teachers and their work at the center.
