Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack
Republican state lawmakers continued their crusade against “critical race theory” through the 2022 legislative session, passing new legislation in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and other states that further regulates how the nation’s teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and issues of systemic inequality in the classroom.
The trend has proved to be an ongoing minefield for teachers and school districts, some of whom have already faced challenges to lessons and professional development courses in states where these laws have passed.
In Oklahoma, for example, the state board of education downgraded the accreditation for two school districts that it claimed violated the state’s law targeting critical race theory. In July, a Tennessee parent group sued local and state education leaders over a curriculum it claims the state law prohibits.
These laws and their consequences are just one manifestation of the increased scrutiny schools are facing in teaching about any issues that could be deemed controversial. Even in states without CRT legislation, school boards and parent groups have challenged curriculum choices, sought to remove library books, and called for teachers to take down flags or banners supporting social justice causes.
Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.
Throughout the 2021 legislative session, most of these bills were centered on a list of prohibited “divisive concepts.” This list has its origins in a September 2020 executive order signed by then-President Donald Trump, which banned certain types of diversity training in federal agencies. (For more on the origins of this state legislative movement, see this story.)
The order, which has since been revoked by President Joe Biden, prohibited trainings that promoted certain ideas—for example, that one race or sex is inherently better than another, that all people of a certain race have unconscious bias, or that the United States is a fundamentally racist or sexist country.
It was written in response to the anti-racism and anti-bias trainings that many workplaces—including schools—began after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Pundits, advocacy groups, and parents—mostly conservative, but some across the political spectrum—fiercely opposed these exercises, along with other efforts schools were making to diversify curricula and materials. They argued that schools were placing too much of a focus on race, causing white children to feel guilty, and overemphasizing the dark, difficult chapters of American history at the expense of fostering patriotism. They labeled these kinds of activities “critical race theory.”
The term refers to a decades-old academic theory that holds that racism is systemic, perpetrated by structural forces rather than individual acts of bias. But over the past two years, the phrase has been warped from its original meaning, used by opponents to refer to anything that makes race or gender salient in conversations about history, current events, or literature.
Several of the state bills proposed in the 2021 legislative session describe Trump’s list of “divisive concepts” as critical race theory, even though scholars of the framework maintain that it doesn’t teach that certain races are better than others, or that individuals are inherently racist.
With this fuzziness around terminology, teachers and school leaders in states where these laws have passed have reported widespread confusion about what kind of instruction is and is not allowed. For example, while many proponents of these laws claim that they shouldn’t curtail discussions of events in U.S. history, one parent group in Tennessee invoked the state’s law in attempts to pull a book about the civil rights movement.
Meanwhile, some of the laws passed during the 2021 legislative session have already faced legal challenges. Lawsuits have been filed in Oklahoma and New Hampshire claiming that the laws deprive teachers of free-speech and equal protection rights. See the table below for more information on some of the measures and variations from state to state.
The Republican Fight Against ‘Critical Race Theory’ Continues As Arkansas Enacts New Ban
Arkansas Gov.-elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders prepares to take the oath of office, with her husband and children by her side, on the steps of the state capitol in Little Rock on Jan. 10.
On her first day in office, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in schools—an early sign that Republicans’ attempts to restrict how teachers can discuss race, gender, and politically controversial issues will continue into this year.
The Arkansas order, signed Jan. 11, requires the state education department to audit its policies and materials, removing or altering any that might “promote teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as CRT, that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.”
It also prohibits teachers and other public school employees from espousing certain ideas—among them, that people of one race or ethnicity are “inherently superior or inferior” to those of another.
The map below shows which states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism.
This phrasing echoes language from similar legislation passed in other states over the past two years. It stems from a list of so-called “divisive concepts” originally outlined in a 2020 executive order from then-President Donald Trump, banning certain types of diversity training in federal agencies.
Conservative pundits and advocacy groups claimed that the anti-racism and anti-bias trainings that many organizations—including schools—had begun to roll out in the wake of summer 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests were divisive, stereotyping groups of people based on race and gender and casting guilt on white participants.
They called anti-bias trainings and classroom lessons that taught about racism “critical race theory.” The term refers to an academic theory that holds that racism is perpetuated through systems and structures embedded in U.S. society. But conservative commentators and lawmakers have appropriated it as a negative label, applying it to a host of curricula and classroom conversations that explore the role of race in America’s past and present.
Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would ban critical race theory or “divisive concepts” from the classroom, or otherwise limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen states—including Arkansas—have imposed those bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.
The Arkansas order comes after similar legislative proposals failed to pass in 2021. While most of these bans have been passed by state legislatures, Sanders now joins a few governors who have enacted prohibitions on critical race theory in the classroom through an executive order.
Govs. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, both Republicans, also ordered their state education departments to review policies and materials for “divisive concepts.”
In a memo released this week, the Arkansas education department announced plans for a future webinar to provide more information about the order, as well as others that would affect schools.
“We are reviewing the rules, regulations, policies, materials, and communications of the department and will make changes in accordance with the executive order if references are found,” said Kimberly Mundell, a spokeswoman for the education department, in an email.
State education agencies are now being tasked with developing rules for, and enforcing, state laws on classroom speech. In Oklahoma, the education department downgraded the accreditation of two school districts—one of them Tulsa, the state’s largest—after reported violations of HB 1775, a law passed in 2021 that limits how teachers can discuss racism and sexism in class.
In Missouri, lawmakers have introduced three bills that would ban race and sex “stereotyping” and give parents the right to monitor school curricula and other materials. Republicans in the state tried and failed to enact similar legislation in 2022, filing at least 20 related bills last legislative session, none of which passed.
At the same time, another legislator is attempting to strike one of those bans—Oklahoma Rep. Jacob Rosecrants, a Democrat, who introduced a bill that would repeal HB 1775.
“It’s literally a bill created to solve a problem that never was there,” Rosecrants told a local news channel this month. “If there is any kind of indoctrination or anything like that, as a former teacher I can speak to you, you can’t bring politics in the classroom. You never could in the first place.”
State Ed. Systems Aren’t Equipped to Address Schools’ Big Challenges
Clarification: A previous version of this article referred to state education systems as state education agencies. The story has been updated to clarify that the NCSL report was referring to state education systems.
State education systems need an overhaul and it’s incumbent on state legislators to make it happen, a group of 20 bipartisan state lawmakers and legislative staff concludes in a new report.
The National Conference of State Legislatures report, “The Time is Now: Reimagining World-Class State Education Systems,” outlines a dire situation for state education systems: widened academic achievement gaps between high- and low-achieving learners, teacher staffing challenges, and an unprepared workforce.
The new report builds upon NCSL’s 2018 “No Time to Lose,” which highlighted academic disparities and failures across specific states. It also pointed to alarming National Assessment of Educational Progress and Programme for International Student Assessment scores, which show American students lost nearly 20 years of academic progress during the pandemic and have middling performance when compared with international students.
“These academic test scores, coupled with other measures of student well-being, serve as a warning that our system is failing a vast majority of students, which has significant implications for our future economy,” the new report says.
But there are ways in which state lawmakers can make a positive difference in public schools, and they will require bipartisan commitment, the report emphasizes.
The 20 lawmakers involved in the report spent two years learning about education systems in the Canadian province of British Columbia, as well as the national systems in Estonia, Finland, and Singapore. They also heard from researchers about successful state education systems, such as Maryland’s, which used international best practices to create its Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, an extensive plan to increase education funding by $3.8 billion each year over a decade.
“The U.S. education system, which had led the world for a century, … is no longer a world leader,” said Rep. Llew Jones, a Republican state legislator in Montana who participated in the report. “It has not only begun to falter, it is being out-competed by other models at increasingly higher levels.”
After talking with education experts from other countries, lawmakers decided to adopt the National Center on Education and the Economy’s Blueprint for a High-Performing Education System, which establishes a framework for state education systems to achieve “excellence, equity, and efficiency.”
According to the framework created by the Washington-based center, schools should ensure they have effective teachers and principals, rigorous and adaptive learning systems, and equitable foundations of supports to be successful.
The education systems in the other countries were built on “a corps of world-class, well-prepared teachers working in schools that are organized to develop their expertise,” the report says.
The report suggests that lawmakers focus on establishing a career ladder for teachers that includes: a comprehensive, multi-year teacher induction experience; ongoing professional learning, collaboration, and improvement; a structure for developing mentorship and expertise; a strategy to develop leadership at all levels of the system; and a pathway for teachers to move more easily from one district to another.
“There’s no inference that teachers aren’t working hard,” Jones said. “We potentially aren’t working at the right model … We need to offer our teachers the training and the opportunity to work in a more effective model.”
The report also recommends that state education systems create personalized and proficiency-based learning pathways for students. The idea is to let students move through the education system at their own pace rather than at a pace determined by the amount of time spent in the classroom.
For example, the report recommends that state education systems adopt competency-based assessment models, ensuring that students don’t move to the next step in the education system without first mastering the subjects they are working on. The report also places an emphasis on career and technical education that includes work-based learning and has a focus on helping students explore career options.
“A lot of the [other] countries are making sure their students have in their 11th or 12th-grade year paid internships with businesses or volunteer work,” said Alaska Rep. Andi Story, a Democrat who participated in the report. “It helps motivate kids to see how their school years are relating to employment after.”
The importance of bipartisan partnerships
The group working on the report was made up of 12 legislators and eight legislative staff members. The 12 lawmakers included eight Democrats and four Republicans. Those involved believe that improving school systems should be a bipartisan endeavor.
“At the end, the best practices are the best practices, they’re neither Democratic or Republican,” Jones said.
Jones said it’s important for lawmakers to be aware of how they’re talking about education initiatives and open their minds to new ways of solving old problems.
Both Jones and Story, who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, hope to use the information from the report to improve career and technical education, create systems for teachers to thrive in their workplaces, and establish mentorship programs in their states.
Bipartisanship allows for the lawmakers, who have many differences, to better understand each other and act as examples for students, Story said.
“It’s a way to show our students, our children, our youth, that as adults we can work together in a very civil way on issues that are important to everyone,” she said.
