Crt

Sunday

Bethany Mandel

Why civics test scores are falling in American schools

Twenty years ago, one of the most popular bits on late-night television was “Jaywalking,” where Tonight Show host Jay Leno quizzed passersby on world events, geography, history and more. He would ask random people on the street about literature, who the vice president was, or who we fought in World War Two. The clips that made the cut inevitably involved embarrassingly ignorant answers. Today, America is a nation of Jaywalking Allstars; whereas it was once a punchline for someone to be that ignorant, ignorance is now the norm. In early May, news emerged about record low scores for history and civics for eighth grade students nationwide.

test scores

Monday

Jesse Singal

The outrage fever over Critical Race Theory

On October 10 Mississippi Today ran an article that nicely captures how America’s debate over Critical Race Theory has been marked by far more hyper-politicized nonsense than policy substance. As the author, Bobby Harrison, points out, GOP officials in Mississippi have been taking a victory lap over their supposed banning of CRT. “Here in Mississippi we are leading the way and we are driving the conservative movement,” Governor Tate Reeves said at a country fair. “We have banned Critical Race Theory — and we have banned vaccine mandates.” But the CRT bill, Harrison notes, does no such thing.

crt
Casey Chalk

Debunking the grievance industry in our schools

City Journal last month released a survey that asked eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts related to critical race theory. These included: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people," “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.” Each of these was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80 percent attended public schools. That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools.

Friday

Casey Chalk

Exposing the logical fallacies of Critical Race Theory

In a late September article for the Washington Post magazine, staff writer DeNeen L. Brown declared that she has “decided to eventually leave America.” Though when or where she will go she “can’t say for sure,” she is “finally ready.” “I want to engage in intellectual debates without having to explain the history of this country’s racism,” she writes. "I want to live in a country where racism is not a constant threat.” There are other things about America that frustrate Brown. It's a country that “seem[s] to be increasingly dangerous for Black people” — an observation that is, in fact, true, though, as data indisputably demonstrates, this stems far more from black-on-black crime than it does from a supposedly “white supremacist” regime.