California voters said it again loud and clear this past election: Racial discrimination should have no place in government or public education. Now, a new transparency effort could help Golden State parents make sure that schools don’t quietly teach their children the opposite.
Just 24 hours after Californians overwhelmingly defeated Proposition 16 in 2020—which would have allowed public institutions to go back to discriminating against applicants on the basis of race and sex—its proponents refused to abandon their crusade, declaring: “We see from election results here and elsewhere, that there is work to enlist more champions in the fight against structural racism and gender discrimination.”
In a sort of bizarre irony, that is, champions against structural racism are apparently needed…so that we can re-establish racial discrimination into our laws.
Unfortunately, nowhere is the pool of potential new “champions” larger than among the rising generation of California students, whose minds have yet to be shaped by a worldview that believes we should treat people differently based on the color of their skin.
This worldview, part of the ascendant dogma of “critical race theory” (CRT), is now being promoted across the country, as new programs like the California-based “Equitable Math” curricula call for “critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms,” while de-emphasizing the importance of actual arithmetic literacy.
Indeed, as echoed unapologetically by the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, “it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks…including critical race theory.”
It’s no surprise that California parents are rising up in alarm, with even the Los Angeles Times Daily Pilot recently reporting the unanimous opposition among parents who appeared at the Orange County school board against new CRT-aligned curricula. Parents, the Pilot reported, like Linda Padilla-Smyth, “mother of two biracial daughters, [who] worried the curriculum would divide students by teaching them to cast white people as oppressors and people of color as victims.”
Yet the media and other CRT apologists have rather shamelessly tried to tell parents that critical race theory is not taught in their schools, forcing families to identify, expose, and navigate this radical content on their own.
Fortunately, this may all be about to change.
The Goldwater Institute, where I work, has launched the Academic Transparency initiative to shine a light on the corrosive political ideologies now permeating our schools. The Institute’s model policy—adaptable for use by states and local school boards alike—would ensure that parents and governing board members would finally have an honest and unobstructed view of the content being assigned to students, allowing them to engage with and respond to it before their children are locked into a given schooling environment and before their kids bring a politically charged assignment home from school.
Proponents of CRT have already warned that academic transparency would be “devastating” to the schools most actively trying to push their ideology, as it would equip families to identify, resist, or escape such instruction. Yet academic transparency is now on the march in states across the country, from bright blue Illinois, to deep red Texas, and purple states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Of course, lawmakers in Sacramento may resist statewide transparency, but parents and school board members in local communities now have it within their power to bring transparency and parental awareness to their schools directly.
Advocates of CRT and other politically radical content surely plan to continue slipping their ideology quietly in front of our kids in the classroom using supplemental materials like the academically discredited New York Times “1619 Project,” while placing the burden on parents to discover where and when such content is being used.But with academic transparency in place, parents will be able to easily identify which schools have succumbed to political crusades, and which have retained their original academic mission.
Californians did the right thing in sending the proponents of racial discrimination packing this past November. Now, they can begin the work of keeping those same views out of the classroom. As in so many areas of life, when it comes to toxic teachings, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy and the director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy at the Goldwater Institute. To read more about Goldwater’s efforts to shine a light on what kids are being taught in school, visit https://goldwaterinstitute.org/academictransparency/.
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