Back in April, the Department of Education proposed a new set of criteria for judging whether school districts would be eligible for federal grants. It proposed two key priorities.
The first cited author Ibram X. Kendi and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and suggested that school districts would improve their odds of obtaining federal dollars if they could “Incorporate Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, and Linguistically Diverse Perspectives into Teaching and Learning.” Second, the Department proposed that school districts would also improve their odds if they could fight disinformation, ominously referring to this as simply “Promoting Information Literacy Skills.”
Like many Department of Education proposals, these priorities were subject to comment from the public. And yes, the comments flowed in like a mighty river. Nearly 35,000 of them, including from Mountain States Legal Foundation. Indeed, when confronted with the public’s fierce backlash to the politicization of these federal grants, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona backed off from this effort. Instead, the Department made these items merely “optional,” and conceded that it could not formally give credit to school districts for going “woke” on these topics.
That’s the good news.
With respect to the first priority, the public’s response shows that parents and the public are becoming aware that Critical Race Theory ideology is coming to a classroom near you, if it’s not already there. Indeed, the writing has been on the wall since the beginning of the Biden Administration. Shortly after taking office, the Department withdrew informational documents meant to guide the public and schools about the importance of non-discrimination.
For instance, those documents stated that:
“… it is impermissible to assign students and individuals specific characteristics based solely on their race, and insist that members of specific racial groups act in accordance with those characteristics.”
“… a school may not advocate that students adopt specific beliefs based on race…”
Again, the Department of Education withdrew these uncontroversial statements. Why? Because they contradicted Biden’s executive order on racial equity. So watch out, parents and students. Literal forms of “anti-racism” are contradictory to Biden’s vision of equity.
With respect to the second priority on disinformation, the public’s response shows that it won’t be fooled by vague Orwellian terms like “information literacy.” Because while that term may seem harmless at first glance, the question will always be: who defines the “information” that makes one “literate”? Left-wing conspiracy theories like 2016 election tampering might pass unnoticed, while viable theories like the COVID-19 virus potentially being linked to a Chinese laboratory would be relegated to “disinformation” status.
Let’s hope these priorities don’t rear themselves again next year. If they do, though, we hope to see your name on the list of commenters, making your voice heard on the Department’s unfortunate efforts to slice and dice us by race, and to deem certain information simply unlearnable.