As expected, the wave of anti-critical race theory legislation would make teaching difficult for the teachers who include CRT topics in their curriculum. According to a national survey from the Rand Corporation, one-in-four teachers reported being told by school officials to limit their speech about race or racism.
The State of the American Teacher and State of the American Principal Surveys found a third of educators were told to limit their classroom conversations about racism and gender studies. About one in four social studies or English teachers said they’ve been harassed about policies regarding racism and bias.
This is the first glimpse of what educators’ reactions are to the new limitations on teaching. The survey noted 54 percent of teachers and principals oppose the legislation and the numbers were even higher for educators of color.
Read more about the survey from NBC News:
“It’s heartbreaking for our youth, who won’t be getting the high-caliber education that they could be getting from a multimedia, multicultural, global era,” said Tony Diaz, the writer, activist and professor who started the Librotraficante movement a decade ago, “smuggling” forbidden Chicano history and other books from Texas into Arizona to defy a ban on Mexican American studies in the state.
Diaz, who’s a professor of English at Houston Community College, said the numbers reflected in the teacher survey show the “damage” that “censorship campaigns” have done to the morale of educators everywhere.
The Rand survey said teachers raised concerns they weren’t being allowed to include more diverse perspectives in their curriculum and struggled to square their lesson plans with districtwide and statewide policies on critical race theory.
“I have had parents come in and say, ‘If this is what you’re going to teach, my student doesn’t need to know about this,’” an unnamed teacher said in the report.
As of June 2022, UCLA’s School of Law CRT Forward Tracking Project found that anti-CRT measures have been taken in literally every state except Delaware. The politicization of education has taken a toll on educators. The survey found educators who reported being harassed about political issues considered leaving their jobs.
Think about it. Black students in the schools where anti-CRT measures have been enforced have had to watch their own history be silenced for the sake of their white peers (and parents) avoiding guilt. Then, they may have seen their teachers leaving the school after losing the fight to include CRT in their curriculum.
Nearly every anti-CRT complaint has come from the mouth of a white parent, never their child.