San Antonio— Shortly after George Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street on Memorial Day 2020, Meghan Dougherty felt an awakening in her suburban Texas school district.
Teachers received training on the role that race had played in creating the vast inequalities in the United States. Students, parents, and teachers spent their summers studying and debating how to combat generations of systemic racism. Some devised a plan to enroll more African American and Latino students in Advanced Placement classes, where they had long been underrepresented.
“That’s a small thing, but it’s also big,” said Dougherty, who works in Round Rock, a fast-growing and increasingly diverse district outside of Austin. “The conversation has changed.”
Now, however, Republican lawmakers have passed a bill that could change it.
Under the cry of cultural warfare to combat the “Critical Theory of Race” (CRT), an academic framework centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a collection of individual prejudices, legislators have endorsed an extraordinary intervention in classrooms across Texas.
Their plans would place restrictions on how teachers discuss current events, prevent students from receiving course credit for civic engagement, and, in the words of advocates, restore the role of “traditional history” in its rightful place. primacy by emphasizing the noble ideals of the nation rather than its centuries-long track record of falling short of them.
“We should be teaching American history,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, recently told a Sinclair Broadcasting interviewer. “We shouldn’t be teaching that people are unequal in some way.”
To Texas educators who have applauded attempts to offer students a fuller and more honest account of the nation’s often ugly history of racial subjugation, it all feels like an attempt to put the post-Floyd awakening back to sleep.
“Traditional history. I wonder what that means, ”said Dougherty, who presented his testimony opposing the bill. “It feels like a story where we don’t have to tell the whole story.”
Unsubstantiated claims
Monica Martinez, a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, said the legislation is an open tool to mobilize voters in the upcoming midterm and gubernatorial elections. The legislative push is also an organized campaign to undermine public confidence in what she said are already underfunded public schools and underpaid teachers.
“Lawmakers are making bold and unsubstantiated claims that public schools are indoctrinating students with Marxist ideas,” Martinez said. “Those things are not taught in the classroom, but legislators are invoking CRT, which they cannot define, to try to make it an enemy of the students that parents should support.”
Opponents of the legislation also say that lawmakers are misinformed about what happens in the classroom.
“I teach my students that Jefferson sat there and wrote ‘all men are created equal,’ but that he made his money from the plantations,” said Jocelyn Foshay, a Dallas High School Social Studies teacher.
Carmona, the Mexican American Studies teacher, said he has seen his dual enrollment students participate more in school, work harder to graduate on time, and flourish as thinkers after taking his course and seeing themselves reflected in the texts. He is not sure how the legislation can restrict his lessons, but he does not plan to change.
“We have always had the Anglo-Saxon point of view. We are just beginning the effort to get other voices and points of view, ”he said.
Against social work
The legislation would also target students involved in social or public policy work by prohibiting them from earning course credit or service hours for activities in favor of social causes. San Antonio high school senior Alejo Peña Soto said he can draw a straight line from his school work to his lobbying in the House of Representatives for his district’s student coalition.
The students, he said, organized because they did not want to be left out – as their ancestors had been excluded from history – from the legislative discussions that affect them.
“You can’t ignore the world around you, and punishing students for getting involved with it is not the answer,” said Peña Soto, who plans to do urban and ethnic studies at the university. “Legislators target CRT because they say it makes students angry. But in reality it is about being listened to and learning from the mistakes of the past to improve our country. ”
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