Arizona schools teach critical race theory. They just call it different names

In the summer of 1963, having just graduated from high school, I attended the march on Washington, D.C., in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech saying he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

All of my life I have believed that we are all individuals, brothers and sisters under the skin, and that what matters about us is what we know and can do, and not what race we were born into.

Students should be taught to treat everyone, regardless of race or sexual orientation, with dignity as individuals, and that race, an accident of birth, is irrelevant to anything.

I am open minded about almost all political issues, but this belief is in the marrow of my bones and not subject to the slightest compromise.

Why critical race theory is harmful

This includes my long-standing opposition to the divisive and harmful teaching of critical race theory, which has found its way into Arizona classrooms under many guises, such as diversity, equity and inclusion.

Christopher Ruffo, a Manhattan Institute fellow and conservative activist, has documented numerous instances of CRT in K-12 classes. One public school in Cupertino, Calif., required third graders to “deconstruct” their racial identities and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

CRT has distorted the meaning of the previously attractive word “equity.”

To proponents of critical race theory, it means distributing benefits by racial percentages, rather than by individual merit.

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Equity as equal outcomes disfavors equal opportunity. Nor does it favor excellence springing from ambition, talent and free competition of ideas.

In the Age of Woke, achievement is not praiseworthy but proof of privilege and injustice.

K-12 is teaching it, albeit by other names

What about Arizona? It is a myth that CRT is a graduate course not taught in Arizona K-12 schools:

• In Peoria, it’s taught under the title of “Power Diversity;”

• In Chandler, the teaching falls under “Deep Equity,” for which the district spent nearly half a million dollars on teacher training and material;

• Some 250 Arizona teachers proudly signed a national teachers’ union document pledging to purportedly teach the truth about so-called systemic racism. They would not have signed the statement if they were not already teaching it.

• The Balsz Elementary School District in Phoenix was the first in Arizona to adopt the “1619 Project,” a rewrite of American history and the current primary source for teaching CRT.

The '1619 Project' is historically suspect

The New York Times project suggests that President Abraham Lincoln, the man who did more good for humanity than just about anyone in U.S. history by freeing the slaves, was a racist.

The same man who freed the Southern slaves unilaterally by the stroke of his pen against a lot of advice and opposition – and freed the rest of the slaves by pushing hard for the 13th Amendment, a formal abolition of slavery.

The “1619 Project” also asserts that the cruelties of capitalism come from the cruelties of the plantation. This is pure Marxism, ignoring that free market economies free people from poverty, and socialist economies (such as the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea and Venezuela) create poverty.

Furthermore, it wrongly advances the belief that the Revolutionary War was not fought for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but to principally protect Southern slave owners from British interference with slavery.

When a number of historians who specialize in that period wrote The New York Times about its series that there was no historical evidence for this, the principal author of the project dismissed them as “white historians.”

ASU is teaching CRT to future teachers

As for CRT in higher learning, what universities are teaching isn’t simply the examination of the theory – that is, how laws, policies and institutions may be shaped by race and ethnicity.

The ASU School of Education has a required course on child and adolescent development.

The text for the course reportedly has a chapter called “Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race.”

The parent of a student wrote to a state lawmaker complaining that the class discussion for this chapter includes how these future teachers should articulate how “white people are inherently racist” to their future captive audiences of young elementary students.

Parents spoke. I'm addressing their concerns

Let’s get one thing straight:

No one has ever suggested that teachers can’t teach about the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre or any other historical events of racism.

That is a straw man put up by CRT advocates to create an easy but fabricated argument to knock down.

The parents who protested in massive numbers at school board meetings weren’t making up an excuse because they like to protest.

They were protesting because, during COVID-19, teaching was largely online to students at home, the parents could watch and they were profoundly shocked at what they saw.

That is one of the reasons I defeated an incumbent in a year when a number of Republicans lost.

The parents spoke. And I pledge to address their concerns.

Republican Tom Horne is state superintendent of public instruction. He served in the same role from 2003 to 2011.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona schools teach critical race theory under different names