Nation’s largest teachers union goes on the offensive re: critical race theory

According to Education Week, “several of the proposed new business items” requested that the union officially oppose efforts to “regulate what students learn about the history of race in America” and “to support the teachers who are doing anti-racist work.”

Kentucky delegate Kumar Rashad offered a resolution which states the NEA should “share and publicize” information about what CRT is and what it is not, and organize a “team of staffers” to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.”

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Rashad’s item seeks “truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history,” and notes that the NEA should indicate that by teaching such, it is “reasonable and appropriate” that lessons and curricula make use of “academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory” (emphasis added).

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Oregon delegate Stephen Siegel was behind New Business Item 2 which recommends the NEA do research into organizations which oppose CRT, such as the Heritage Foundation. In its story, Education Week portrays the group Parents Defending Education as having done something sinister by posting online a teacher professional development meeting. In that meeting, a teacher says educators who don’t get with schools’ anti-racism programs are looking to get terminated from their positions: “If you’re going to come with those old views of colonialism, it’s going to lead to being fired, because you’re going to be doing damage to our children—trauma.”

Siegel said the union needs to be better prepared for such “attacks” from “right-wing media.”