Anti-Racism and Democracy in Our Schools
Anti-Racism and Democracy in Our Schools
It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week. The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical Race Theory and the “leftist” takeover of education. Not surprisingly, Youngkin hammered McAuliffe with this quote in TV and web ads.
So what should McAuliffe have said instead? Imagine a response like this:
“My opponent wants our schools to take wide detours around any mention of racism in history, politics or economics. He says this is how parents can take back control of their kids’ education. I say exactly the opposite. Everything we’ve seen—opinion polls, demonstrations, and local school board conversations—tells us that Virginia’s parents want to improve education on all fronts, including better informed treatment of racial inequality and ways we can end it. They don’t want any particular ideology, but they do want schools that address racism honestly and reflect our shared desire to rise above it.”
You can change the words to your own liking, but the key point is that it is possible to be for both anti-racism and democracy in education.
So why wasn’t this the message in Virginia or in the United States overall? One reason might be the technocratic biases of the administrative class that has predominant power within the Democratic Party. They are for a properly managed education system insulated from the whims of the common folk who can only gum it up. Their knee jerk reaction to a Republican call for parents to rebel against progressive directions in education is to reject parental involvement in general.
Another reason, with historical roots in the first, is that the current dogma in anti-racism is that white supremacy is in America’s “DNA” (a biologically dubious metaphor), and that all whites, knowingly or not, are implicit racists whose biggest contribution to the cause would be to step aside and keep their mouths shut. If that’s what you think, the idea that a democratic upswell of parents, many or most white, could be a force for progress against racism is a dangerous illusion.
Is it no longer possible to even imagine a conjoining of popular power and opposition to bigotry? If not, we’re doomed.
“Is it no longer possible to even imagine a conjoining of popular power and opposition to bigotry?”
It is certainly possible to imagine. To achieve it will require eternal vigilance. I’m not aware of DNA evidence for a genetic trait of white supremacy, but a casual familiarity with the history of our species reveals that we are hard-wired for tribalism. White supremacy is merely one–albeit pernicious–manifestation of tribalism. To conjoin popular power and opposition to bigotry will require that such power be directed at preventing the consequences of bigotry. We can never extirpate bigotry. Under the right circumstances, each of us is a Nazi.
Given that a large majority of Virginians live in local school districts with elected school boards then McAuliffe’s gaffe reflected cognitive dissonance towards current state law as well as democracy in general.
https://acluva.org/en/press-releases/why-we-have-and-should-have-elected-school-boards-virginia
By Kent Willis, Executive Director, ACLU of Virginia
In 1992, Virginia became the last state in the nation to allow elected school boards. Within a few years, voters in more than 80% of Virginia’s school districts decided to trade their old appointed school boards for elected ones…
As far as racism and democracy go, then hypocrisy is the bigger problem there.
When I moved to Richmond VA in 1967, then it was the most racist place that I had ever lived since I began to be socially aware from participation in public school and Sunday school. Later then I came to know that Fredericksburg where I was born and lived through my fifth birthday was even worse. While living in Fredericksburg as a preschool child, then the children of our black neighbors would throw sticks and stones over our fence when they passed by in the back alley. They never hit me, but not necessarily for lack of trying. No, we were not integrated back then, not exactly. We were poor and lived on the wrong side of the tracks just like the blacks, us on the block between the blacks and the tracks, which was convenient to the pants factory where my mother worked as well as the lowest rent white block in town. Since 1967 then Richmond VA has come to have a lot more government funding problems, but racism is unknown here now in no small part due to white flight out into the counties. We had some Unite the Right demonstrators from out of town, but they left safely and quickly under police protection. Many whites in the professional class do still live in the city near the state university zones and the wealthy have their own upscale zip codes between the river and the private suburban university.
When I graduated from rural Orange County High School then I had no idea how much one person, Marion duPont Scott, had positively influenced race relations in Orange despite that I knew of her there and my dad had done work for her. Growing up mostly in Prince William County before my dad getting the concession rights for Lake Orange after my junior year in high school, then I had never before seen overt racism, just the quiet kind which is as insidious as it is subtle, but rarely perceived by the young unless they are among the objects of abuse. But in Orange there was not even that. My own dad turned out to be the most racist person that I knew there and he regularly ate, fished, and drank with black men, objecting only to the “uppity blacks” that he saw on the evening news.
There are too morals to my story. Anything made by humans can be changed by humans, either for better or worse. Even just one very influential person can make more change than hundreds of ordinary fools can resist.
Peter:
During my time in Grade Schools and High Schools, I do not recall any time where parents were involved in deciding what was taught in it either. Of course, there were PTAs involved in the schools and supporting functions. I do not remember parents laying down the law to principals or school boards in Chicago. The atmosphere was pretty calm till the sixties hit.
The northwest side was distinctly middle and working class people living in bungalows and in range of neighborhood schools. Protests were starting with walkouts by students over the lack of black educators, the use of portable trailers (Willis trailers) in predominantly black areas of the city, and the overall segregation of white schools nearby with room to spare for the addition of black students. This was the overall atmosphere in the sixties.
Was too young or ignorant to grasp the significance.
My high school was the forerunner of magnet schools and was one of only a few in Chicago and located next to Riverview park, an amusement park. We were integrated and the school drew from the upper half of the city. You took the CTA busses to get there and often times spent the ride standing up with your drafting board tucked under your arm. You got along if you were going to survive there. I was fortunate to get into this high school.
I do not recall my father and mother ever complaining about the curriculum. Then too if I had said something about it, it was pretty much accepted as their being right and we were there for a purpose to learn what was taught. I think this has changed in that parents want to make sure that what they want is taught rather than accepted studies decided by educators.
The question to ask is whether all schools are passing through their halls and doors students who can manage in the world today. My high school had every type of shop in it known to mankind. Those who could not excel in academics requiring studies to be successful in later life could go in a different route and learn house framing, auto repair, drafting, machine shop, etc. You still had to take English, history, and Math courses though. Just not as much,
That part of the high school is gone now. And Lane now pushes academics. Big mistake. It was then parents should have been involved. The resource was there to train students.
You are correct in that a hopeful governor to be should have been wise enough to be more political in an answer rather than telling parents to butt-out. But then, maybe we are too honest at times.
States differ in how textbooks are selected, whether at the state or local board level. Elected local school boards give parents a lot more influence over curriculum in states where local school boards select text books. The most recent information that I could find said that twenty states selected at the state board level and thirty at the local school board level. My state (VA) selects at the State Board of Education although districts can petition the state to allow alternatives.
Even local school boards that cannot choose their own text books have power over curriculum and if those local school boards are elected then so do parents. Few states had elected school boards when I was a kid in school.