A Washington think-tank on Tuesday revealed the discovery of a guidebook detailing the extent to which teachers unions have aligned themselves with Marxist-orientated Critical Race Theory.
NEWLY DISCOVERED: NEA guidebook reveals the lengths to which #teachers’ #unions have been laying the groundwork for neo-Marxism for some time.https://t.co/2BxlZGEEY5#CRT @BreitbartNews @nypost @newsmax @OANN @RedState pic.twitter.com/lCVr7OqUnU
— Freedom Foundation (Parler: @FreedomFoundation) (@FreedomFdtn) August 25, 2021
The Freedom Foundation said the discovery shows that while the teachers unions have tried to downplay CRT publicly, their plans to promote the controversial curriculum have been more extensive than many think.
“The guidebook—which has not garnered any attention outside union circles—reveals the lengths to which teachers’ unions have been laying the groundwork for these movements for some time,” says Ashley Varner, vice president of communications and federal affairs at the Freedom Foundation.
CRT combines the Marxist concept of systemic class struggle and oppression (which can only be resolved through conflict) with the ethnocentric lens of the Black Liberation Movement that emerged in the late 1960s.
The guidebook was first published in 2018, well before the controversy over George Floyd‘s May 2020 death introduced CRT to many Americans.
Yet, it includes many items being advanced by Democrats today, such as defunding police and relaxing voter ID requirements.
Among the highly-charged hypotheses on race that are pushed by the guidebook: the concept that structural racism is everywhere in America; that being color blind (as advocated by Martin Luther King Jr.) is also racist; and that only white people can be racist.
The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, came under fire for voting at its annual meeting in July to adopt several CRT-based concepts under the guise of “new business items.”
“While the NBIs were subsequently scrubbed from the union’s website, they remain available courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine,” said the Freedom Foundation.
“Perhaps more stunning than the guide’s contents, however, is how precisely—indeed, almost prophetically—events since 2020 tracked with the actions recommended by the NEA, from defunding the police to woke mobs tearing down statutes of public figures deemed offensive,” it added.
That suggested that the introduction of CRT and corresponding social-justice movements, rather than stemming from a grassroots proletarian uprising, likely were coordinated from the top down via well-paid political strategists and union bosses.
Education Week, a union-aligned trade magazine with ties to many other leftist organizations, has scrambled to defend the CRT curriculum by attacking its conservative opponents.
The magazine cited a December 2020 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation that attributed a whole host of recent issues to the spread of the CRT agenda.
Among them:
- 2020 Black Lives Matter protests
- LGBTQ clubs in schools
- diversity training in federal agencies and organizations
- California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum
- the free-speech debate on college campuses
- alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings
Likewise, labor boss Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has suggested that conservatives use CRT to “bully” teachers and stop them from teaching the truth.
“There are legislators, mostly from the Republican party, who are currently bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching kids honest history,” Weingarten told the audience according to Fox News.
“Look, maybe they are just trying to raise the temperature on race relations because of the next election,” she claimed.
Or maybe it’s going just exactly how the teachers unions planned.
