After conservatives began to attack the supposed spread of CRT in late 2020, says AAPF’s director of strategic initiatives Sumi Cho, the organization sounded an early alarm about how school politics might be weaponized against civil rights. The group launched a new campaign, the Truth Be Told initiative, to defend accurate race and gender education in schools. In partnership with the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, the initiative also runs a hotline for educators facing harassment or threats of termination for what they teach, in addition to campaigning for colleges and universities to release faculty resolutions in support of academic freedom. It also created a model resolution that faculty at higher ed institutions could use to formalize their response. To date, AAPF says some 20 colleges and universities, in at least 16 states, have introduced a version of their model resolution, or one with similar intentions, with others likely to join soon.
With the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, politicians began to see they might fulfill their ambitions for higher office by riding this anti-CRT train. It spawned a race to the bottom with more extreme bills in 2022, which, in addition to targeting CRT and prohibiting teaching about systemic racism or sexism, sometimes also target higher education. In 2021, only Idaho, Iowa and Oklahoma did that; now there are over 20 states with pending legislation targeting higher education.
You also see private causes of actions that follow from the Texas anti-abortion bill, where you give parents and individuals the ability to sue teachers and school districts. That led to the phenomenon of Moms for Liberty essentially putting a bounty on teachers‘ heads, offering $500 for whoever could turn up the first violation of the New Hampshire gag order.
We also see the scope going beyond race and gender to the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, which in Florida were so egregious that their proponents had to pull back their proposal for mandatory outing — that if an administrator, teacher or even a student reported another student was not heterosexual, that information would have to be reported to the parents within six weeks.
These are the surveillance states being set up to monitor teachers and chill the environment for free inquiry and critical discussion, with the overall purpose of undermining public education and multiracial democracy.