Bad Legislation Leads to Confusion in Texas School District

Link: Texas School District Teaches "Opposing" views of the Holocaust 

Texas School District Backtracks on Holocaust "Sides"

Confusion in Texas Over "Legislated Curriculum"

Texas Legislation HB 3979 Creates Confusion

When I initally saw the news about an administrator at the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas telling teachers that they had to provide an "opposing perspective" when they taught about the Holocaust, it certainly caught my attention.  The way the media handles issues like this leaves more questions than answers and there had to be a context to that report that was missed.  This is, after all, an educational institution and the administrator who put those requirements on the teachers has to be an educated person, at least knowledgeable enough of history to know better than to make a blanket statement like that.  

As it turns out, there is a lot of context to her statement, and to what was happening in that school district, as well as districts around the state of Texas.  The context is HB 3979, a piece of legislation specifically aimed at preventing teachers from teaching "Critical Race Theory" in their classrooms.  But the bill, hastily written and poorly worded, has thrown curriculum objectives in confusion.  It is an unprecedented inteference by a legislature into the curriculum objectives of schools, has created mass confusion about its interpretation and is a gross violation of the first amendment.  

Earlier this year, a teacher in the district was reprimanded because a parent complained that she had a book in her library entitled This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How To Wake Up, Take Action and Do the Work.  The parent of  a student who took the book home without permission complained that it was inappropriate for her daughter's age and grade level and was upset because her daughter had been taken out of class and reprimanded for taking a book without permission. The book has nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, but far-right wing conservatives are using CRT as a blanket to snuff out anything that looks like it promotes diversity and equality. This particular incident served to cause a lot of uncertainty among teachers as to how the new law would be interpreted and enforced, leaving many of them to feel that they could be victims of an ideological "witch hunt."  

On the far right, the terms "diversity,  equality and inclusion" have been completely taken out of their context and mischaracterized, ignoring the fact that the activists promoting the issues are aiming at unity, not separation.  The term "marxism" gets thrown around to see if it sticks anywhere because it is a buzz word.  It takes a lot of convolutions and turns, redefinition of terms and ignoring anything that doesn't fit the opposition's narrative to get from the kind of diversity, equality and inclusion that is being advocated through the school system, to "Marxism."  But most Americans get their knowledge of political and social philosophy from social media, not from reliable sources.

Southlake, Texas is an affluent suburb of Ft. Worth.  Located in the northeastern corner of Tarrant County, part of the city is also in southern Denton County on the northern edge of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex.  It is 78% white, I6% Asian, 6% Hispanic and less than 2% black.  The median income for families in the city is almost $250,000, the highest in the Dallas area and one of the highest in Texas. It would be easy to just write this all off as what happens in a predominantly white suburb in the South.  But most Southlake residents tend to have more education than is typical, as the median income levels would indicate, and a majority of them are transplants from other parts of the country, like California and the Northeast, who migrated there for the climate and following the corporate jobs that relocated there. So the interesting development is that the community seems to be expressing sympathy for its teachers and administrators attempting to exercise academic freedom while trying to navigate and interpret a piece of bad legislation.

Restricting the Teaching of Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory, in any form, is not being taught in the public education system.  It's not a part of any teacher certification requirement, and while it probably is part of the sociology curriculum in a college or university setting, it's taught as information, not indoctrination. No doubt there are teachers who are informed about it and who bring it into a class discussion, at the high school level perhaps, but it is not part of any required curriculum. Conspiracy theorists on the extreme right have picked up on it and are using it to drive political histeria among those who believe there is a sinister plot to take their "white privilege" away from them.  It's a display of collective ignorance that is almost without comparison in the furor that it is causing in school board meetings, mostly in the South.  

There's not one in a thousand people who know enough about CRT to attempt to define it.  The nation's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, passed a resolution on it in 20I9 and during the debate, it was clear that those who wanted to go on the record as "being against CRT" had little understanding of the theory or purpose behind it. Their ignorant, uninformed, biased comments are part of the record of the minutes of the convention, held in Birmingham, Alabama in 20I9 if you care to look it up. It embarassingly became a referendum on racial attitudes within the denomination, resulting in the departure of thousands of African-American church members who saw opposition to the resolution as a repudiation of their involvement in convention life. 

But whether you are in agreement with the theory and conclusions of CRT or not, the bigger issue is that an American citizen has a right to agree with it, speak in defense of it and live by it if that's what they choose to do.  And I believe that while the first amendment guarantee of freedom of speech has boundary lines when it bumps up against the rights of others, including in a school setting where a teacher or professor has some advantages over a somewhat "captive' audience, a teacher in a public, government-funded school has the right to believe what they choose.  They do not have the right to coerce their students, and there is a fine line between coercion and influence, but that's not up to the state legislature.  The legislature, however, is coercing teachers by making this requirement  And threatening a teacher with their job because of what they believe about a racial theory is tyranny.

An Opposing View of the Holocaust

The fact that HB 3979 opens the door to an interpretation that the "other side" of the Holocaust must be taught is a demonstration of the law's ambiguity and lack of definition.  The denial that the holocaust never happened is a delusion, not an "opposing view."  There are literally hundreds of thousands of first hand, eyewitness accounts that make the history of the Holocaust one of the most documented events in world history. We know details of exact events, times and places from virtually every location where the events occurred.  

I have personally visited the ruins of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where more than a million Jews were executed in the gas chambers.  There is more than enough evidence there, walking through the main Auschwitz camp, and the nearby Birkenau camp, to prove the Holocaust took place. I have also seen the Museum of Polish Jews and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, stood on the site of the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw from where 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were transported to their deaths, and took the tour from Warsaw to Treblinka, which is another place where all the evidence needed to confirm the Holocaust as fact exists.  I've also visited Holocaust museums in Illinois, Texas and in Washington, DC, all of which lay out mountains of evidence in horrid detail and total consistency.  

The Holocaust happened, just as the historical narrative says it did.  Denying it isn't an opposing view.  It's ignorance.  

The opposing view of the Holocaust is the National Socialist, or Nazi view.  The Nazi view, which was directly ordered by Adolf Hitler and put into practice by the Nazi government, is found in a document known as the Wannsee Protocol, the minutes of a meeting in Berlin on January 20, I942 during which the Nazi bureaucracy drew up the plans for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem."  Hitler is not mentioned in the document but there's no question that the order came directly from him, since that was the way the Nazi government operated.  The opposing view to the Holocaust is Nazi racial theory rooted in anti-semitism. 

The results of the enactment of the "opposing view" of the Holocaust disqualify it from any approach to teaching students about it that would engender sympathy for it, or which would argue that there were "good people on both sides."  Apologists for National Socialism see the results of the Wannsee Protocol, which was the systematic, industrialized murder of six million Jews, as an act of national unity by people who saw any kind of diversity, equality or inclusion as a violation of the natural order.  There were no "good" people on that side, there were only the deluded and coerced, and the evil.  

Something is desperately wrong with a law, or with its enforcement, that leads to interpreting it to mean that the opposing view to the Holocaust must be treated fairly and equally when it is taught as part of history.  The language of HB 3979 has opened unintentional doors.