Comment by NoGravitas 4 days ago
No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take). It's a heterodox thread in legal scholarship. Whatever you think primary schoolers are learning about race, it's not Critical Race Theory.
There were two definitions of Critical Race Theory. In 2021, the National Education Association adopted a Business Item [1] to "Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) -- what it is and what it is not; [...] and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members."
This included "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project." [1]
Which is pretty wild, because that's a great summary of everything conservatives were objecting to in social studies classes, and provides a good wording for Christopher Rufo's redefinition of CRT.
However, I agree with you that this was a very recent redefinition of the term Critical Race Theory: As far as I can tell, the application of legal scholarship's CRT to education scholarship in the late 1990s was focused on the Critical analysis of teaching outcomes [2, 3, 4], especially racial discrimination in school districts. This seems to have been focused on administrative things rather than course content. There was a subsequent movement around 2016 to bring "Critical Race Praxis" into school districts, which again seems to be focused on removing inequities from school administration and teaching counter-narratives to "K-12 leaders". So I think that this is where conservatives found the term and decided to repurpose it to label the antiracist content which was being incorporated into social studies courses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210705234008/https://ra.nea.or...
[2] https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/22/02/state-critica...
[3] https://thrive.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Just%20what%2...
[4] https://ed.fullerton.edu/lift/_resources/pdfs/multicultural_...
[5] https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Envisioning-a-Critical-R...
> No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take).
Yes and no.
You are correct that almost no one is learning full CRT legal theory in K-12.
That said, CRT principles have expanded beyond legal studies, and they have certainly made their way into classrooms. Here is an example of an article that makes a case for it:
https://www.uclalawreview.org/yes-critical-race-theory-shoul...
I’m not sure if you know many education academics, but I assure you that CRT and derivatives thereof have been some low-hanging fruit in education research for over two decades (i.e., relatively easy to get published).