49
have passed from coast to coast, and
education was a dominant topic in Vir-
ginia’s recent gubernatorial election,
which saw Republican candidate Glenn
Youngkin ride a critique of state policy
to an upset. Yet the debate has generated
more heat than light, with conservatives
charging that students are being brain-
washed with “critical race theory” while
liberals insist they merely want the
teaching of history to better reflect the
country’s complicated past. The Mystic
Valley controversy helps illustrate that
both arguments are misleading, or at
least incomplete. What’s really at issue
is not the past but the future: how the
next generation of Americans are taught
to regard their own identities in relation
to society and their peers.
In Virginia, political attention fo-
cused on a white mother upset that her
high schooler was assigned Toni Morri-
son and a sexual-assault case apparently
unrelated to bathroom- gender policies.
But parents in the state have also pro-
tested the reorienting of the state’s
social- studies curriculum to focus on
“antiracism”; an attempt to eliminate
advanced math classes in the name of
equity; new “social emotional learning”
standards that ask children to contem-
plate their racial and gender identity be-
ginning in elementary school; and the
elimination of admissions testing at
Thomas Jefferson, an Alexandria high
school ranked No. 1 in the nation. Else-
where in Massachusetts, Boston’s presti-
gious public “exam schools” have sought
to eliminate admissions tests as discrimi-
natory, a move also under way in liberal
cities like New York and San Francisco.
These are potentially seismic shifts
to the public educational system. None
was put to a public vote. As in Mystic
Valley’s case, the push for change has
as often come from activists and bu-
reaucrats as from parents or politi-
cians. Whether critical race theory is
the source of the changes is a red her-
ring. “Call it whatever you want, it’s
just bad ideas,” says Asra Nomani of
the anti-CRT group Parents Defending
Education. An Indian American lib-
eral who grew up in West Virginia, No-
mani founded a parents’ group to pro-
test the changes at Thomas Jefferson,
from which her son graduated this year.
“We’re all in agreement as a nation that
we have to dismantle the old hierarchy
of human value that perpetuated dis-
crimination and racism,” she says. “But
these ideologues want to replace it with
a new hierarchy of human value that’s
racist, intolerant, shaming and bigoted.
What they are doing is messing at the
△
The Henry family outside their home
in Malden on Nov. 18
TONY LUONG FOR TIME
