As the new legislative session gets underway, some state lawmakers are filing bills this session that focus on the input parents can have on their kids' education, specifically related to the ways history and race are taught in Missouri classrooms.
State Senator Andrew Koenig is one of the legislators who is working on a bill that would create a "parental bill of rights." He explained that the basic concept is transparency for parents.
"I think we've seen with COVID there's a distrust between parents and the schools. And one way to alleviate that distrust is to create transparency," Koenig said. "So creates a portal where parents can check the curriculum, they can have a right to know about their child's records and any safety concerns relating to their child and the school."
His bill would also ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory. CRT, which explores how racism is prevalent in the structures of American society, has been a rather contentious topic over the last few years.
"Actually in the bill, we're not trying to define CRT, we're trying to basically create a definition of what we want prohibitions on," he said. "And so taking directly from the bill on page eight of the bill, it says, 'That individuals by virtue of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, bear collective guilt, or are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.' And there's no question that this is happening."
Advocates of CRT say that CRT does not blame white children for structural racism and is not supposed to make them feel guilty.
Koenig said he understands that race had big impacts on the United States with Jim Crow laws and slavery, but that he doesn't believe racism is a structural problem in society anymore.
"I think a lot of those things have been mitigated," he said.
Koenig said that while he wants the state to get involved with banning CRT, he doesn't believe the state has to be in charge of things like teacher pay. As for the way current racial inequities still exist, Koenig said "there's no question that redlining was what did happen," but says he doesn't believe it's happening anymore because "it's against the law."
Adrienne Dixson is the executive director of the Education and Civil Rights Initiative. She tells KMOX that most people fighting CRT can't actually define it.
"Critical race theory is initially, what we call in the Academy, a theoretical framework that emerged from legal scholarship. That was imported into education, and other and subsequently other fields," she explained. "But in education, it was a way of trying to make sense of, given the kind of pre/post Brown decision, and the related civil rights legislation, why do we still find in education, disparities that appear to map very neatly along race — and so how could we account for that?"
She said that she and other scholars believe the attacks on CRT from lawmakers is part of a "much longer arc of attacks on civil rights."
"What these laws are doing, in my view, is effectively legislating the protection of white feelings, to be quite blunt. And I think that is dangerous as a democracy," she said. "When we are restricting what people can know, we're telling teachers, and we're telling children, 'You can't teach this. And your children, your students can't know it.' And in a democracy, and certainly in the kind of rhetoric of what it means to be an American with free speech, I find that not only hypocritical but untenable for democracy."
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