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Any good magician creates distractions. The key to figuring out the trick is to know what the other hand is doing.
All throughout the course of this school year, while the debates were being waged in school board meetings and in courts, I’ve posed the point that my bigger concern isn’t about masks. It’s been about the principal. If school districts are willing to break the law by usurping parents' rights in plain sight, my concern is on other things schools are doing or are willing to do.
For example, teaching Critical Race Theory or other forms of indoctrination. Remember, the reason CRT and related issues came to the forefront when they did was a combination of greater racial activism surrounding the BLM movement last year combined with parents actually seeing and hearing what was being taught through online education during the pandemic. Indoctrination in the classroom isn’t new.
There’s no telling where specifically you’ll find it but these days the CRT concerns should be real. Anyway, the reason I’ve specifically mentioned this again today is due to the alarming statement made by Palm Beach County School Superintendent Michael Burke to State Representative Rick Roth when Roth posed the question as to if Critical Race Theory was being taught in schools.
Burke’s response wasn’t a simple no. He said, "Critical Race Theory is a manufactured term to incite, to try to divide us". That’s more than a little disturbing for multiple reasons. Critical Race Theory isn’t a term, it’s the title of a book that proposes a curriculum. As for the adaptation by schools, Critical Race Theory was the basis for the 1619 Project which was created by the New York Times and perpetuated by the Pulitzer Center. The 1619 Project was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and subsequently shared with 4,500 schools across the country by the Pulitzer Center. This included South Florida’s schools.