Legal Docket - Parents criticize critical race theory

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 2nd day of August, 2021. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

School boards and news rooms around the country are getting an earful from parents.

Here’s a father in Illinois:

SMITH: You talk about critical race theory which is pretty much gonna be teaching kids how to hate each other, how to dislike each other. Martin Luther King said he wanted his kids to grow up in a world where they are judged by the content of their what? Character. Not their skin.

Two mothers in Virginia:

BRANDY: Yes, I don't want critical theory, not just critical race theory, but critical theory taught in our classrooms.

ONDERCHAIN: And I want the school to get the politics out of the classroom.

REICHARD: Some of the parents you just heard have taken another step in their opposition to political ideology in the schools: They are suing the school boards or officials in charge.

One case arises out of Democracy Prep School in Las Vegas.

High school senior William Clark attended a mandatory class called Sociology of Change that particularly rankled him. He’s biracial, with a black mother and a white father.

Here’s William Clark’s mother, Gabriel Clark:

CLARK: I was mostly outraged that this was being taught at all, but principally that they were asking my son to reveal identities that are protected. You can't do that at a job. You shouldn't be able to do it at a school. It put a target on my son's back.

Clark and his mother sued, alleging violation of his First Amendment rights. Their lawyer is Daniel Suhr with the Liberty Justice Center.

SUHR: William was being compelled as part of a required class to have to share deeply personal information about his faith, about his family, about his values in front of his classmates, knowing then that the teacher was going to judge him publicly and label him an oppressor for sharing that information. There's also a law, the Civil Rights Act, that says schools cannot create a hostile environment for students based on their race.

Suhr told me the Clarks and other families worry about government overreach in the school setting.

SUHR: ...worried that their child is going to be anonymously ratted out by a classmate, and accused of a so-called bias incident. For something as simple as telling a classmate, I'll be praying for you, or this is what I believe about politics, or saying, I believe in a colorblind society, I think we shouldn't treat people differently based on the color of their skin. Those are all the sorts of statements that will now get you in trouble with the speech police.

William Clark has since graduated from Democracy Prep, but litigation continues because the school is still using the same curriculum.

SUHR: And Democracy Prep hasn't recognized the tremendous damage that this did to William in his academic career that right at the start of his senior year, while he's doing his college applications, they gave him a failing grade, because he refused to participate in this curriculum.

On the other side of the country, this same lawyer represents five families who sued the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia. They allege school policies discriminate against those with political views the school doesn’t like. Views that don’t align with the social justice agenda endorsed by the district.

This school also has a bias-incident policy that encourages students to inform on one another.

Initially, only students with black or brown skin were eligible for the panel to judge the incidents. Lawyer Suhr:

SUHR: And one of the things that our Constitution guarantees in the 14th amendment is that all of us will be treated equally, regardless of our race.

Moving east to the middle of the country, Stacy Deemar of Evanston, Illinois, sued her school district for violating both the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Deemar is a drama teacher there.

Her lawyer is Braden Boucek.

BOUCEK: Things got so bad for Ms. Deemar that a few years ago, she actually reported the district to the Office of Civil Rights Enforcement, and remarkably, after an 18 month investigation, that the Office of Civil Rights found in her favor, and that the district was engaged in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination.

But then the Biden administration withdrew those findings, just three days after taking office.

That’s when Deemar and Boucek picked up the case.

I asked Boucek for specifics. He referred me to the complaint filed in the case.

BOUCEK: Right on the front of it, we have a picture of a children's book that has a literal white devil holding up a contract that binds you with whiteness. And the contract binding you with whiteness gets you stolen land, stolen goods, stolen money, all you have to do is sign over your soul. And underneath, it has got a caption that says, whiteness is a bad deal, and it always has been. And then elsewhere, as we relate in our complaint, there's parts that say, whiteness is authoritarian. Whiteness is associated with being loud. And so there's just general stereotyping that goes along with that.

The complaint describes many other activities at school, such as affinity groups. Those actually physically separate teachers and students based on their race and put them into different rooms.

BOUCEK: They also participated in these things called privilege walks, a privilege walk is where they put you in a line, and then you're to take a step forward or step back, based on the supposed benefits that your race has accrued for you. And so that's another way of isolating and stereotyping people based on the color of their skin.

I contacted each of the schools to give them a chance to tell their side of the story. Each declined to comment for this story or ignored my request altogether.

But other news sources reported that Loudoun County’s interim superintendent Scott Ziegler denies the school is teaching CRT.

At a school board meeting, Ziegler said the school is trying to respond to reports of widespread racism. He says it's reasonable to use racial equity to address that concern.

Lawyer Boucek has qualms with that.

BOUCEK: We need to take a step back and see that there's these two concepts out there: equality and equity. And these are not the same concepts, they're radically different concepts, because equity must come at the expense of equality. Equity is a license to punish Americans for their skin color. It means you have to treat individual Americans differently to try and achieve sameness among different groups. And that's the way that when we say equity, we're actually sacrificing equality, which is a constitutional mandate.

Lawyer Boucek recalls something Chief Justice John Roberts said in a 2007 opinion. A case called Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.

BOUCEK: You know, I think Justice Roberts said it best when he said that the best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. You know, public schools are arms of the government. There's certainly vital conversations that need to happen among Americans of different races in different socioeconomic statuses. But the government cannot have a hand in legalized discrimination. It's wrong, it's unconstitutional. And there will be legal actions like ours to stop it.

For a broader view, I contacted Joshua Dunn, a political scientist and education policy researcher at the University of Colorado.

Dunn says even key founders who were slaveowners were uneasy with the institution and in framing America’s founding documents included the seeds of slavery’s eventual legal destruction.

He thinks this may be why even though critical race theory started in law schools, it never really gained much of a foothold.

DUNN: ...precisely because it undermines what you could call liberal principles of equality. And it's the liberal principles of equality that tell us that slavery and racism are wrong, and we should combat it.

Dunn predicts that as parents stand up against CRT in the schools, school boards will start to retreat.

DUNN: So just again, reverse the racial categories or the identities you know, or make it a female student and say that they force them to say something, that there's something inherently negative about being female? Would that ever survive legal scrutiny under Title IX? If it doesn't, if you don't think it would, I think then you probably have a problem if you're trying to defend the schools in these other cases.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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