Thread by @glukianoff

Wondering about the controversy surrounding "anti-CRT” bills popping up all over the country? You’re not alone. It’s taken me several weeks & 3 co-authors to write this 5000+ word piece (1/34)

thefire.org/13-important-p…

.@AdGo @RynoWeiss & Bonnie Snyder have put together 13 points you should know about the “anti-CRT” law debate. (2/34)

(1) There are dozens of these bills, w/ hundreds of amendments. (This is also why it’s absurd when activists on either side accuse opponents of hypocrisy for not instantly condemning every new bill.) (3/34)

(2) Laws that bar the teaching of certain concepts/materials re: race & gender in higher ed are almost always unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination & are contrary to a #freespeech culture. (4/34)

thefire.org/state-legislat…

Universities are places where ideas, even wrong ones—especially wrong ones, in fact—find their place on what I call Mill’s Trident. For the project of human knowledge to advance, nothing should be completely off limits in the crucible of higher ed.(5/34)

thefire.org/mills-invincib…

(3) Students’ rights to #freespeech & conscience should be the first priority in the K-12 context, & public K-12 students should be afforded greater recognition of their 1A rights. (6/34)

thefire.org/first-amendmen…

We think the free speech rights of high school students have been eroded too much, & we said so in our recent amicus curiae brief in the Mahanoy (cheerleader/snapchat) case. (7/34)

thefire.org/fire-ncac-and-…

As we wrote, if admins "may surveil & punish off campus student expression far beyond the schoolhouse gate, a generation of Americans will be taught a corrosive, illiberal lesson about the illusory value of their constitutional freedoms." (8/34)

supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/2…

(4) K-12 curricula have always been political. The system was created by states to educate future citizens; all then-existing 48 states had compulsory ed laws 21 years before 1A rights were even recognized as a potential competing interest. (9/34)

files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED119…

(5) Most of the divisive concepts bills aimed just at K-12 are probably constitutional, given that legislatures have a lot of power to decide curriculum. That doesn’t mean they are above criticism. Even when lawful, there are good reasons to think that most are unwise. (10/34)

Many bills are worded so vaguely that they arguably reach the teaching of certain noncontroversial historical facts. E.g. Rhode Island’s bill that bans “assigning blame” to a race arguably bans the statement “Until 1865, in the US, white people enslaved black people.” 11/34

K-12 teachers have few 1A rights in the course of their teaching, so this vagueness doesn’t make the bill unconstitutional, but from FIRE’s decades of experience with speech codes, navigating vagueness like this will chill even benign speech. This is a serious problem. 12/34

(6) Banning specific curricular materials like the 1619 Project in public K-12 schools, whether or not you agree with doing so, is within the power of the government in many states. (13/34)

casetext.com/case/chiras-v-…

(7) Misleading reporting has muddied the waters. For example (though not a “divisive concepts” bill), coverage of Florida’s SB264 has focused on how it allegedly creates a mandatory political registry of students & professors. (14/34)

salon.com/2021/06/23/des…

But what the bill actually calls for is a statistically valid survey of campus speech attitudes. It does not require everyone participate, or that political affiliation of individuals even be surveyed, let alone made identifiable or published. (15/34)
myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Docum…

It is frustrating when people ask why FIRE hasn’t opposed a bill for something that is demonstrably not in that bill due to misleading reporting. (Especially when, for other reasons, we actually DID oppose the bill.) (16/34)

thefire.org/florida-legisl…

FWIW, FIRE would oppose efforts to create a mandatory political registry of students & professors as a violation of freedom of conscience—we’ve done so before—but that is not what’s going on here. See @jadler1969’s excellent work for more... (17/34)

reason.com/volokh/2021/06…

ZERO TWEET: Keep reading for more of my thoughts on anti-CRT bills, OR click the link below to hop the rail to my book of the month award, @jon_rauch’s towering Constitution of Knowledge, out now! 0/34

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1407102189995270144

(9) Proponents & critics of these bills are largely talking past each other. Meanwhile, there are legitimately concerning cases of K-12 students being singled out due to their race. Some are documented in my co-author’s forthcoming book: (18/34)

amazon.com/Undoctrinate-P…

Wise or not, these bills try to address that problem. w/ skyrocketing rates of anxiety among young people it's not hard to see why some would want to prohibit teaching kids that they should feel “guilt or anguish” due to immutable characteristics. (19/34)

thefire.org/catching-up-wi…

(9) Legislation is not the only way to address these concerns. As @DavidAFrench noted, some of the activities that motivate divisive concepts legislation would likely violate Title IV. Ethical guidelines & professional complaints are other options.(20/34)

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/a-discrimina…

The bills try to proscribe behaviors that are symptoms of a deeper problem. In @JoinPersuasion I shared a positive vision of small-L liberal K-12 education that I hope will help move the discussion from what we oppose in K-12 to what we are for. (21/34)

persasion.community/p/the-empoweri…

(10) Critical race theory isn’t a perfect term for the problematic behavior these bills are trying to address. But critics who say CRT isn’t taught in K-12 because Derrick Bell isn’t on the syllabi are refuting a point the bills aren’t trying to make. (22/34)

The bills use CRT as a shorthand for ideas that have filtered from CRT thinkers into the mainstream; e.g., that all white people are consciously or unconsciously racist, “meritocracy” is a tool of white supremacy, etc. The bills target these concepts, not CRT itself. (23/34)

What critics of “CRT” fear is the rise/adoption of a philosophy that relies on genetic essentialism, overgeneralization, guilt by association, “The Great Untruth of Us versus Them,” shame/guilt tactics, & deindividuation. See: Yugoslavia. (24/34)

npr.org/templates/stor…

(11) The California ethnic studies curriculum helps demonstrate what the proponents of these bills are afraid of: education that “encourages tribal loyalties” & “magnifies differences” (& here is more than a little anti-Semitic). (25/34)

nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opi…

(12) What is the deeper cause of this battle? A breakdown in societal trust & trust in expertise, particularly along partisan lines. Many parents, even on the left, don’t necessarily trust their children’s teachers to do the right thing. (26/34)

thefire.org/gurris-negatio…

You may assume I will next call for Americans to trust each other again. While I wish it was that easy, there isn’t any quick fix to this conflict. Both sides can find ample reasons to justify their suspicion of the other. (27/34)

(13) There are going to be LOTS of lawsuits. CRT opponents may sue to enforce some of these laws; supporters will sue to block them; & parents, even those who didn’t think of themselves as involved in this fight, will sue when their kids suffer as a result. (28/34)

Who’s going to win in this situation? I can’t say for certain, but it’s most likely not the children.

Being part of this debate has been, well, tedious. It puts on full display the worst of the culture wars. (29/34)

Some media outlets & twitteratti have covered this as it’s some king of hoax or intended to ban talking about slavery or even a tactic to obliquely attack Joe Biden. (30/34)

newrepublic.com/article/162737…

I’ve had numerous people come to me animatedly asking or demanding that we blast these “unconstitutional” laws as applied to K-12, when they’re often not actually unconstitutional & often don’t say what their opponents think they do. (31/34)

Proponents of these bills need to realize that they can’t legislate these ideas out of existence; opponents need to read the bills, be honest about what’s actually in them, & recognize that many advocates are motivated by something other than a desire to ignore slavery. (32/34)

It is my hope that, wherever you lie on this issue, this article has given you a greater understanding of the opposing side. And if not, you’re welcome to join those yelling at me across both sides of the aisle! (33/34)

Lastly, I'd like to again thank my co-authors, @AdGo, Bonnie Snyder, & @RynoWeiss for their hard work on this beast.

If there's some nuance I crushed in this thread, please read the whole article before yelling—there's a good chance we covered it! 34/34

thefire.org/13-important-p…

BONUS: If you need a palate cleanser after that deep dive into the culture war, check out this thread of the “big middle” of apolitical FIRE cases! 35/34

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1370510441982660610

Whoops, here is a working version of the link: persuasion.community/p/the-empoweri…