Texas Republicans showed up and showed out during the school board elections and made a clean sweep of the local school board, in a roughly 70% to 30% margin to take two spots and control of the Carroll Independent School District board, two city council seats, and the Southlake mayor’s seat.
Southlake, which is a northern suburb of Dallas, has been up-in-arms over the school board’s push to put critical race theory in their schools. They responded by what was reported to be three times larger than normal voter turnout for the local election.
Progressives have argued that the curriculum in question is part of something they’re calling disciplinary changes that are needed to make all children welcome in the local school system that is primarily caucasian at this time. The population is shifting toward more diversity, but the formerly progressive school board felt more was needed.
However, conservatives had another opinion on the issue. CRT is known as the ideology that is supposed to teach kids how to “even the score” or make society slanted in favor of the person of color to make up for centuries of “white aggression,” teaching children who are minorities that they’re oppressed and white children that their oppressors.
While no one would be unwilling to stipulate that minority groups in this nation have historically gone through some hard times, CRT seems to be hauling that hard time back into the modern era, making things like segregation, class and race warfare, and even pointed discrimination once again, the issues of the day.
According to the peddlers of this racist doctrine, the times never changed, we were either just too white or too much of an “Uncle Tom” to notice it. In other words, there’s no escape, everything is already decided, your conflicting opinion be damned.
The election “was a referendum on those who put personal politics and divisive philosophies ahead of Carroll ISD students and families, and their common American heritage and Texas values,” Southlake attorney Hannah Smith, one of the winners from the election. Smith beat local business consultant Ed Hernandez for a spot on the school board.
“The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity,” Smith said. “By a landslide vote, they don’t want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future.”
CRT has been taking a much stronger hold in schools with teachers and administrators emboldened by the Biden administration’s backing. The current White House has shown overwhelming support for the controversial curriculum that could cause impressive divides among children, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the success of the Civil Rights movement.
The advent of “Project 1619,” which literally seeks to re-write the history surrounding the founding of the United States, saying that we should mark the start of the nation by when the first slave ship landed in the US, has put gas in the tanks of educators who were already pushing toward installing victimization in the minds of minority children.
“I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history,” Princeton University’s James McPherson said in 2019. “And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries.”
Clearly, at least one newly minted school board in Texas agrees with the historian. Perhaps more school boards can take note and realize that they’ll have to either shape up or ship out.
