National Review is the latest to cover AIM’s Critical Race Theory Investigation
March 25, 2022
Originally published at National Review
School Administrators ‘Worm Around’ Laws Banning Critical Race Theory, Undercover Videos Reveal
By Caroline Downey – March 25, 2022
As the intra-right debate over anti–critical race theory laws continues, new evidence has emerged to support the notion that the laws are toothless because ultimately teachers in the classrooms decide what is taught.
In key Republican-dominated states across the country, the sentiment among school-district officials is that the CRT bans don’t affect them, according to a compilation of undercover interviews recorded in Idaho and Tennessee by Accuracy in Media (AIM), a conservative watchdog group.
Melissa Langan, the Van Buren Elementary School principal and now the chief academic officer of the Caldwell School District in western Idaho, told Adam Guillette of AIM that her district circumvented the state’s law by simply renaming certain aspects of their curricula. “Social-emotional learning,” which opponents of CRT have identified as a Trojan horse for racialized instruction, was rebranded under the seemingly innocuous title of “behavior adaptations.”
“I just went to a superintendent’s meeting last week and the district was intending to switch out social-emotional learning to ‘behavior adaptations.’ Changed the label, same stuff,” Langan said. “And I thought, it’s kind of a bummer they have to do that, but at the time I thought it was kind of brilliant. Because they don’t care about this even though it’s the same as this. But it’s the label. So, I thought it was brilliant on their part.”