Fairfax School District Sends Educators PowerPoint On How To Implement Critical Race Theory In The Classroom

A Virginia public school district sent a PowerPoint to teachers explaining how to explicitly implement Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the classroom. 

Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) district sent out a resource — intended to be a “teacher facing item” — which defined Critical Race Theory, among other progressive ideologies, and explained how to implement the ideologies in the classroom. Examples included “culturally relevant pedagogy,” “institutional/systemic racism,” “anti-racism education,” “anti-hate education,” and more. 

The district defined Critical Race Theory as an “interpretive framework” that “examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression.”

“In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice,” the PowerPoint reads. 

Under the “application/example” portion of the slide, educators were told that critical race theory is a helpful tool for analyzing issues such as “school funding, segregation, language policies, discipline policies, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and accountability policies.” 

The district defined “institutional/systemic racism” as an organization, system, or institution that maintains policies and procedures that “produce inequitable outcomes for people of color and advantages for white people.”  

Under the “application” section, the PowerPoint insinuates that educators should teach students that racism is a public health emergency. The slide links to the American Public Health Association, an organization that claims that “declaring racism [as] a public health crisis or emergency” is “an important first step in the movement to advance racial equity and justice and must be followed by allocation of resources and strategic action.” 

According to the slide, some school systems have “systemic racism” akin to Jim Crow laws and apartheid in South Africa. 

On July 6, educators were forced to read a Teaching Tolerance article called “Ending Curriculum Violence.” Teaching Tolerance is the education arm of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. The article claims that a lesson or curriculum plan can be racist, regardless of intent. 

The article reads: 

Curriculum violence is indeed detrimental, but it does not have to be deliberate or purposeful. The notion that a curriculum writer’s or teacher’s intention matters misses the point: Intentionality is not a prerequisite for harmful teaching. Intentionality is also not a prerequisite for racism. As I define it in my work, curriculum violence occurs when educators and curriculum writers have constructed a set of lessons that damage or otherwise adversely affect students intellectually and emotionally.

The district also states that “progressive movements and organizations” are helping to shape the way the school implements its curriculum. 

FCPS has been engaging in critical race theory-inspired training and consulting since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The concerned parent organization Parents Defending Education (PDE) uncovered that FCPS spent $49,600 to conduct an “Anti-Bias Community Engagement Policy” survey. The survey was crafted by a New York City-based diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm called Leadership Academy. 

PDE reported that the district also “signed a four-year ‘Notice of Award’ on March 11 with the organization with a ‘pricing schedule’ of 21 items that could add up to a minimum of $702,700 of business and even into the millions of dollars.” 

Fairfax County Public Schools did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment. 

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