Indoctrination As Intervention

The Biden administration encourages school districts to conduct “antiracist therapy.” 

 Max Eden May 25, 2021

Congress has allocated nearly $200 billion in Covid-19 relief funds for K-12 schools over the past year. While this money was intended to help re-open schools and mitigate learning loss, President Biden’s Department of Education is encouraging school districts to spend some of it for a different purpose: providing “free, antiracist therapy for White educators.”

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) requires school districts to reserve 20 percent of funds for “evidence-based” interventions that “respond to students’ academic, social, and emotional needs”—a very sensible charge. But the devil is in the definition, and the administration’s guidance booklet for spending ARP funds suggests that students’ social and emotional needs include the disruption of “whiteness” and the propagation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) ideology. The “Roadmap to Reopening Safely and Meeting All Students’ Needs” explains that “schools are microcosms of society,” and that therefore “intentional conversations related to race and social emotional learning . . . are the foundation for participating in a democracy and should be anchor tenets in building a schoolwide system of educational opportunity.”

The guidance document links to the Abolitionist Teaching Network’s “Guide for Racial Justice & Abolitionist Social and Emotional Learning.” Traditional Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), the Network maintains, is built around five key “competencies” or “standards”: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. By contrast, an “abolitionist” approach to SEL contends that traditional “SEL can be a covert form of policing used to punish, criminalize, and control Black, Brown, and Indigenous children and communities to adhere to White norms.” Abolitionist SEL is “not a lesson plan” but rather a “way of being that informs all aspects of teaching, learning, and relationship building with students, families, and communities.” ........To Read More.....