CRT advocates and consultants have launched a coordinated assault on the independence of schools and the decentralized educational curriculums of suburban districts. The sophistication of the offensive (much of it reportedly originating in NYU Steinhardt education college) poses a real threat to our traditional system of community school organization. 

 

Many area adults came of age locally graduating from quality public education systems. Those recalling their own life successes after these experiences can't watch this radical, violent overturning of customs and history without wondering about its origins; its timing; its "why?" and "why now?"

 

After more than a year of disruption and tragedy caused by the Covid pandemic, an abandonment of proven standard educational practice is the last thing children need. More than anything, a return to normalcy might be sought to get their primary education and acculturation back on track. But what have the CRT-partisans provided? According to reports and parental experience, disgusting "inquisitions" into the racial, gender and economic identity of children and families - compounding 15 or 16 month of uncomfortable, possibly unnecessary home confinement!  And for some unlucky ones, deprived circumstances, unprecedented family crowding of spaces that might more constructively have been devoted to homework and home study; the unanticipated occupation of computers and other media by stay-at-homes!

 

Remote classroom learning may have served its purpose for some, but for the majority confined to home, disruption of traditional learning has got to be upsetting to ordinary childhood norms. What are our educators doing to assess the impact of compelled home-stays, separation from friends and teachers and staff, and designing remedial measures? This should be the first order of business for school districts. Pedagogical and social welfare educational employees, and bureaucrats and politicians in our municipal governments should be fairly obsessed with the issue. The scale of the problem cannot be overstated. Elementary school student populations confined to home - schooled remotely with new technology, by telephone or related proprietary means - may comprise 10 percent of the general population. In Westchester, the figure may be guessed at greater than 10,000. In the entire United States, 33 millions of kids may have been so affected.  

 

So what have Westchester educational professionals prepared for children just returned to the classrooms they knew so well before 2020? The fact is, many of the kids are so young, that the habits of classroom school attendance, deportment, the raising of hands, the maintenance of silence during teachers' and other students' presentations may not have been well-imprinted upon their young minds before the epidemic hit. We will have to leave it to the therapists and counselors who will undoubtedly attend to the damage in coming years. In any case, the times call for a careful consideration of the needs of the young everywhere; in large urban public, suburban public, and in smaller rural and small town and private institutions as well. 

 

This is undoubtedly a difficult task. But instead of addressing this adolescent mental and social public health care emergency, an increasing number of public school bureaucrats have decided to CHANGE THE SUBJECT!  That's right. Rather than help kids resume their normal maturation processes, Westchester schools have enlisted tired and discredited Marxist revolutionary rhetoric and practice in order to transform our gentle, suburban havens into arid, air-headed dystopias of racial suspicion and class conflict!

 

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) and CRT (Critical Race Theory)? Such concepts are not primarily educational or even remotely related to constructive educational discourse. They are a cruelly harsh effort to crush adolescent mental and emotional development. CRT and related frameworks  fraudulently, dangerously and despicably seek to politicize the whole system of primary education. Most significant in the near term, DEI/CRT perpetrators want to divert parents' and taxpayers' attention from the public education sector's chronic incompetence and most recent failure to manage operational and infrastructural deficiencies and social dislocations caused by the global Covid pandemic

 

Cowardly school boards have abandoned their duty to our children. Instead, they have invented a tidy intellectual frolic with which to conceal their professional shortcomings and their avoidance of the real educational and psychological challenges that pose real threats to children in the  years ahead.