According to a Daily Signal story, the state superintendent of public instruction, Catherine Truitt, announced in January she was pulling a contract with a child development research facility at UNC-Chapel Hill. “I have not and will not sign it,” Truitt, referring to the contract, stated in a Twitter post.
“Instead," Truitt announced in the Jan. 14 post, "I will create a new contract proposal that has strict guardrails and new accountability measures to ensure the true needs of our young and most vulnerable learners are met.”
The state education leader went on to state that pre-K classrooms will “remain places of play and learning,” which appears to be the closest she came to addressing the topic of Critical Race Theory.
Education groups Education First Alliance and No Left Turn in Education credit Amy White, a state school board member, for raising the issue of the racist, race-based curriculum (pictured below; click on image for larger view) at the public meeting and forcing the issue to be discussed in the open.
A press release from Education First Alliance says White challenged Truitt about a pre-K curriculum that includes phrases such as “systemic racism” and “anti-racism.”
Critics of CRT have learned such words are tell-tale signs white students in a classroom, or white teachers in a workshop, are being forced to embrace the tenets of Critical Race Theory even if that phrase is never stated. Another key word is “equity,” which is the part of the title of the training program created by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
Such far-left ideology usually begins with a white teacher, a white corporate employee, or a white U.S. military officer being "informed" about the premise of CRT: Because they are white, they are racists who maintain power over minorities in academia, the law and courts, politics, media, and economics. Much like a religious experience, the white racists learn there is hope: They can become “woke” to their literal “white supremacy” and pledge to work to rid society of racism, even though technically they are and will always remain racists.
An example of that ideology in full swing is Loudoun County Schools, the public school district in Virginia that has become ground zero for a grassroots fight between parents and school administrators. The wealthy, majority-white school district maintains an entire website about “Equity” that includes a “Systemic Equity Assessment,” an “Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism” and an “Apology to the Black Community.”
When a CRT-based course is used for teachers, those “woke” teachers then teach that ideology to children in the classroom, which appeared to be what was happening in North Carolina before the Alliance learned about the contract and the content of a "training module." It then contacted White with examples from it.
According to the Alliance, the “training module” from the Institute informs pre-K teachers that “whiteness affects everything we bring to our interactions inside and outside the classroom.”
Elsewhere in the same training guide, in a section about supervising children, teachers are advised that “control” is based in “white norms and is associated with white supremacist thought.”
Teachers are advised they can "deconstruct whiteness" if they use "Clarifying Conversations" about racism.
It's not clear if White, the state school board member, went into detail about the anti-white teacher training but the Alliance credits her for getting it stopped. The group also says the child development institute also "scrubbed" its website of the controversial training documents soon after the state school meeting ended.
Reacting to the now-pulled North Carolina contract, Mike Gonzalez of The Heritage Foundation says it is sickening that disabled children were the next targets of Critical Race Theory.
“It’s stomach churning,” he says of that now-pulled plan.
