This week’s City of Chicago edition of Public Affairs, focusing on: Should Critical Race Theory [“CRT”] be taught to all IL K-12 students, airs throughout the City:

• Tonight at 8:30 pm and midnight, Cable Ch 21 (CAN TV)
• Tmw night at 9:00 pm, Cable Ch 21 (as the first segment of the Illinois Channel 2 hour package).  

The show also airs in:

• In Aurora at 6 pm, Cable Ch 10 this Wednesday & Saturday
• In Rockford at 8:30 pm, Cable Ch. 17 this Thursday

You can also watch the Public Affairs show 24/7 by clicking here.   

Jeff Berkowitz and Terry Martin assess the teaching of CRT: what it is and what it purports to be.

Former WSJ editorial writer Jason Riley (who happens to be black), writing in a WSJ op Ed last week, lamented that the Teachers Unions’ priority is not to teach math and reading in K-12 better, but to turn our schools into politically correct, social justice boot camps.

This is despite the fact that about 70% of the blacks being taught in inner city grade schools and often in high school cannot read at grade level. Martin argues the least we can do is enable these students to escape their failing public schools by using tax dollars to attend private or charter schools of their choice that would immeasurably improve their chances of learning how to read, write and do math much better.

CRT has entered classrooms via the NYT 1619 Project, which claims the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and earned its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones (who also happens to be black), a Pulitzer Prize.

Columbia University Humanities Professor John McWhorter (who also happens to be black) argues Hannah-Jones’ claim about the Revolutionary War “Is simply false, but our current cultural etiquette requires [we pretend] that isn’t true -because she is black.”

McWhorter argues that Hannah-Jones’ claim is disputed by legions of black and white scholars who are much more expert on the matter than she is, but the claim will be broadcast in our schools as unquestioned, in educational materials being distributed across the nation by teachers’ unions [including the NEA, which has more than three million members and  who gives massive campaign contributions to politicians, primarily Democrats, to buy clout and legislation that will enable them to force all teachers to propagandize CRT].

That push by the NEA of the Hannah-Jones’ claim illustrates how teachers unions use CRT to indoctrinate tens of millions of American K-12 students with inaccurate teaching of history- which the NEA President [Randi Weingarten] defends as “Teaching the truth.”

Martin claims our schools’ teaching CRT means students won’t learn about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought and died in the Civil War to preserve and move toward a more perfect union by abolishing slavery.

Further, the students, under CRT pedagogy, won’t learn how millions of whites and blacks protested together in the 1960s to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which have been implemented over the last half century to achieve a More Perfect Union.

Public Affairs show host [and Illinois Channel’s Chicago Bureau Chief] Berkowitz argues teachers’ unions in IL and around the country want to mandate “Implicit-bias” training of teachers and using “Woke political ideology  curriculum in all school districts.

IL teachers’ unions don’t call their pedagogy CRT. Instead, they and the Illinois State Board of Education (“ISBE”) disguise their training and curriculum as “Culturally Responsive Teaching and leading standards.”

Initially, these “Standards,” which are to be used by IL to certify teachers, were labelled as “Progressive.” When Republicans in the Illinois Legislature objected on the basis that teachers were supposed to be politically neutral, the ISBE didn’t change the substance of the CRT standards, they just changed their labels. 

Berkowitz argues behind this all is the CRT belief that we should teach white kids they are oppressors and black kids that they are oppressed.

Often, students in the classroom are separated into all black and all white groups. Berkowitz and Martin suggest this kind of teaching promotes racism by teaching our kids to judge each other by the color of their skin, not the content of their character, the exact opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream- which apparently is to be dropped from the CRT revisionist history and curriculum.

Finally, Berkowitz and Martin conclude that teaching CRT in the format of the NEA’s accepted truth, as opposed to an alternative, revisionist view of history, to K-12 students will rob young Americans of their rich heritage and American History, as the United States has evolved over the last two centuries into a “More Perfect Union,” that stands for freedom and equal opportunity for all Americans, of every race, color, sex, religion, national origin, creed and sexual orientation.