After a wave of bills limiting class discussions on race and gender, an Education Week analysis shows the policies have slowed.
Is it the beginning of the end of “anti-critical race theory” legislation? Starting in 2021, state lawmakers introduced a wave of such proposals, many modeled off a 2020 executive order signed by then-President Trump forbidding federal employees from receiving training on a number of “divisive concepts,” including the idea that any race was inherently superior to another, or that individuals should bear guilt for things that happened in the past. Some of these bills explicitly name-checked critical race theory—an academic framework for analyzing structural racism in law and policy. Education Week recently updated its ongoing tracker of these laws, and concluded the pace of newly introduced legislation has slowed. The organization has counted just 10 bills that would affect K-12 education so far in 2024, of which two have passed.
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Some analysts see the slowdown on critical race theory legislation as a sign of fatigue with this element of the ongoing battle over who should shape curriculum. “There’s only 50 states and only a subset that are sort of safe Republican ones where politicians can vote for these without worrying about being held politically accountable, so it can’t keep going forever,” noted Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “You can only signal-call so long, so it’s not that surprising that once people have done their pass and proven themselves to the true believers in their largely solid, gerrymandered, state-legislated districts, things would run out of steam in some way.”
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Attempts to undo the laws could come through the courts. Lawsuits from various combinations of parents, teachers, students, teachers’ unions, and civil rights organizations have been filed in at least six states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and Tennessee. The lawsuits generally allege that the laws are impermissibly vague and violate students’ and teachers’ rights to free speech or due process. The latest lawsuit, filed just this week by two students and their teacher in Little Rock, Ark., takes aim at that state’s executive order and legislation that forbid “teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies,” including critical race theory. State officials had cited those rules when determining that the newly developed AP African American Studies course would not count for credit.
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Two newer laws signed this year suggest that diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs could be the latest target. These anti-DEI laws gained traction after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year that bans affirmative action in college admissions, and appear to be aimed mainly at higher education institutions. But several would also prohibit DEI efforts in K-12 schools and districts.
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Here, too, Henig sees the possibility of overreach. “People’s attitudes about Harvard and Columbia and Penn as these elite, distanced institutions are different if it starts playing out at Michigan State and your local community college,” he said. “I think there’s some of that same friction when it comes closer to home.”