In Schools, CRT Is The Coverup. The Crime Is Failing Academics.

Fairfax County High School Principals, Virginia – This is the good news! Not available valuable academic awards from top-performing students — around the time the school system hired a consultant that promised “equal outcomes for every student, without exception” — has shocked the nation. How can schools go from encouraging academic excellence to seeming to suppress them? What about our nation’s brightest and best?

This latest scandal effectively dispenses with a misconception that has confused the debate over politicized schools for three years: The most important way you’ll see Critical Race Theory (CRT) manifest in your school system isn’t through discussions of race at all. It’s through lowered academic standards and the rejection of the idea that excellence even exists.

Leftist activists present CRT — or as its proponents in K-12 call it, “equity” — as being about teaching about slavery (as if every American school doesn’t already do that). However, I spent two years researching the subject. Book on these activists’ takeover of American schools, and it quickly became clear that the real, underlying story was much more important, if less politically flashy: schools’ abject failure to actually help kids learn, and the dishonest tactics they’ll use to keep you from realizing it.

One of the most striking charts I ever saw was from 2015. It showed one axis the terrible state of academic achievement in New York City schools. In many schools, most students failed the state math exam known as the Regents. The other axis was determined by the math class grades. Here the story looked much different: Almost everyone got passing grades — even when they failed the standardized exam covering the same material.

There was no correlation between passing the objective and getting a passing score on the letter grade. The Science School for Exploration and Discovery (Bronx) saw 94% passing their math classes, while only 2% of their math exams passed.

Letter grades were, in other words: meaningless They were also arguably fraud. Parents were being misled by educators. Ninety percent of parents believe that their children are at grade level. Yet, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam only 11% of U.S. twelve-year-olds are proficient or advanced in history and 22% are proficient in science.

Those inflated grades aren’t a favor to little Johnny. They’re the desperate lies a suspect tells to the detective when he knows he’s about to be busted.

Teachers lied to parents and taxpayers for decades in order to placate them. FairTest, a teachers union front group, demonized standardized tests. “high-stakes.” They claimed that teachers stifle creativity and impede creativity. “teach to the test.”

In reality, state exams have very few repercussions on students and are used only as a way to measure the performance of schools and staff. As such “teaching to the test,” These tests assess students’ abilities to perform math tasks, for instance. So shouldn’t At some point, teachers teach students how to do mathematics.

Under the Obama years, hiding actual academic performance with lowered standards allowed the president to tout an increase each year in the high school graduation rate, even as SAT scores fell.

After a decade, however, these smokescreens and excuses began to wear thin. Enter CRT. It’s a new name for the same thing.

CRT claims there is no such thing as objectivity — and nothing is more objective than standardized exams. CRT goes further and claims that grades are also racist. That’s implemented by a litany of policies, such as a move from letter grades to “standards-based assessments” — scored on a scale of one to five, where anyone with the equivalent of 80% or higher gets the top possible mark—or decrees that students who don’t turn in work will get a 50% instead of a zero.

Racial-equity education consultants state that the best attributes are wanting to know the right answer and value the written word. “whiteness.” Some even say Do you need homework? It is also racist. This 36% proficiency in reading seems less like the terrible victimization of children and more social justice.

The justification for CRT is not the horrific reality that many students can barely read or count—it’s that there’s a disparity, meaning some can and some can’t. That means you don’t need to teach anyone to read to fix the problem; you just need to suppress the top performers, stop measuring with granularity, then declare victory.

That works for teachers — if their goal is not to solve the issue of kids not being able to read or count, but simply to avoid being caught.

The award was withheld by Fairfax County — the National Merit Scholarship commendation — is given to those who placed in the top 3% of the nation. In a world that is fair for everyone