Republicans Move To Strip Funding From Schools That Use 1619 Project

Republicans in the House and the Senate introduced a bill that would remove some federal funding from schools that use the 1619 Project curriculum.

The bill, the Saving American History Act, was introduced by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Colorado Rep. Ken Buck Monday. Cotton first introduced the bill in 2020, during the last Congress. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Cotton To Re-Introduce Bill Cracking Down On Chinese Spying In American Universities)

Activists in schools want to teach our kids to hate America and hate each other using discredited, Critical Race Theory curricula like the 1619 Project. Federal funds should not pay for activists to masquerade as teachers and indoctrinate our youth.https://t.co/ytnLjAHjd5

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) June 14, 2021

The bill would create a formula to determine how much time schools spent teaching the 1619 Project curriculum, and deduct a proportional amount from the federal funds they receive. It would not deduct money from free and reduced lunch programs or special education initiatives.

“Activists in schools want to teach our kids to hate America and hate each other using discredited, Critical Race Theory curricula like the 1619 Project. Federal funds should not pay for activists to masquerade as teachers and indoctrinate our youth,” Cotton said in a press release.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches students to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.

“Debunked activist propaganda that seeks to divide has no place in American classrooms and no right to taxpayer funding,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is co-sponsoring the legislation, added.

Historians on both the left and the right have heavily criticized the 1619 Project’s main argument, that the introduction of slavery to the American colonies in 1619 constitutes the United States’ true founding.

“None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War” were consulted for the project, Brown University professor Gordon Wood noted in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site.

Phil Magness, an economist and economic historian at the American Institute for Economic Research, claims that an essay arguing that slavery was a key driver of American capitalism “advances an explicit anti-capitalist political message that’s rooted in a fundamental misreading of economic history” and employs “long-discredited piece of pro-slavery propaganda from the Confederate era.”