Now parents, teachers, and administrators are rejecting this mantra

In April a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Education was filed by the parents, teachers,and three different school districts in western Pennsylvania, challenging the guidelines issued by the state that would force leftist indoctrination down the throats of kids and teachers.

The Mars Area, Penn Crest, and Laurel school districts, as well as two teachers, several board members and parents, filed a lawsuit Monday trying to stop the Shapiro [Democrat] administration from implementing “culturally relevant and sustaining education,” also known as CRSE, in every school district in Pennsylvania.

Leonard Rich, the superintendent of the Laurel School District, explained to KDKA-TV why he and the district joined the lawsuit. “CSRE goes beyond and tells students what to think,” he said. “I’m more driven to tell students and encourage students on how to think.”

“The district’s objection that we are being mandated to not teach our kids how to think but what to think,” he added. “Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right.”

The Thomas More Society is representing the litigants. You can read the filed complaint here [pdf].

The new guidelines are right out of the critical race theory playbook, requiring schools and teachers to:

• “Engage in critical and difficult conversations with others to deepen their awareness of their own conscious/unconscious biases, stereotypes, and prejudices.”
• “Disrupt harmful institutional practices, policies, and norms by advocating and engaging in efforts to rewrite policies, change practices, and raise awareness.”
• “Design learning experiences and spaces for learners to identify and question economic, political, and social power structures in the school, community, nation, and world.”
• “Understand and honor the ways in which culture influences verbal and nonverbal communication.”
• “Believe that all learners have a choice and a right to practice the language(s) of their culture.”
• “Believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real and take steps to educate themselves about the subtle and obvious ways in which they are used to harm and invalidate the existence of others.”

These kinds of requirements are the stuff that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion administrators continually use to impose their racist Marxist agenda on schools, teachers, and students. The first five items require teachers to advocate the leftist agenda, whether they agree with it or not. The last item is the most important, however, because if enforced as the Education Department intends, it would essentially make all dissent forbidden. To do so would be considered a “microaggression” against anyone who complains, and would then require punishment and blacklisting.

This particular story is hardly unique, and actually reflects the growing number of lawsuits and protests by parents and teachers against this Marxist racist agenda. What makes it significant are the plaintiffs. Not only are parents and teachers suing, so are administrators from three different public school districts. Despite being part part of the public education system that the Pennsylvania Education Department funds, these public schools administrators no longer wish to meekly go along with this agenda.

The nature of the plaintiffs forces me to ask a different question: Why just sue? Why not join together to form independent charter schools? It certainly appears that with teachers, parents, and administrators all agreeing that the state’s guidelines are unacceptable, they could simply secede from the public school system and create their own system.

The suit is of course still necessary, because the state’s education bureaucracy will still attempt to impose these guidelines on private schools. In the end, however, forming new competing schools is really going to be the only final solution, unless there is a complete house-cleaning in the Pennsylvania state government, something no one should expect. As long as the state’s big cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, are one-party Democrat strongholds, statewide policies are going to be shaped by them.

Until enough alternatives exist defying the racist and Marxist indoctrination attempts by the Democrats who dominate the state’s education bureaucracy, those Democrats will still run the show.