By Terri Jo Neff
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and 19 of his counterparts across the country issued a letter on Wednesday to the U.S. Secretary of Education expressing “deep concerns” with proposed changes to how American history and government studies could be taught in the future.
The letter calls on Secretary Miguel Cardona to reject his agency’s proposed program priorities for American History and Civics Education, calling them “a thinly veiled attempt at bringing into our states’ classrooms the deeply flawed and controversial teachings of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project.”
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a controversial ideological construct which views or interprets American history and civics “primarily through the narrow prism of race,” according to the letter, while the 1619 Project changes the focus of teaching America’s national history from 1776 to 1619 with the first arrival of Africans at what was Colonial Virginia one year before the arrival of Pilgrims near Plymouth Rock.
Cardona is asked to not adopt the proposed priorities, or at a minimum “make clear that grants may not fund projects that are based on CRT, including any projects that characterize the United States as irredeemably racist or founded on principles of racism (as opposed to principles of equality) or that purport to ascribe character traits, values, privileges, status, or beliefs, or that assign fault, blame, or bias, to a particular race or to an individual because of his or her race,” the letter states.
According to the letter, Congress set forth goals for the American History and Civics Education programs “to advance a traditional understanding of American history, civics, and government.” However, the attorneys general believe the program priorities as currently proposed do little to advance those goals.
In fact, the letter contends that by promoting the 1619 Project and CRT ideologies, the U.S. Department of Education would be endorsing the teaching of “factually deficient history. Moreover, the implementation of these priorities will, in practice, lead to racial and ethnic division and indeed more discrimination.”
The letter goes on to state that the proposed priorities “do little to promote civics instruction” and would instead promote a “warped view of American history” not grounded in facts but rather “an ideology that distorts American history.” The proposed program priorities would also prop “up an idea based not in fact, but on the idea that ‘the United States is a nation founded on white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression and that these forces are still at the root of our society.’”
Issues of race and discrimination are complex, the attorneys general acknowledge, but the 20 signers believe the proposed priorities will “dilute the quality of American history and civics education in America in favor of a hyper-racialized and ahistorical doctrine” and are focused not on promoting American history and the ideals used by the Founders “but instead are being used to promote revisionist American history and principles that lead to more discrimination, not less.”
Also signing the letter were the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.