FROM THE PUBLISHER | School board should have known more before the vote

That program was designed to help teachers do a better job with minority kids, so as to improve the educational outcomes for those kids. The school district found the program, from a company called BetterLesson, and came to an agreement to use their services. The program was to cost $61,000; it would provide instruction to 20-some teachers who voluntarily signed up this summer.

Internal communication among school district administrators indicates that the whole thing was driven by requests for teachers for the training. The documents, obtained by The Mercury under the state’s public records law, also indicate that this particular program was judged to be relatively cost-effective. Meanwhile, a Mercury interview with the CEO of the company made explicit that the instruction does not include what’s called “critical race theory” indoctrination.

That is at the root of the critics’ complaints. They have said that the training would create or worsen racial divides by teaching teachers — and presumably students, eventually — that all white people are racists, either acknowledged or unacknowledged, and that the structures of U.S. society are inherently racist.

Rather than “critical race theory,” this program teaches what they call “culturally relevant teaching,” which by happenstance has the same initials. The company CEO said they’re changing that because of this problem.

If the training program helps white teachers do a better job of teaching non-white students, then it is clearly useful. Whether it’s worth $61,000 is another question. And whether it should have been approved on one quick vote late in a meeting, in the middle of a laundry-list of spending items, is yet another.

The answer to that last question is easily “no.” The school district — and the school board, in particular — should have slowed down, and had a broader discussion about these issues before going ahead. That’s easy to see in retrospect. But one of the reasons to have an elected board is to make sure that the administrators running the district aren’t doing things that are politically unacceptable. The board voted 4-1 — with two absences — to go ahead; we need to tip our cap to Darell Edie, who said exactly what I’m saying right now.

The school district undid that approval by saying that the money they had pegged to pay for it had strings attached that prevented its use for this sort of program. There’s no evidence to prove anything else went on, since they reversed course on it before the local Republican Party started raising hell. And, to be clear, the party deserves some credit for raising an issue about all this. But the GOP also embarrassed itself by drawing conclusions that were clearly out of line. Their flyer said that the school board was introducing critical race theory “under the guise of” culturally responsive teaching and learning, and that the lessons teach that the U.S. is a systematically racist country and that all whites are racist oppressors. This program simply does not do that.

Ultimately, based on the information we’ve now obtained, I would say the program was worthwhile, and appropriate, and probably worth the money. But we needed to know much more beforehand, rather than after the fact, and both the board and the district are facing the political consequences right now because of that misstep.