Critical race theory in Rhode Island schools?

The June 2 school committee meeting for the town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island was not a regularly scheduled event. It convened to address a specific issue—or, rather, a specific person.

“Discussion/Action:” the committee’s agenda stated under its Open Session section. “Filing lawsuit against Nicole Solas to challenge filing of over 160 APRA requests.”

Solas, who attended the meeting, used her speaking time to make her case. The volume of her information requests, which totaled 201, came directly from the district’s unwillingness to answer her questions about the specifics of the elementary schools’ curriculum. 

“I am a mother of a child enrolled in the district, going into kindergarten” she told the committee on June 2.  “I had questions about her education, and you didn’t answer them.”

When she sought the answers to her questions through the requesting of town documents, she was hit with another roadblock—a price tag of nearly $10,000. 

According to South Kingstown Superintendent of Schools Linda Savastano, that cost was necessary to keep up with the “tsunami” of “requests for information… often at least 50 or 60 per day.”

South Kingstown, Rhode Island, is a small town in the nation’s smallest state. Sandwiched between the Narragansett sea wall and the University of Rhode Island, the town has a population of just over 30,650, a little over 3% of the state’s overall population of 1.1 million. Its school district is made up of seven schools—four elementary, two junior high, and one high school— and serves 2,880 students. 

For a town that averages a total of 70 requests in an entire fiscal year, Solas’ Freedom of Information efforts were unprecedented. So was the size of the meeting called to address it. 

“This was our first in-person meeting since 2020,” said Benjamin Roland, a former member of the school committee and the former chair of South Kingstown’s Republican Town Committee.  

“And then all of a sudden we went from nobody in a room and just having a meeting, right, to probably 100 people, standing room only in this cafeteria.”

 What was the information Solas was so determined to uncover? She wanted to know if the school she planned on sending her child to planned to teach “CRT”—an acronym for critical race theory. 

Critical race theory has gotten more than its 15 minutes of fame recently. In the past year or so, the term has been the subject of broadcast news segments, social media posts, podcasts, books and, of course, school committee meetings. It’s a lot of exposure for something that has existed prior to the internet and originated in upper-level academia.

In the mid-1970s, scholars were unsatisfied with critical legal studies, which posited that the law could never be neutral and that there was a single correct outcome for every legal case. They began developing a new way of looking at the law: CRT, which, according to the American Bar Association, is 

“a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society… that acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation”.

CRT is a way of looking at our society through the assumption that social and political institutions within the United States (such as the criminal justice system, the healthcare system, and the labor market) are built on and profit off of racism and as such, people of color do not experience these institutions in the same way as white people do.

Recently, however, something happened. Critical race theory entered the country’s mainstream zeitgeist—not as the academic and legal school of thought it was designed as, but as a weapon, an indoctrination of leftist politics and ideologies targeted at a vulnerable population: public school students. 

On March 3, Rhode Island state representative Patricia Morgan introduced House Bill No. 6070 to the General Assembly. The bill prohibits teaching “divisive concepts” or that the state and country are “fundamentally racist or sexist.”

“Bill 6070 is to ban the use of critical race theory in our schools and our workplaces that are receivers of state or local taxpayer’s dollars” Morgan said.

“I think this is a poisonous ideology that is putting in place a program of racism. And now it’s being passed down through all of our educational institutions, from K-12 to colleges to post-graduate. It’s damaging to our cohesiveness as an American culture. I think it should be stopped, I think it should be banned.” 

The House Committee recommended the bill be held for further study, stalling it indefinitely. 

The language of Morgan’s bill mirrors that of Executive Order 13950, which President Trump issued in September 2020. 

The order prohibited federal contracts with any organization or agency that had workplace trainings that has “any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating”.

The order included examples of such prohibited training, such as a seminar hosted by the Department of Treasury that “promoted arguments that ‘virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke' they are, contribute to racism,’” as well as a Smithsonian Institution museum graphic that stated, “facing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear.”

Order 13950 prompted similar bills and laws in state legislatures across the country, all with the same target: public schools.

These legislations came into existence amidst an ongoing media frenzy surrounding the topic.

According to a 2018 survey by Education Week, 90% of K-12 school district leaders either established or planned to establish language in their curriculum like “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) and “SEL” (social emotional learning), in efforts to shift from “colorblind” or “identity blind” ways of teaching that often glossed over or ignored the unique experiences of students who are not white, straight, and/or cisgender.

News outlets and social media are rife with reports of what some consider to be CRT ideology in the classroom: displaying of Black Lives Matter or ANTIFA symbols, schools having books on whiteness and white privilege, students being asked to take part in “equity surveys”, and teachers asking students their preferred pronouns or gender identity (as well as sharing their own with students). 

Fox News hosts mentioned the term “critical race theory”close to 1,900 times in the past three and a half months. A Representative from Tennessee called on the Air Force Secretary to remove a teacher at the Air Force Academy that publicly stated she supported CRT being taught to her students. Columnists and pundits like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson have been vocal about the dangers of CRT, with Carlson suggesting cameras in public school classrooms.

MSNBC host Joy Reid stated on air that she associated those who oppose critical race theory with “QAnon conspiracy theorists”.  CNN reporter Elle Reeve, when asked by a host if critics of CRT “fully understand” what the concept is, answered, “No. Why should they? It’s an academic theory mostly taught at the grad-student level”.

The country’s two national teacher’s unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have both publicly stated that they plan to defend teachers across the US who choose to teach elements of CRT, claiming that any efforts to limit this teaching is comparable to censorship.

“You go girl!” wrote one commenter. “The left has gone nuts and is screwing up our youth. People are people... they are causing MORE division!”

“This is really disturbing to me,” added another. “We have one more year before kindergarten and I’ll pick up and move out of state if we have to because there’s no way I want my child indoctrinated with this politically correct bs.”

“Whatever happened to majority rules. There are only 2 genders, male and female” another commenter wrote. “All this PC bullshit needs to stop.”

Later that week, Solas created a Facebook group called “Rhode Island Parents Against Indoctrination”.

“This group is to share information about indoctrination in Rhode Island School Districts” its “About” page stated. “Share evidence. Brainstorm ideas. Build a cohesive and organized community ready to take the next steps.”

The group gained 525 members in just over four months. Its members share an average of nearly 300 posts a month.

Solas’ group is similar in content (and members) to the 100-plus other anti-CRT groups operating on Facebook. In Rhode Island, anti-CRT groups for the towns and school districts of Chariho, North Kingstown, and Westerly have also appeared.

In another quest for information -- this time, mine -- I joined several of these groups, including RI Parents Against Indoctrination. I made a post in each one asking members to describe what, specifically, their issues were with the concept of critical race theory and their fears about its possible implementation in schools.

Are these fears valid?

Gregory Bowman is dean of Roger Williams University’s law school, the only law school in Rhode Island.

He was at the forefront of RWU’s creation of a course on the intersection of race and the law that will be required for second-year law students as of this upcoming school year. 

“The discussions around this course began with a request from the university’s chapter of the Black Law Student Association,” Bowman said.

“They came to the administration in 2020 with a list of demands, one of them being the establishment of a required course that focused on critical race theory and the law. We ended up taking that one step further, and creating a course that included not only critical race theory, which is one perspective to look at the law, but also a much broader focus that had a more expansive coverage of race and the foundation and current structure of American law.”

The course, Bowman said, covers topics such as race in the Constitution, laws pertaining to slavery, amendments following the Civil War and the process of Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the rise of the KKK, the legislation of the Civil Rights Movement, the history of immigration and how this history made impacts that still exist in our society today.

The focus on the ties between the past and present has begun to emerge more and more in the K-12 system, said Rhode Island public high school teacher Sarah Caldwell.

“I don’t think CRT is being forced through schools,” she said.

However, curricular changes that focus on diversity efforts are being labeled as CRT.

“Academia has been whitewashed for decades—centuries, even,” Caldwell said. “American history in schools has typically been taught through a narrative that says, ‘Racism WAS horrible and awful, but don’t worry, it’s all in the past! We fixed it, and everything is ok now!’ And that’s just not true.

“Kids learn about slavery and are taught that the Civil War was a one-and-done solution. They learn about the Civil Rights movement and the Jim Crow era with a heavy emphasis on the fact that black people achieved this through nonviolence and nonviolence alone,” she said.

Annalise Hartaway, another RI public school teacher, teaches social studies, including one class specifically on the history of black people in the United States. 

“How do you teach a class on the black experience without talking about current events—the BLM movement, the police brutality riots, all of that?” said Hartaway.

“Students have questions, and it's our job to answer those questions. And those answers lie in the sometimes ugly history of our nation.

“What me and my colleagues do is present information and hope we’ve taught our students to think critically, to make decisions by and for themselves. To look into something with more than one point of view. And sometimes, with some subjects, that can be uncomfortable. But that’s not a bad thing, to be uncomfortable while you’re learning.”

Hartaway thinks the anti-American sentiment is unfounded.

“There’s nobody who sits in my classroom, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity, etc., that doesn’t in some way benefit from the way our country became so powerful. Does that mean they should feel horrible guilt and resentment? Of course not.”

Several current and former Rhode Island public school students have no recollection of CRT in their curriculum.

2017 South Kingstown High School graduate Eli O’Brien said, “It kind of took me by surprise that there’s so much discussion about schools being too liberal, because growing up, a lot of times it felt like the opposite.

He felt that in-school bullying was the impetus for curricular changes.

“Like, the expectation of middle and high school was always that kids were going to get bullied—for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or being transgender. Black kids hung out with Black kids and white kids hung out with white kids and there weren't many mixed-race friend groups.  It was expected that you weren’t going to get a teacher outright explaining that those things happened,” he said.

“And now, when some teachers and schools are sort of trying to change that, all of a sudden parents are furious and saying their kids are being indoctrinated. It’s strange.”

Sofia DeSimone also graduated from South Kingstown in 2017 and recently finished a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Columbia University.

“If the right is so sick of having these liberal, snowflake ideologies pushed down their throats, as they claim, then how about they start advocating for real change that will help solve the real issues these diversity and inclusion initiatives are created to help offset? And for the left, how about instead of playing into these ridiculous culture war fights, you start actually implementing progressive policies like you keep telling us you’re going to?” she asked.

South Kingstown’s June 2 school committee meeting ended up lasting more than four hours and eventually resulted in a decision to not, as it was proposed, take legal action against Nicole Solas. 

Still, Solas took to the national media, speaking on Fox News and the Glenn Beck podcast. Her story has been featured on NBC News, the New York Post and the Daily Mail. 

Her legal challenges aren’t over, either.

The Rhode Island chapter of the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the nation, filed two lawsuits against her earlier this month pertaining to the records’ requests.

Roland Benjamin originally went to that June 2 meeting to hear about a different agenda item. The board never got to it.

“Instead, we get hours and hours of people getting up on their soapbox and talking about—well, not even really about CRT, whatever it is. Just talking about themselves and their opinions and everything from how Solas is a white supremacist to how the NEA is evil,” he said.

“It just seemed like a waste of time. The whole time I was thinking, ‘Can we just talk about the real issues now, please?”