The Trouble with New Jersey Public Schools is They are Always Trying to Teach the Wrong Lesson: Critical Race Theory’s Experiment with Public School Discipline Practices

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Page one of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction places the reader into an elementary school classroom where they are asked to observe the following scene: “A child raises her hand repeatedly in a fourth-grade class; the teacher either recognizes her or does not” (1). Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the authors, then ask the reader to imagine receiving messages from others as a white person: “are you annoyed? Do you, even for a moment, think that maybe you are receiving this treatment because of your race? Or might you think that all these people are merely having a bad day? The authors question the reader if a sense of anger or depression arises within if a person of color delivered that negative message. Delgado and Stefancic then ask the reader to imagine being a person of color: “do you immediately think you might be treated in these ways because you are not white?” (1)

Delgado and Stefancic glance over multiple considerations to introduce their main hypothesis: “race seems to play a part” (2) in how one will perceive the message from others. Critical Race Theorists (“Crits” as they are known) propose that “society ‘look to the bottom’ in judging new laws” (27) and examine methods for deconstructing the idea that “color blindness seems firmly entrenched in the judiciary” (28). Recently, New Jersey Public Schools have seen rates of Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying numbers quadruple from 2018 to 2024. Educators, lawyers, social activists and news media point to Covid, Social Media, and generalized “child misbehavior” as the culprits to these rising numbers; however, an emerging hypothesis wonders if New Jersey Public School disciplinarians have been rapidly erecting Critical Race Theory scaffolding in efforts to conceal their true intentions of bulldozing the American judicial, educational, and social structures.

Critical Race Theorists, a collection of “lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country” (4) are followers of Herbert Marcuse, the “Father of the New Left” and adversary to Western Civilization traditions. These theorists became disenfranchised with the Civil Rights Movement from the mid-1950’s and finally, in 1989, the originators of Critical Race Theory held its first workshop in Madison, Wisconsin. These activists “engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (3). Thus, they began the experiment of re-envisioning “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (3). Critical Race Theory gained momentum from the 1970’s through the 2000’s picking up endorsements from critical legal studies and radical feminism scholars. Experts in these fields, with degrees from Ivy League universities where CRT originated, are now leading DEI special interest groups that have infiltrated New Jersey’s public schools.

On page 7, Delgado and Stefancic discuss how CRT advanced from the legal field into other practices. “Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves to be critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools” (7). Consider the hypothetical that Delgado and Stefancic present to the reader on page 20 of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

“Suppose a magic pill like the one mentioned above were invented, or perhaps an enterprising entrepreneur developed The Ultimate Diversity Seminar, one so effective that it would completely eliminate unkind thoughts, stereotypes, and misimpressions harbored by its participants towards persons of other races. The president’s civil rights advisor prevails on all the nation’s teachers to introduce it into every K-12 classroom, and on the major television networks and cable network news to show it on prime time.”

Suppose the “magic pill” is New Jersey’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying Law; suppose the “Diversity Seminar” is the Government funded Social-Emotional Curriculums; and suppose the “civil rights advisors” are the law firms capitalizing on the opportunity to advance European censorship methods by training both teachers and students to advance their legal storytelling tactics within the school setting. Crits are hopeful that their theories will become the “new civil rights orthodoxy” (157). Their social experiment includes modeling New Jersey’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying law after university speech codes and using the United Nations educational curriculum framework to develop an activist structured multi-tiered system of support.

One tier includes three components for developing “student empowerment.” First, Crits propose adding legal literacy lessons to students’, as young as elementary school, curriculum. Second, activists aim to transform the role of the school psychologist to be the primary change agent in dismantling the communities children live in rather than addressing a child’s individual, unique mental health needs. Third, these new framers advocate for applying a “counterstory” telling approach, developed by Richard Delgado, to oppose what Dr. Regina Berry calls, the “master narrative.” Counterstory “is created by the outgroup, the members of the socially marginalized group, aimed to subvert the reality of the dominant group” (Berry & Candis, 2013, p.50).

Political, legal, social, and educational theorizers are motivated to make sure public school children do not have to live in fear in the future. However, the future is now and children’s mental health is an epidemic; technology is impacting person to person relationships; public school enrollment is declining; teacher retention is dropping; and “child misbehavior” due to Covid and technology accounts, rationalized by Educrats, for the rapid rise in Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying (HIB) violations within New Jersey Public Schools. DEI and CRT activists have been quietly remodeling New Jersey’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying law in their hidden laboratory. As a result, new theories are emerging that link the rise in HIB violations with the rising rates of child mental health issues and the significant number of trainings public school teachers receive from law firms. Public interest is growing for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Critical Race Theory scholars to publicize their results against the other American experiment first presented in 1776.

In their conclusion, Delgado and Stefancic question whether a “power shift will occur peacefully or only after a long struggle?” (153). It appears Critical Race Theory made major gains in American institutions, including public schools, by operating first in the shadows and then openly and aggressively once their own power structures were firmly in place in media, universities and colleges, in school curriculums, and in the courts. The creators of CRT wonder if providing “magic pills” to children will enhance life for oft-marginalized people that have grown in categorizations over the years. Others wonder if their theories and practices have made life worse off for all people and, if continued, will life be worse in the future? This decades-long social experiment is reaching the concluding stages. What began as a legal theory in Ivy League university classrooms and found its way into public education practices may result in public school administrators and school Board of Education members shaping their counter legal stories to state and federal committees.

 

Delgado, R., Stefancic, J., & Harris, A. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York University Press.

Theodorea Berry & Matthew Candis. “Cultural Identity and Education: A Critical race perspective” Educational Foundations (2013): 43-64

 

 

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