Over the last three years, the Santa Barbara Unified School District has been served with an uptick in negative pushback from a group of concerned parents called Fair Education and, more recently, Neighborhood Schools. Unfortunately, the dialogue has not been civil, and the discourse has been aggressive to turn back the district's progress.
Unsurprisingly, this is not a local effort. Hundreds of similar groups of concerned parents have made their disappointment heard in uncivil manners. Although veiled as an attempt to "close the achievement gap," this is nothing more than a fear campaign to turn back the clock on progress by deterring districts from adopting Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Dual Immersion, and comprehensive sexual education. If this doesn't scare you, it should.
Nationally, extremist right-wing groups have stepped up efforts to decrease the teaching of Critical Race Theory by eliciting fear. A recent study released by UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, found that over 900 school districts, representing 35 percent of all K- 12 students, have experienced actions by concerned parents to ban Critical Race Theory. What's worrisome is that this study found that conservative media is driving these local efforts to intimidate local districts to stop any engagement with critical race theories. Think of Texas' latest state law to limit the teaching of Black history or Virginia's Executive Order banning the teaching of the history of people of color in that state. Or even locally. Two years ago, a group of concerned parents took an aggressive assault on comprehensive sexual education and made an effort to stop the immersion program at McKinley, or most recently, attempted to break the district into seven regions to dilute the voting power of people of color.