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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our midterm election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. We're in the middle of a three-episode stretch on the culture wars and public education. Yesterday, we talked about sex ed as a hot-button issue in the Tom Malinowski versus Tom Kean congressional race in New Jersey. Today, for Issue 7 on 30 Issues in 30 Days, we'll focus on the teaching of American history as a culture war and electoral issue.

It's one that Republican candidates tend to raise much more than Democrats, though one of the guests we're about to have on will say Democrats should be doing their own version of it or at least engaging in this more actively than they are. President Trump, to take one obvious example, promoted a teaching of American history that he called the 1776 Project that focuses on teaching patriotism.

It was part of his response to The New York Times 1619 Project, which told the story of how slavery and racism have been central to American history, beginning in that year, 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought here. We'll talk now about the politics and also about how to teach history, so it doesn't gloss over reality, but doesn't leave the country divided into racial or political camps to the extent that that's even possible.

With us now are Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and Peniel Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He was here recently, some of you may recall, for his new book that's relevant to this topic called The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Peniel, welcome back. Jon, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Peniel Joseph: Great to be back.

Jon Valant: Thanks, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Jon, one of your recent Brookings articles is called Democrats Should Engage in Education Politics So Kids Don't Have To. It begins with a victory last year for Governor of Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin. Can you remind us of the place that teaching about history and so-called critical race theory played in his campaign?

Jon Valant: Sure, and thanks. Really, it's been a bumpy couple of years for schools when it comes to education politics. Typically, we don't see education at the forefront of the American political conversation, but really, for the last couple of years, at a lot of times, it has been. That's unusual for us. A lot of that very likely has roots in the school shutdowns that came after the initial wave of the pandemic, but it's expanded and it's touched in a lot of other issues and a lot of other areas.

That Virginia gubernatorial election, which was last November, was where we really saw in this race between Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, and Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat, we really saw education bubble up. There was a gaffe by McAuliffe, where he said that he doesn't think that parents should be telling schools what they should teach. That was really in the context of where we had been where a lot of parents felt like they didn't have enough say over what their kids were doing felt like a political sin to say that. That race became then-- it added fuel to this idea of parents' rights.

A lot of Republicans grabbed onto this idea that parents ought to have more control over what's happening in their kids' education. Some of that was directly related to pandemic issues. It was about masking and it was about vaccines and some of those kinds of things, but a lot of it had to do or has come to have to do with other issues related to how history is taught and which books you find on bookshelves and what schools say about gender and sexuality. These issues that feel like, in a lot of ways, they're rooted in the pandemic have, over time, come to really encompass a lot of social issues and a lot of culture war issues that we're more and more finding in schools.

Brian Lehrer: You also refer in your article to book bans premised on the idea that even math books are infused with critical race theory. What's an example or two of what's being targeted?

Jon Valant: That's right. That comes from Florida where we've seen it. It's not just Florida. Governor DeSantis--

Brian Lehrer: Of course, Florida, but you weren't listening to our last segment, so go ahead. [laughs]

Jon Valant: You're right, yes. There's no shortage of education stories coming out of Florida these days because Governor DeSantis has really been at the forefront of a lot of these attacks on schools. In Florida and in other states and other localities, we're seeing more and more, these pushes. Often, they're anti-critical race theory pushes. They're framed as that, as being anti-CRT. They'll have different parts to it. Some of it is sort of taking a look at all of those books that are on library shelves, whether it's in school libraries or it's in classrooms.

Those nets are capturing a whole lot of books that, I think, the vast majority of parents would not find objectionable in any way and, in fact, would find to be exactly the types of books that we want kids to see because they have people who look like them and stories that resonate. In Florida, as in other states, there was this look at the curriculum and, in Florida, in particular, look at the math curriculum that ended up flagging a whole bunch of textbooks in some cases because of claims that they were promoting critical race theory, which to my eye is quite a stretch.

Brian Lehrer: Peniel, I want to ask you about the actual teaching of history since that's part of what you do at UT. Do you want to give us your take on the politics of this as you see it? How does this fit in with the premise of your book that the US right now is in a period that you call the Third Reconstruction?

Peniel Joseph: Well, absolutely, Brian. The whole critical race theory controversy is a hoax for the elimination of truth teaching in US history. It goes back to the Lost Cause, which was also a hoax, but became institutionalized in the 19th and the 20th century and still in the 21st century. The Lost Cause is this story of American history that tells us the Civil War was a bad thing, Black citizenship and dignity was a terrible thing, the Klan were heroes and Black men were rapists.

That's the Lost Cause that Archibald Dunning at Columbia University institutionalized in textbooks. John F. Kennedy learned that Lost Cause racist history at Harvard University. The whole idea of CRT is to ensure that the Lost Cause remains in Florida and Virginia and all these different K-12 public school curriculum. We have to really stop talking about CRT and say, "Look, this is a hoax. This is against the truth teaching in American history." They don't want us to talk about antisemitism, Brian.

They don't want us to talk about settler colonialism and what happened to Indigenous people. They don't want us to talk about the Chinese Exclusion Acts and what they've done to Asian-American Pacific Islanders. They don't want us to talk about the Bracero program or even what we did earlier in the 19th century to Mexico, including having Confederates who brought enslaved Africans to Mexico so they can continue to perpetuate slavery and all the land theft in Mexico and the killing of both Mexicans and Indigenous people in Mexico.

We have a long, long terrible history in this country, but we also have a history that is more beautiful because we have a history of resistance to racism and antisemitism and slavery and imperialism. We have this abolitionist democracy legacy and that's what they're calling critical race theory. Susan B. Anthony is this progressive feminist. They're calling Ida B. Wells. They're calling Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

The whole area where we've tried to have multiracial democracy, the reconstructionist legacy of the Civil War, becomes smeared and becomes a scandal when we think about the Lost Cause. It's not a 1776 patriotic project because it's rooted in the Confederacy and the Confederacy was a white supremacist, anti-American project. When we think about this in the 21st century, part of what conservatives and Republicans and white supremacists have been able to do is control the language.

They turn terms like "woke" into really new racial epitaphs and antisemitic slurs. These are the same people who, in January 6th, 2021, stormed into the Capitol with Confederate flags, but also antisemitic symbols. This is all of a piece and we have to have the language. Toni Morrison teaches us that language is power. We have to understand and utilize the language that they're trying to stop truth teaching, CRT is a hoax, wokeness is a hoax, and move and articulate our reasonings accordingly.

Brian Lehrer: That articulates some of the worst of what's going on on that side. Some conservatives would say they're playing defense, not offense here though, that things like The 1619 Project, but many other things as well, portray the United States as too resistant to anti-racist progress.

When it becomes curriculum rather than just published work like in The New York Times, it leaves white kids feeling like they're inherently bad and the country is inherently bad and doesn't do enough to acknowledge they would say that many thousands of white northerners fought and died in the Civil War to abolish slavery, that the Constitution was amended to make all people equal. Eventually, that battle was fought again in the civil rights era to abolish Jim Crow, which a mostly-white US Congress finally did. That's as important as the racism that is obviously also real. How would you respond to that?

Peniel Joseph: Well, I would say that, one, I'm teaching The 1619 Project in a graduate seminar right now. I'm on my third reading of that book. If anything, it's direct opposite of what they're claiming. It's extremely patriotic and veneration of America and American democracy and the role that Black people, at times Native people, at times white people played in transforming this republic of slavery into a multiracial democracy.

Second, I would say, when it comes to white children, one of the things that they should be very proud of is the abolitionist legacy that is talked about in The 1619 Project, that's talked about in all of African-American history that includes white abolitionists. My book talks about Thaddeus Stevens and how important Thaddeus Stevens was during the period of reconstruction to secure citizenship and dignity to at least try through the law and legislation.

Part of this is an excuse in the sense that it's not the teachers who are teaching, whether it's a 1619 Project or truth teaching, who put up these Confederate monuments to white supremacists and murderers and people who wanted to commit genocide against Black people and Native people. I would love to put up monuments to abolitionists, including white abolitionists who did the right thing during the 19th century and abolitionists who continued into the 20th and the 21st century. We have a problem because we refused to venerate the good people who tried to transform this country.

Then when we talk about the bad people, people say we are hating the country. Truth teaching, if anything, is about loving the United States, but loving a particular vision and version of the United States that is inclusive, that is against racism, against antisemitism, that basically says either we all count or none of us counts, right? That shouldn't make any of us upset. That is an expansion of the Constitution, an expansion of 1776 in the declaration of independence because we can never forget.

When those things were written, Black people were enslaved. Native American people were being hunted and marginalized and killed. Women had no rights. Poor people had no rights. Children could still work in factories. We've transformed because of the good people in the United States of America. We need to talk about that history alongside of the bad. Dr. King said we have to talk about the bitter but beautiful struggle to transform American democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if we have any history teachers out there or former history teachers, parents too on how your kids are being taught race and history at any grade level. Teachers, we would love to hear from you as well. I know it's a school day, so many current teachers are probably not out there right now, but I know some of you listen on your prep periods, which is awesome when you call in from there.

Some of you may be home on COVID protocol or whatever. History teachers or teachers in the lower grades, how do you teach race in American history in a way to either avoid a culture war among the parents of your students or to fight it if you see a role that way on whatever side you think is right, teachers and parents on race as a flashpoint in the education culture wars and how that plays out in elections these days as well?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet for Peniel Joseph, who was just speaking from the University of Texas at Austin, and Jon Valant from the Brookings Institution. Jon, when you write for Brookings that Democrats should engage more in these education politics so kids don't have to, that was the title of your recent article, what do you mean that Democratic politicians should be doing more of?

Jon Valant: I think part of this is that it has felt like a very one-sided debate. We've had Republicans who've engaged really aggressively and really taken control of the language as Dr. Joseph said and taken control of these terms and pushed and made a case that it is the left that is extreme when it comes to what they have in mind for schools and education policy. Oftentimes, those claims just have not been responded to.

When you let them linger and you let these ideas fester and they sit out there, they become real on a lot of people's minds. In my view, the Democratic Party has been much too timid in countering some of those ideas. In some cases, that's pointing to the most extreme ideas and communicating that most Americans don't agree with this stuff. They don't want to go book by book in school libraries and take books off of shelves in the name of keeping kids from learning all of that beauty and ugliness.

That is our history and is our culture. Parents don't want that. They don't want the Holocaust to be taught as a both sides' question. Really, it's been one-sided. It's been Republicans who have been willing to engage and Democrats much less so. In my view, we have these elections coming up now in November. I think it's unlikely in November that come November 9th, the day after the midterms, that we're going to be talking about education is the core issue in this election.

I think that the national conversation's probably going to be abortion or inflation or crime or democracy or some of the issues that are becoming really prominent in political discussions right now. In a whole bunch of other races around the country, whether they're the 36 gubernatorial races that are being challenged here this year or it's state superintendent races or local school board races, a lot of those issues really can matter.

My view is that Democrats ought to be engaging on these issues partly for their own political benefit because, again, you need to stay engaged. The American public, for a very long time, has been sympathetic toward Democratic ideas when it comes to education but also for the sake of students. Just to pick an example or two, a lot of these attacks of late have been made against transgender students, often in ways that are outrageously unfair and cruel.

They have not been responded to. There are students who hear those messages and see that there's not a strong-enough fight in response and it's bad for students. Then here on this topic of critical race theory in particular and who owns that language, just as one example of where this language matters. In schools, we've recently seen this fusion of the term "critical race theory" with the term "social-emotional learning."

In schools, for decades, the idea of social-emotional learning has been completely uncontroversial. It's the idea that we should give kids the skills, the knowledge, and the dispositions they need to have good self-identities and to engage well with others and build strong relationships. Of late, in a whole bunch of states, we're starting to see policymakers talk about how social-emotional learning is really a Trojan Horse for critical race theory, which is absurd.

It's not true. When that happens, you get changes in policy that affects students. In my view, I would like to see Democrats engage much more forcefully. That doesn't mean they have to make it the most prominent issue in an election, but in engaging, I think you can both stave off some of the harm that comes, and also I think it would be in their own benefit politically.

Brian Lehrer: If so much of this is a hoax as Peniel describes it and I think you would agree with that, why do you think it's so politically powerful and catches on? Even more so, since you say that the Democratic Party's position on education issues generally, good funding for education, things like that, doesn't drown it out.

Jon Valant: I think a lot of it has to do with our context. A whole lot of these issues grew out of the pandemic where there was very real frustration and anger about how schools responded to the pandemic. Also, that is around the time when Black Lives Matter was gaining its most prominence. Some of these culture issues that have grown out of that, whether it's CRT, the anti-CRT movement, or it's the anti-trans student movement, some of those kinds of things, I don't think, are fundamentally about issues in schools.

I think that schools became a vehicle for fighting a whole lot of other political battles. The unifying theme in a lot of those has been parents' rights. Politically, parents' rights is a very clever phrase. Everyone likes having rights. People particularly like having rights when it comes to their kids, which is the most important thing in a whole lot of people's lives. Parents' rights, when you think about what it means, it can mean anything to anyone. You could say that as a parent, you have a right to not have your kid wear a mask in school.

You could, at the same time, say you have a right to have your kid go into a school environment where other kids are wearing masks so your kid is safe. It's like one of those phrases that has a lot of punch and it resonates with people emotionally, but it doesn't actually have a lot of substance, so it's very hard to fight against. I think that is where we are, is that we have these terms and these ideas that are vague and hard to fight back against in some ways, but they do have some real bite politically.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes on Issue 6 in our 30 Issues in 30 Days midterm election series. Issue 6 is the teaching of American history as an education culture wars flashpoint in the elections. Stavros in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Stavros.

Stavros: Good morning, Brian. Hi, love your show. Thank you for taking my call. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, just fine.

Stavros: Oh, good. I love what your guest said about identity and our national identity. Indeed, he's correct when he says there are wounds to identify with and healing to identify with. Healing requires atonement. Now, you look back at the history of Germany. I'd like to ask your guest. Can we learn from Germany how they teach Nazi history to students? What are they doing? How have they done it? I know they've done it. I have German friends who did school trips to concentration camps. What could we learn? Did they maybe have their model?

Brian Lehrer: It's a great question. Peniel, is it a comparison you've thought about as a history teacher at the university level?

Peniel Joseph: Oh, absolutely. What Germany has done is placed the whole history of the Holocaust in a panoramic way in its curriculum, in its built environment, the wrongs that have been done. They've tried to atone through reparations to specific Jewish communities and families whose fortunes were stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War. They don't have monuments to Hitler and to the Third Reich.

Instead, they have, really, a built environment and landscape where you can see and acknowledge what happened so that it would never happen again. It doesn't mean that Germany doesn't still have small groups of right-wing, white supremacist fascists. As a whole, they've come to terms and come to grips with what they did in terms of the genocide against six million Jews.

They've come to much better terms with it than what we've done here, vis-a-vis slavery and what we've done to other groups. That hasn't made young German kids hate themselves because they learn about German complicity in the Holocaust. If anything, it's made them much more complicated and empathetic actors on the global stage and within their own country. That's a great example of where we could move forward to some kind of truth, justice, and reconciliation.

Obviously, South Africa had truth, justice, and reconciliation commissions, where people were able to acknowledge the wrongs that were done during apartheid. These things are always going to be imperfect, but the United States does the exact opposite and runs away from the truth and continues to perpetuate this Lost Cause lie that is connected to CRT, connected to the anti-wokeness.

There's always a ready group of white Americans and, at times, people of color who are redemptionists and who believe in the Lost Cause as well, who take any measure of racial and social justice progress as an attack and assault on the lie that they've based their entire lives upon and their entire reality upon. We're seeing those lies absolutely converge in the 21st century, where new layers and levels of conspiracy theories, new layers, and levels that seek to really dispatch any kind of Democratic opposition to the redemptionists' Lost Cause lie in the 21st century.

These are very, very dangerous times we live in because they're so similar to the First Reconstruction, 1860s, 1870s, 1880s. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War. He's saying by 1866, 1867, Black people are being buried in the South by the thousands because of that Lost Cause lie, which is as soon as the Civil War ends, you start to have that Lost Cause lie. That lie is weaponized both through a narrative war but also violence. That narrative war is what we're engaged in right now.

The stories we're telling each other, our kids, the world about, "What does it mean to be an American?" What is American history? How does American history inform our present-day identity? It does, right? Those who don't want to talk about the bad parts of our history continue to do bad things in our current contemporary reality. Those who do want to confront the more negative parts of our history are trying to change and transform that. That's why reconstructionists are always trying to build. Redemptionists and supporters of the Lost Cause are always trying to destroy both rhetorically and physically through violence.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, really interesting. Well said. We're almost out of time. Let me get one more call in here. Maureen in Brooklyn, a parent who wants to praise a particular homework assignment that her kids got. Maureen, hi, you're on WNYC, and we have about a minute for you.

Maureen: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Maureen: Hi. Yes, my daughter, my 11th-grader in a New York City consortium high school, I won't name the school, but she came home with a homework assignment last night. I was so excited because, actually, it's a class on the 1960s. The assignment was reading the report of her own statement with SDS and trying to connect what they were saying then to today and problems that young youth faced compared to, obviously, what SDS was fighting for--

Brian Lehrer: Students for a Democratic Society, an anti-war group, and other things at the time?

Maureen: Yes. Tom Hayden, so forth, right? Yes. Really remarkable to see that. My daughter read the essay and was able to really articulate and show critical thinking as she was completing this assignment. We do have really good learning that's taking place. We just need more of it. That is the kind of stuff that needs to be louder and talked about more and more supported. It is happening. It would be terrible if it weren't, right?

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious, Maureen, if that lesson made your daughter feel more secure in a certain way because so much that's going on right now is so intense. To look back on the 1960s, which was different, but also intense, perhaps was comforting and empowering to her because she could look back and learn that, "Oh, things like this have happened before."

Maureen: That's exactly what she had gotten out of it. That was the point that she had pulled out of the assignment was, "Look, these were young people who saw really serious social problems, and they weren't taken seriously." Nobody was listening to them just like today because we're young. It's full ageism against these kids. [laughs] That's basically what--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Maureen, thank you so much for that call. Great call. We're over time, but I want to get one last thought from you, Jon, because besides writing about the issue and how it's been politicized, you wrote up an Education Next public opinion survey about public education. You put the scary title on your article, What If Americans Sour on Public Education?

Where it connects with this election issue is there have been people out there now, Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times and others, who are saying this isn't just about not teaching critical race theory or not teaching sex ed as independent issues. Those are being used by people who want to destroy public education, period, and turn education funding into vouchers that parents would use for private schools and that some say this is led by the religious school movement because they want more vouchers to be available to them. Do you see it that way?

Jon Valant: I worry about this. We are in an era where there's increasing skepticism of American institutions. For a long time, K-12 public schools have been spared that. We have what some people call this public school ideology, where Americans are just fond of our public education system. We're proud of the idea that it's at the foundation of our notions of social mobility and equality of opportunity, and that we have these nice, little, super local institutions all across the country.

In some polling that's been coming out lately, we're starting to see cracks in that support for public schools. A lot of it is breaking on party lines, so we're seeing a lot more very strong, vehement disapproval from Republicans than we've seen before. Higher education went through this a few years ago. There was this enormous spike in Republican disapproval of higher education about 5 to 10 years ago.

It's been tough in a lot of red states for public universities. I think it's a trend that we need to be keeping an eye on, whether Americans are, in fact, souring or certain groups of Americans are souring on public education. It does have potentially serious consequences. You mentioned some of the voucher reforms. First of all, they're more possible now, partly because the Supreme Court has been weighing in on some issues involving--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and we have 30 seconds left.

Jon Valant: Just to say that some of these programs now are much more expansive and are designed in ways where it seems like they're intended to be antagonistic toward the public education system rather than sit apart from it.

Brian Lehrer: Jon Valant is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow of governance at-- governance studies, I should say, at the Brookings Institution. Peniel Joseph is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He's also the author of the recent book, The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Thank you so much for being our guests on Issue 6 in our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days.

Peniel Joseph: Thank you.

Jon Valant: My pleasure. Thanks, Brian.

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