Local news media continue to report on critical race theory (or the specter of it) in K-12 public schools. The continued salience of the issue raises the question of what, if anything, can be done to address legitimate parental concerns about what children are being taught about American history and civics and how that is becoming politicized.

Some organizations are launching efforts to offer parents tools to address CRT in schools.  The Utah State House of Representatives and Utah State Senate each passed resolutions supporting restrictions on teacher training and instructional practices, and the State Board of Education enacted such restrictions via rule. This policy approach is being referred to as a “CRT ban.”

CRT bans have some merits. As one policy thinker put it, “These laws will undoubtedly curb some of the most insidious messages bombarding our kids.” But, as that same thinker also said, bans are “ultimately only a partial bandage” because they can be evaded (and apparently already are) by smart curriculum providers – meaning that a ban may prove ineffective at accomplishing its goal.

Also, different policy approaches often get misleadingly lumped together under the label “CRT ban.” As AEI education scholar Rick Hess writes:

As I see it, there have been two general kinds of responses: those that misguidedly aim to ban ideas or restrict thought and those that seek to put an end to dangerous, discriminatory pedagogical practices. The first approach is destructive, wrong-headed, and obscures the common ground that is there to be found; the second is appropriate, even essential.

To borrow Hess’s framing, if a destructive CRT ban proves ineffective because of workarounds or loopholes, the options for rectifying this policy problem are not great. One is to expand the ban to include the new variations on the previously banned ideas. However, extensive lists of legally banned ideas erode the American principle of valuing the marketplace of ideas. This is one feature of CRT bans that can make them so destructive.

Additionally, the more extensive such bans become, the more commonplace becomes the banning of ideas that are out of favor for political reasons. And because political pendulums always swing back and forth – even in a red state like Utah, the pendulum will swing from more moderate to more conservative and back again – this means that ideas that are considered fine today can become ban-worthy next year or in a few years from now. The question becomes: Which ideas may be next?

These realities raise the prospect of destructive bans leading to a recurring political war as leaders newly in power try to ban opposing ideas. In other words – a never-ending cycle of increasing politicization of what is being taught in the classroom and how it is being taught, rather than accomplishing the goal of depoliticizing the classroom.

For those who recognize that the American constitutional system requires consensus-building compromise as the mechanism for securing the vision of equality and liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the rights and freedoms secured in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, no-compromise perpetual political wars are a grim prospect.

So if a destructive CRT ban is at best a partial policy solution – which may ultimately prove ineffective – what are the alternative (or perhaps additional) policy options that leaders should consider? At the level of policy vision, one alternative is to empower parents and students to better chart the course of their education in a way that fits their values and unique learning needs, while simultaneously ensuring high quality civics and history curriculum and instruction in all public schools.

Accomplishing this policy vision requires things like additional curriculum transparency, expanded education choice, and civics education reform. Each of these policy concepts is significant enough to deserve standalone treatment. To that end, Sutherland will publish a series of blog posts on these policy concepts in the coming weeks to illustrate their important role in depoliticizing the classroom as an alternative approach to the destructive CRT ban.