In August, North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt, and temporary Senate President Phil Berger stood shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the state senate to announce the much-anticipated release of Robinson’s report on indoctrination in the state’s public schools.
The report came after Robinson’s FACTS task force spent five months collecting complaints about teaching practices—via an online portal—and poring over social media feeds of educators and organizations connected with education in North Carolina. Its release was timed to support legislation being advanced in the General Assembly that would place strict limits on conversations related to race and sex in the state’s public schools.
Kicking off the press conference, Robinson said:
“This task force that we started that we called fairness and accountability in the classroom for teachers and students or FACTS. It set about to answer one question: Is there indoctrination happening in our public schools? And after doing this report, and after doing this task force, the overwhelming answer is yes.”
Robinson’s task force report primarily consists of more than 500 submissions gathered from the public and a variety of social media posts. They are intended to serve as evidence of indoctrination and the insidious critical race theory seeping into North Carolina’s schools.
Here’s one example of the evidence included in the report:
Nothing says “indoctrination” like Big Bird and Sesame Street.
Robinson announced the formation of the FACTS task force in March, shortly after his unsuccessful attempt to stop the North Carolina State Board of Education from adopting new K-12 social studies standards to ensure students will learn about racism and how government policies have resulted in inequities in the modern era.
At his March press conference, Robinson related a story he’d heard about a student who wanted to write a report about Lieutenant Governor Robinson for Black History month but had been denied by her teacher and, instead, told to write about rapper Tupac Shakur. (Robinson has not provided any specific details about this alleged event and said last week that he’d been asked to keep those involved anonymous.)
Among other things, the FACTS task force invited North Carolinians to submit examples of discrimination related to students’ political beliefs and examples of “students being subjected to indoctrination according to a political agenda or ideology.”
During the five months FACTS was collecting submissions, Republican state lawmakers followed the example of conservative legislatures around the country in filing a bill that would severely limit conversations about race and sex in public school classrooms. (This seems like a good time to mention that the North Carolina GOP caucus is 86 percent male and 100 percent white).
HB 324 is benignly entitled, “An act to demonstrate the General Assembly’s intent that students, administrators, and other school employees recognize the equality and rights of all persons and to prohibit public school units from promoting certain concepts that are contrary to that intent.” Legislators who have worked to advance the bill have consistently and disingenuously asked why anyone would be against a law that simply promotes equal treatment for all.
In reality, this legislation would prohibit class discussions that result in students feeling “discomfort” about their race or sex. Lessons about Native American genocide; the white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina; or efforts to prevent marginalized populations from voting, for example, would be subject to a whole new level of scrutiny; and students expressing regret over those things could potentially land teachers on the wrong side of the law. As a result, many educators would be less inclined to facilitate the kind of hard conversations that students want and need to have.
While HB 324 was winding its way through the state legislature, Robinson’s task force was busily fielding more than 500 complaints, which I obtained through a public records request in July.
I carefully reviewed each submission, and I found that many of the complaints were from North Carolinians who were disturbed by Robinson’s project, which they perceived as a political witch hunt and harassment campaign against public school teachers:
“Hello - I am disheartened by this blatantly political attempt to foment further partisanship by the lieutenant governor. By promoting this anti-teacher task force, the lieutenant governor is exhibiting his own bias and discrimination regarding education: it’s clear he is interested in indicting hard-working teachers based on hearsay, ignorance, and innuendo.”
Of course, there were many complaints that expressed anger over the direction of public education in North Carolina. Among them, I found a clear and disturbing thread of white racial resentment over perceived moves away from a public school system that centers white Christians at all times.
Those submissions included recommendations to cancel Black History Month, pleas to stop making white students feel guilty by teaching so much about slavery, which one individual remarked “is getting old,” and suggestions to end hiring practices aimed at increasing diversity of school staff:
“My kids attend a charter school, Union Academy, in Monroe, NC. A parent survey was sent out a couple weeks ago and one page of the survey was nothing but diversity, equity, and inclusion questions. They asked if my kids would benefit from a more diverse staff, etc. Of course my answer was no, they would benefit from qualified teachers and staff. This got my [sic] agitated so I spoke at the board meeting (and sent a follow up email) . . . nothing. I made it clear that myself and (other parents I had spoken with were too scared to speak up) were not happy with this and the critical race theory the state passed.
“When I left the head master, [redacted] said he had not heard of critical race theory. A week later he sent a letter to the entire school that a Head of Curriculum and Inclusion position had been created and [redacted] would be in this position. She is a middle school counselor, not a teacher or even deals with the curriculum, but I guess she had the right skin color.”
Mark Robinson’s “Indoctrination in North Carolina Public Education Report,” which was deliberately trotted out an hour before the North Carolina Senate’s Education committee took up HB 324, makes no mention of the racist submissions or witch hunt complaints. Instead, the report consists largely of a handful of cherry-picked, unsubstantiated allegations by individuals whose identities are redacted while the educators and their worksites are published for all to see.
These complaints allege things like teachers criticizing Republicans or expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement and encouraging student activism. On one vocabulary test, the example sentence for the word “xenophobia” was “It can be said that Donald Trump has xenophobia, because of his fear of people from other countries other than the United States.”
In addition to the FACTS submissions, the report includes what it deems “significant social media posts and articles discovered by the Office of Lieutenant Governor Robinson” which it claims “are significant due to the blatant use of indoctrination in the classroom by numerous counties, educators, education groups, and superintendents across North Carolina.”
Exhibit 1 is a Facebook post which I made on May 14—although the report incorrectly dates it July 3 for some reason.
This section of the report consists of dozens of screenshots of educators’ personal social media activity as well as posts by school districts and others tangentially connected with public education. It’s as if some unlucky staffer was given the task of stalking educators online with keyword searches including “systemic racism” and “critical race theory.”
But it’s definitely not a witch hunt.
Near the end of the “blatant use of indoctrination” section of Robinson’s report, not long after the Sesame Street example, you’ll find a screenshot of the very North Carolina social studies standards that the Lieutenant Governor unsuccessfully fought to keep from passing in February, just before he started the FACTS task force.
In it, Robinson has highlighted the standard “Explain how individual values and societal norms contribute to institutional discrimination and the marginalization of minority groups living under the American system of government.”
It’s likely as close as Robinson and his General Assembly colleagues will come to admitting that one of the primary goals of both the FACTS task force and HB 324 is to ensure that classrooms in our increasingly diverse state aren’t home to any talk of systemic oppression.
After all, the first step toward dismantling a harmful status quo is acknowledging its existence.