California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education
2020-10-01 · Guest: Williamson M. Evers (Independent Institute Senior Fellow) · 51:04
California K-12 Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory
Bob Zadek and Dr. Williamson M. Evers discuss the radical shift in California’s K-12 ethnic studies curriculum, focusing on the influence of Critical Race Theory and the portrayal of capitalism as inherently racist. They explore the bureaucratic process of textbook adoption, the ideological capture of education schools, and potential solutions for parents and taxpayers to reclaim influence over public education.
Topics: Education, K-12 Curriculum, Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Theory, Capitalism, 1619 Project, Textbook Industry, California Policy, 1776 Commission
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Williamson M. Evers
Introduction: The Disconnect in K-12 Education [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show this Sunday and always of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
I have to make a confession. Over the years, I have been observing what’s going on in college campuses, what’s going on with teenagers. Why are they so unsupportive of the country, the system of government, the economic system that has provided so much benefit to so many people? Why do they just not understand it? And I was puzzled, and I couldn’t really understand the reason until I started reading articles such as those written by this morning’s guest.
And articles started to appear—not a lot of them, but they were important articles—discussing the creation and the dramatic change in the curriculum in the K through 12 educational system. And these articles started to answer, at least for me, the question I had been wondering as to what’s going wrong. Well, what’s going wrong is not that the K through 12 generation and then the college generation—it’s not that there is something inherently wrong with them, that it is just generational. No, no. They are victims. They are victims of a somewhat, somewhat below the surface, not so visible, subtle but very important change in curriculum.
And the values that we come to associate with the values on which our country was formed and which provided it with so much economic and political success—those values are not inherent in people. They have to be taught. They have to be explained. There has to be an intellectual foundation. And so I got very curious about this, and I imagine that many of you might be as well.
To help us understand what’s going on—and this is as important as a topic can be—what is going on in the educational system in the country in a somewhat stealthy kind of way that is profoundly altering how each generation, as they go through the educational system, college, and then out into the world to affect other people’s lives as well as their own—we have to understand what is going on so we can deal with it. Now, we may accept it, we may want to change it, but the first step is we have to understand it.
To help us understand what has been going on and what is going on now at a somewhat increased rate, I’m happy to welcome to the show Dr. Williamson M. Evers. Bill is a senior fellow, director of the Center of Educational Excellence, and he’s an assistant editor for the Independent Review. He works and studies and directs the Independent Institute. Bill has studied educational reform, the educational system for most of his adult life. He has advised Washington, he’s been on various presidential commissions, he has published many books and even more articles.
The article that Bill wrote, or articles, that caught my attention—the first article that caught my attention was a year ago: “California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist.” And that article got a lot of attention, as Bill will explain. It was followed up a year later—and we’ll explain the succession of the two articles during the interview this morning—he then wrote a year later, very recently in the Wall Street Journal, on the very same topic. And again, got a lot of attention. And the attention was so interesting, I thought my friends out there and listeners ought to hear, must hear what Bill has to say. So Bill, welcome to the show this morning.
Williamson M. Evers: Thank you for having me.
Defining Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory [05:58]
Bob Zadek: Now Bill, let’s start with—although we will go back in history—but let’s start with your clarion call article in the Wall Street Journal a year ago. What got your attention? What prompted you to write the article that you did with the attention-getting headline, which I know you didn’t write—probably the editors of the Journal wrote it—it was “California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist.” So what is there that prompted you to write that article and to have the Wall Street Journal editorial staff assign that attention-getting headline to the article?
Williamson M. Evers: So earlier, I had written an article about California’s history curriculum framework. They used to have a reasonable account of American history, and it was drastically modified to be filled with leftist jargon and I don’t know. Anyway, so I wrote that, and I was talking to a bureaucrat in Sacramento, an education official, and he said to me, “Oh, wait till you see the ethnic studies curriculum.” Now, this was before it was introduced. So I knew to watch for this.
And then several friends of mine in the field of education, parents and scholars, alerted me that it was now ready. And so I printed the whole thing out, and in July of 2019, I read the whole thing. It’s like 300 or 400 pages, this model curriculum for ethnic studies. And of course, I was aghast at it because it’s permeated with, it’s interwoven with critical race theory. And the point that that headline—which indeed the editors of the Wall Street Journal wrote the headline—but the headline is correct in that they do want to teach children, not just in California, but you know, throughout the United States, because this is a national pedagogical movement, a national movement on how to teach history and government. And you know, it’s obviously been around in the colleges for a long time, but it’s now gone back into the earlier grades.
Bob Zadek: Let’s do some definitional work so the audience can follow. What is, in a broad sense, ethnic study? What does that subject matter include? And what is critical race theory? I dare say most of us haven’t even heard those three words side by side. So what do those two concepts mean to our listeners so we can really trace what’s going on in education?
Williamson M. Evers: Well, ethnic studies refers to studying the various ethnic groups in the United States. It could be races, it could just be ethnicities within races, it even could be religious groups associated as groupings. And so we had in the 1950s, 1960s, some very serious social science scholars such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, such as Nathan Glazer, such as Michael Novak, write books about this. Beyond the Melting Pot is a famous book on these lines. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics was another book on the subject. So this is a serious subject of academic work in the field of sociology and political science, and obviously it would pertain to history too. So that’s ethnic studies.
And critical race theory, and this form of ethnic studies that is based on critical race theory, it’s called critical ethnic studies, means the following. It’s kind of strangely like national socialism, it’s kind of strangely like Hitler and Nazism, but here’s what the idea is. Everything is about race and racial domination. So in politics, in history, everything is about the whites trying to dominate the blacks and other groups. And so everything that we would think having to do with individualism, having to do with constitutional liberties and protections, having to do with toleration, having to do with civil rights—all of this is just a smokescreen because all of it serves, according to these critical race theorists, all of this serves to just perpetuate and put a cover over white domination of blacks.
If you’re a white, you can never, according to these people, get out of being a racist. If you think you’re not a racist, you’re lying to yourself. You are a racist. And the only thing you can possibly be is an ally of the critical race theory people or of the Black Lives Matter people. And you can be an ally, which means you have to just support unquestioningly whatever they dictate. So that’s—so this is being taught. And it’s not just in K-12, and it’s not just in college. There are training sessions that go on in government for government employees and for corporate companies. Corporations do this too. So the President, President Trump, recently put out an executive order saying he didn’t want any more of this racially divisive critical race theory training done to federal employees. He was asked about this in the debate, very misleadingly, by the moderator Chris Wallace.
The 1619 Project and Subverting Founding Principles [12:11]
Bob Zadek: And what’s so interesting about this is that once you introduce the theory, critical race theory, once you introduce that, it is contrary, contrary to every single founding principle in our country. It is—
Williamson M. Evers: Right. So this 1619 Project is a spinoff of this. So this is an idea promoted by the New York Times that we should teach the history of the United States completely in terms of race and of white domination. And so they—of course, not only is this theory wrong in the sense that the American founding principles as found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are very subversive of racism, of racial domination, of white supremacy. And as American history unfolded, of course, liberties and protection of minorities that had suffered under various forms of bad domination, unjust domination, they have been freed. And that’s because of the follow-through on the principles of American founding, which have to do with human rights and respect for the individual and protection against aggressive violence by either slave masters or, you know, government officials that are going beyond protecting people’s rights.
Bob Zadek: Now Bill, what strikes me as nothing short of astonishing is that an accusation that is used in the media and in public discourse, an accusation that is serious stuff—“X is a racist.” Racist, racism are, one would think, qualities and values to be abhorred and resisted at all costs. However, racism—they just dust off the dictionary in a weird way. They are celebrating it. And if you look at the definition of racism, it means identifying somebody as the primary identifying quality is their race, and that they’re not an individual.
Williamson M. Evers: Right. And that’s what they want. They want us to stop thinking of people as individuals. They want us to only think of other people as members of a race. And indeed, it’s actually quite dangerous to people who are in racial minorities because governments, especially the bigger the government, they don’t like anything that’s unusual, anything that’s not just very homogeneous. They don’t like people with different languages or, you know, unusual religions or whatever. And there’s a famous book by a man called James Scott called Seeing Like a State about how in modern history, governments repress minorities. And these people who think by having everything, getting rid of universal notions of human rights and things like that, they’re going to somehow bring about utopia—they’re sending us on a very dangerous, horrifying, totalitarian future.
How Radical Curriculum Dominates Schools [15:52]
Bob Zadek: I’m going to be reminding our audience right now, and I might even do it more than once during our show, that I suspect that many of our listeners are sitting there getting a tiny bit angry and are rolling their eyes and are saying, “What a bunch of jerks,” and “How can they believe that? How pathetic.” And that’s perhaps an appropriate attitude. However, I need to remind our friends: this topic this morning is not about what some fringe movement may be thinking in some absurd view of the human experience, but we are talking about a subject—they are now dominating curriculum.
So when parents send their children to a school and they turn over their child’s mind to a bunch of strangers for 12 years, this is what those strangers are teaching your children. What got my attention and how scary it is, is that how insidious the movement is. I wouldn’t care that much—I might feel sorry or wish they felt differently—but where they start to affect the very our country in a profound way, because by planting these seeds in K through 12, which then gets carried through to college courses and then gets carried through to business and government when these young adults and then not-so-young adults carry their lives, they carry with them what they are taught. And therefore, these seeds are in the—it’s almost as if we have several hundred million Manchurian candidates, reference to an old and quite interesting Cold War movie starring Frank Sinatra, where there are these seeds planted that will someday take root.
Williamson M. Evers: And Angela Lansbury was the most wonderful villain.
Bob Zadek: That’s right. That’s right. It’s a wonderful movie. And that’s the metaphor that comes to mind.
Concrete Examples and the Textbook Cartel [18:11]
Bob Zadek: Now, so now that invites, Bill—and you have wonderful insights in this. So now we have this curriculum being captured and being promoted kind of under the surface. Nobody really aware of it but for writers such as yourself and many others, especially at the Independent Institute, which does wonderful work in this area. So now we have this issue about how does curriculum—what you’ve described is, you called it a model curriculum. So it’s not, at least not yet, mandatory. It is suggested. But how does it get to be compulsory and how does it get to be widespread? What is the system by which these theories find their way as mandatory sooner or later in every school in the country? What’s the process?
Williamson M. Evers: I would like to do that, but I think our listeners need to have a little more concrete examples because we’ve been talking very abstractly. So in this proposal in 2020, this year, for a model curriculum for high school students in California—and this is coming in Oregon and Washington and throughout the country—you have reliance on socialist historian Howard Zinn’s narrative of American history. It cites this curriculum, cites him 19 times. It mentions Malcolm X twice as often as Martin Luther King. It recommends that students study as an exemplary philosophy the Nation of Islam, which is a racist and anti-Semitic group headed by Louis Farrakhan. It’s—in one of its classes on resistance—so they’re advocating some kind of resistance to the American government—it lists cop killer Mumia’s website as a resource. This is very, very radical stuff they’re pushing.
Now, how does curriculum and teaching materials, instructional materials, textbooks—how does this come into existence? So publishers write what they think the public schools want. Okay? So they are designing a product. It might be a textbook, it might be some kind of online teaching materials, and they have development projects. They have little units within their companies and they say, “Well, what will sell in the California history market? What will sell in the Oregon history market? What will sell in the…” And the buyers are government entities. It’s not like individual parents are going out and buying these textbooks, which would of course lead to much more variety. Even individual teachers or individual departments within schools or whatever—that would lead to much more variety.
So this is because of the heavy burden of government regulation of this, there’s only a few companies. Most independent companies that used to do this 20 years ago are gone. And so we have a sort of cartelization of the textbook publishing industry. And it’s not by some kind of natural process, it’s because of the government regulation. So the developers say, “Well, what do we need to do?” So we need to meet testing. So progressive educators have taken over the testing, what’s on the tests, what kind of problems there are on the tests, what kind of questions are asked. So they’re looking at that. They look at previous textbooks or what the competing companies are doing. They’re looking at academic content standards in the different states. So those are lists of topics that are expected to be learned. They’re looking at curriculum frameworks in the different states. So those are elaborations on the topics, including how to teach it.
So for instance, in California, the history curriculum framework is riddled with all the same stuff—capitalism is oppressing everybody, racial theories, you know, America’s nothing but a country of conquest. Well, you know, there’s nothing wrong with critical things about the United States government. I mean, it’s hardly been only benign. I don’t want to pretend that. But this is a very doctrinaire ideological view, and it goes down to the lowest grade. It’s not that some somehow they learn the basics in the younger grades and then in the high school and college then they get a bit more and more criticism. No, the criticism begins as early as possible.
So then these textbooks are out there, and so you have different kinds of states. Some are statewide adoption, and some are local school district adoption. So California’s a mixture. From kindergarten through eighth grade, it’s a statewide adoption, and in high school, it’s a district adoption. And you have—just to give you two other examples—Oregon has state-level adoption through all the grades, and Washington state has local adoption throughout all the grades. So what then happens is for the state-level adoption, the State Board of Education makes the decision. It may delegate some aspects of that to a curriculum commission, as is done in California. And when the local districts are making decisions, they put together a committee, a textbook review committee of administrators, teachers, and usually some parents or community leaders or something like that. And this isn’t so much done in the math textbook, but particularly it’s watched for in the history textbook.
So that’s kind of what the process is. And the people that believe in these radical political views make an effort to capture this at each level. It’s kind of complicated. Forgive me for the listeners getting lost at some level, but that is a pretty succinct description of what goes on.
Bob Zadek: No, I think it’s a perfect description, Bill. And it’s not that complicated. What you learn is that how few people—it’s like the classic unelected bureaucrats get to make the most profound decisions about what the children of parents will learn. And so any concept that, well, if you have a good teacher—
Williamson M. Evers: So I want to add—and this is particularly important for our topic and for the listeners to understand—at every level, there is sensitivity review. So this means explicit political direction. Whatever—so you see somebody’s name on it as the textbook author. That writer probably didn’t write even that much of it. A lot of it was commissioned in-house by this development group within the company. The sales reps for the companies have a big influence on telling the development group what we think the states will adopt or what the local districts will adopt.
The sensitivity training are to make sure that you have—so let’s say there’s a big push to have women as firefighters. Well, you’ve got to put in all the textbooks pictures of women firefighters. And so they’ll do things like this, whatever political favorite topics are, they will deliberately put this in. So not only the publishers have an internal committee like this—a woman named Diane Ravitch, when she was back in her more sensible period, wrote a fabulous book on this called The Language Police about what goes on. Not only the publishers do this in-house, but the states have a sensitivity—they don’t just do it in the textbooks, they do it on the tests, they do it on all sorts of things. And then if it’s a local adoption, they don’t probably have a separate committee for this, but they are instructed to watch for any problems they see divergent from the political fad of the day.
The Lack of Parental Awareness [27:37]
Bob Zadek: What strikes me is how little—I think this is the case—how little understanding parents have as to what goes on, what goes on when their child gets into the yellow bus or gets into the car being driven to school and the parent has lost control of their child for a high percentage of that child’s awake hours. And what is going on, and the child comes home with the schoolbook and does homework, things seem to be working on the surface okay until you know what is being written on its iPad or whatever. And that is where all the mischief is.
Williamson M. Evers: So then you suddenly find your child out rioting in the streets, right? Because that’s what they are taught. I’m laughing because otherwise I would be crying. It’s a bad thing. And it’s very—so one of the problems is when these documents are originally created, like a state-level academic content standards document, this is an arcane thing that’s going on way behind the scenes. And unless some interest group finds a problem with it, no one hears about it. They also often do this in the summertime, like when the parents aren’t paying attention to education. So the Common Core was pushed through across the nation in the summertime. No one was around. So this was a national curriculum standards in English and math, and the English part has some political stuff in it also. So this is often done out of the limelight. And then it gets embedded in the whole process, and it’s very hard to get out once it’s in.
One of the reasons it’s hard is that there’s a sunk cost problem. So once you buy these textbooks, you have them for seven years in most states. And they don’t want to admit they make a mistake. So if Ford is building Edsel and nobody wants to buy Edsel, Ford stops building Edsel and puts the assembly line to doing something else. Government, the politicians don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to ever admit they did anything wrong. Not saying that companies like to admit it, but the consumers can force them to admit it. And because they have a captive audience in these public schools, they don’t want to admit they wasted all this money and bought a bad product, and so they just dig in and push on.
Ideological Capture of Education Schools [30:27]
Bob Zadek: Now, we have many states in our country that are either two-party government run, not single party, or are more conservative—the Midwest, of course, there are a bunch of states. So what do they do? They don’t—they’re not buying into the theory of the textbook. So is that a big enough market that there are publishers to cater to that market? So are there publishers catering simply to different markets? And California, Oregon, New York, and Massachusetts have one publisher who takes care of their needs, or the same publisher, and then there’s the Midwest edition of American history for those states. Is that the way it works, or do those states just not have a big enough population?
Williamson M. Evers: I would say no. So one of the advantages of having multiple states, of having a federal system in the United States, is that we ought to have competitive federalism. In other words, we ought to have different states doing different things, and then states could emulate things that work well or shy away from doing things that don’t work well. But because of several things, one is a domination of the thinking of teachers by what’s taught in education schools, and that there is an ideological domination of progressivism in education schools.
And then in states like the mountain states and the southern states that tend to be more culturally conservative, the people who are not culturally conservative go and find a harbor, so to speak, a haven in certain areas—maybe it’s the arts, right? But one of the main places that they go is education. So if you’re in Alabama and you’re looking for where the liberals are, you know, they’re not in the police department, right? They’re in the public schools. And so the contrast is, you know—in Washington state, there’s plenty of progressives and liberals outside the schools, but they’re in the schools. In Alabama or Montana, they’re concentrated dramatically in the schools.
So the answer is really no. There are only these few publishing houses, and you know, they’ll insert in your textbook a South Dakota history section that they’ll bind in the book or something like that, and that might cater more to the state’s needs, but they’re basically going to get an American history book that’s the same as a California or New York student’s going to get.
Capitalism Portrayed as Exploitation [34:40]
Bob Zadek: Now, one of the—in these books, these books that you have been describing, the curriculum—they also, the books have a very strange way of teaching capitalism. Now, they teach capitalism as both a political and an economic system, which is kind of bizarre because it has nothing to do with a political system whatsoever. The Constitution doesn’t discuss any economic system at all in the Constitution. There is no discussion of economics at all in our founding documents. But tell us a bit about this, how critical—what critical race theory and ethnic studies has to say about capitalism, which is the bedrock of how the world has escaped universal poverty in just 200 years. So tell us a bit about why capitalism is in the crosshairs. That has nothing to do with race, it has to do with free trade among individuals.
Williamson M. Evers: Of course, there was certainly racial oppression around the world before there was capitalism, right? Or tribal oppression, whatever. No, it’s—well, so basically these people don’t have any new ideas on race. They just take the kind of vulgar Marxism, a vulgar socialism, and put a racial patina on the top. So in California’s ethnic studies model curriculum, they say that capitalism is a way of exploiting people. It—this is right out of Marx—it captures the surplus labor value of work. And it particularly oppresses racial minorities. And that’s their whole theory. It’s just imported from Marxism and then given a slight racial cast to it.
So it’s not an understanding of capitalism as entrepreneurship, as trading between parties, as investment, as economic growth, as wealth builds up in the society and in essence trading between individuals. It’s all this hierarchical thing where the big bad capitalist boss is exploiting the worker and making profits that he or she is not entitled to. That is the whole picture in there. And of course, it couldn’t be more wrong. And it goes back to the late 1800s of Karl Marx and other wrong-headed socialists like Robertus and other people that are practically obscure.
Bob Zadek: And what is so painfully wrong about it is that in the ugly, racist history of our country, Jim Crow South, when government was itself racist, what they would be doing is the Jim Crow laws were to fight capitalism. Because capitalism would allow blacks to purchase goods, to open up stores—
Williamson M. Evers: Walter Williams wrote a fabulous book on this. And there’s—so he’s a retired economist at George Mason University. Another great scholar on this is Jennifer Roback Morse. And she explained how the Jim Crow laws and the segregation laws in the South were to prevent up-and-coming, striving blacks from competing against entrenched white interests, whether workers or companies. So this racism was, in its legal embodiment in the South in Jim Crow, it was blocking capitalism, it was blocking competition.
I mean, they—there’s an interesting thing we’re having this fight in California over AB 5, which is the anti-gig worker law, anti-Lyft, anti-Uber, anti-Postmates, anti-DoorDash, and so forth, anti-Uber Eats. So what is it? It’s these companies are a platform where consumer meets provider. And okay, so one of the main ways in the South after the Civil War, they had anti-immigrant labor laws. So if you’re a black and you were in some place in the countryside and there was a job somewhere else, maybe working on a railroad that was being built or a new light industry factory that was being built in the South after the Civil War, these immigrant labor contractors would try and seek you out, provide a, you know, a railroad ticket or carting money or something to get you to your new job, and they’d get a fee from the company for getting you to it. So they were like a platform similar to these electronic platforms that help Uber drivers meet Uber customers. And so the Jim Crow laws outlawed these labor contractors. So it’s the kind of—I know it’s a little obscure, but it’s the same mentality: stop the productive middleman in order to have keep racial privilege in place.
Bob Zadek: And an example that you folks at the Institute point out repeatedly is, and we have mentioned on my show quite a bit, when you look at laws like licensing laws and occupational licensing, those are anti-capitalist, those are the absolute opposite of capitalism, and those—most of those laws prevent lower-income people, read minority, from entering gainful employment. So capitalism is begging, as a system, is begging to free up these people so they can participate in the economy, and it is the anti-capitalist laws that prevent it. So to target capitalism as racist—capitalism, any participant in a capitalist economy which is racist is doomed to fail or at least have inferior performance because they’re not hiring the best person for the job, they’re not selling to customers who want to buy their product, and you will fail. The marketplace will punish you for any semblance of irrational, i.e., racist behavior. So capitalism is the perfect antidote for racism. If people—because people’s self-interest will require them to not be racist.
And let’s remember in the ’50s, at the lunch counter, the Woolworth lunch counter, when blacks were doing sit-ins, there was Woolworth wanted to feed them. Woolworth wasn’t begging for the cops to come in and get the blacks out of the lunch counter. It was the government who was preventing Woolworth from selling to a customer who had money and wanted to buy lunch. So capitalism is never racist. It is the perfect antidote. And yet here we have a generation of children across the country being taught that capitalism is to be despised as being racist when it is the exact opposite. But it’s sad but scary when you realize that this is what the children of the parents of our country are being taught, and it’s all happening without any input from the parents.
Trump’s 1776 Commission and Structural Solutions [43:53]
Bob Zadek: Now, it invites—we’re kind of running out of time, but it invites—you mentioned Donald Trump and his 1776 patriotism federal government intruding through executive order into the curriculum. That of course is painful to you and I because we do not want the federal government dictating school curriculum. Common Core was bad enough. What would be your recommended solution if people are listening to this show and they are starting to get worked up and a little bit concerned and frightened? What is the structural solution to this, which is a—cannot be understated—problem?
Williamson M. Evers: Well, at first I want to just slightly clarify for your listeners. So there’s one thing, which is President Trump getting rid of critical racial theory-based training to federal employees. I think we can all agree that was a very good thing for him to do. And the second thing is in response to things like the ethnic studies programs and the 1619 Project, which wants to put this racial antagonism into the curriculum, the President has proposed a 1776 Commission and the National Institute of Humanities has given out a contract to come up with a patriotic curriculum. And there I think your point is very well taken that we don’t want the federal government dictating or even strongly promoting a curriculum. So we want to have the pluralism of states, we want to have competitive federalism.
So that means you have to look to your government officials. So you have to push to your school board candidates: will you pledge not to accept textbooks that have this stuff in it? You have to—every State Board of Education is different in every state. So in some states like Texas, they are elected; in Kansas, they are elected; in California, they are appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the State Senate, which is the upper house. Every state is different. So you have to think about, well, where do I need to have leverage? Is it with the governor? Are they named by the legislators? If so, I have to push the legislature and say, “I don’t want this racial totalitarianism in the textbooks. I don’t want this anti-capitalist doctrinaire diatribe, ideological indoctrination in the textbooks.” And you know, they listen, especially if you tell them, “I won’t vote for you.” If you make it a single issue to them, you say, “I won’t vote for you, I won’t support you, I’ll tell all my friends unless you end this.” That’ll work.
Charter Schools and Minority Success Stories [46:10]
Bob Zadek: What about the role—we haven’t discussed much and we’re running out of time—but what about the role of charter schools? How does that change the dynamics of all of this? Charter schools, private schools, voucher schools, religious schools and the like, because they are outside of direct government control. How does they factor in?
Williamson M. Evers: Well, in principle they could do this, but they’re still pretty small. You know, private schools are less than 10% of the school-age population. Vouchers very small. You know, charters very small. They’re growing. They could become an independent market for this kind of thing. So at the college level, the private sector is big enough and the whole system, if you want to even call it that, of higher education has much many more centers of activity and decision makers than really just in the 50 states. So you know, what we’d like to have is the textbook situation was decided—as long as we have public schools, it should be decided maybe at the district or school level. That would lead to a lot more competition. Right now, basically the charter schools and the private schools are stuck with the existing textbooks. They can use a few things. There’s a new book by Wilfred McClay about American history called Land of Hope that’s really at a college level or maybe an AP American history level, but there’s just not very much out there. And it’s just, you know, the numbers.
Bob Zadek: One of the things that I’ve learned from you, Bill, is—which I found to be both—and we only have about a minute left—counterintuitive and scary is how these—this curriculum underplays, indeed completely writes out of the narrative, the success story of minorities who have succeeded despite being held back. If you can do it in about a minute, explain how those stories, which one would think ought to be celebrated, are suppressed. We have about a minute left.
Williamson M. Evers: Well, if you believe in this “race determines everything” theory, you don’t want to have people talking about George Washington Carver, who was a scientist and inventor and a black man, or the women in the movie about the calculators for NASA and the space program are examples of people from racial minorities being successful. And we have all sorts of minorities—Koreans are famous for having a kind of finance system, a kinship-based rotating credit associations where they start new businesses by pooling their money. Now, we know that students will stay in school for more years, they’ll get slightly better grades if they’re taught that people of every sort can rise, including people from racial minorities like Irish or Jews or something like that that once were at the bottom of the ladder and have now climbed up. But they leave this out on purpose because they don’t want people to think this is possible. Only through revolution is what they think can there be a change.
Bob Zadek: Because it’s individual, because it tells a story of an individual who can triumph. And any concept of individualism as opposed to part of a group is contrary to the narrative. It’s kind of scary, Bill. Oh my goodness, when I think of what students are taught while I’m here busily going about my life. So Bill, thank you so much for drawing our attention to this very important issue. How could our friends follow your writings, Bill? We have about 10 seconds.
Williamson M. Evers: Independent.org. They can look for my writings on independent.org. They can also donate to support the work of the Independent Institute, but they can find mine and other scholars who have similar approaches on independent.org.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Bill, for giving us your time this Sunday morning.
Williamson M. Evers: Thanks for having me.
Bob Zadek: Thank you to my friends for giving us an hour of your time to listen to what Bill had to say. We’ll be back again next Sunday. Please have a good balance of the week ahead. Good morning.