ZadekpediaTreatment in the Critical Race Theory episode
Jonathan Butcher, discussing Critical Race Theory in K–12 education, invokes the 1619 Project only by way of a critic. He cites the historian Sean Wilentz, whom he describes as highly critical of the 1619 Project, as arguing that one of the main things the Project has gotten wrong is that America was meant to be racist and oppressive through slavery. On Wilentz’s account as Butcher relays it, abolitionist politics actually originated in the United States; other nations, England among them, abolished slavery before the United States did, but the political movement of abolition is, in Butcher’s phrasing, uniquely an American feature. Butcher places this within a larger claim about what he calls the American experiment and the ideas that bind the culture together Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022).
The 1619 Project is not otherwise described in the excerpt. Butcher’s argument in the passage concerns Critical Race Theory: he says it started in higher education, came to the United States by way of the Frankfurt School, emerged from law schools as Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory, and moved quickly to colleges of education. He names the Hayward Unified School District, which he says put out a memo stating it would keep Critical Race Theory by name in its curriculum as part of an ethnic studies program; the Portland public school system, which he says posts videos of a Critical Race Theory working group on YouTube; and teacher training programs in Loudoun County, Virginia, contracting with companies that use the words Critical Race Theory in their training. He also mentions a music professor hired at Arizona State University to teach music in higher education from the perspective of Critical Race Theory Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022).
Butcher’s stated reason parents should care is that Critical Race Theory believes discrimination is appropriate, which he says violates a moral issue the United States believed settled institutionally in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and culturally through the civil rights movement. He attributes to Derrick Bell, along with Richard Delgado, the theory of interest convergence—that civil rights only succeeded in the United States to preserve white power.
Treatment in the school choice episode
Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute raises the 1619 Project twice in the Arizona ESA episode. First, describing what he says the Biden administration has done, he refers to funding requirements and carrots handed down to schools that teach things like the 1619 Project or Ibram Kendi’s anti-racism, which he calls deeply destructive and corrosive content pushed with heavy-handed influence from Washington, D.C. He contrasts this with school choice and education savings accounts, under which, he says, none of that has any impact, because parents are not forced by government bureaucrats in Washington to take a one-size-fits-all approach Arizona’s School Choice Reform is a Model for the Nation (2022).
Second, in the discussion of textbook content and transparency, Beienburg says that in Arizona a law requires a school district adopting a textbook to make that public so parents can see it, but that the requirement does not apply to supplemental resources. He says a district can therefore have its teachers teach things like the 1619 Project—which he characterizes as teaching that the United States was founded on slavery and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, calling it radical revisionist ahistorical content—and then say it did not have to formally get permission or even tell parents because it is just a supplemental resource that teachers may be encouraged to use. He describes the problem as more severe than the textbook-adoption issue Bob Zadek raised, and describes Goldwater’s work on academic transparency, under which public schools would post online a list of what they are using Arizona’s School Choice Reform is a Model for the Nation (2022).
The surrounding argument in that episode concerns the expansion of Arizona’s ESA legislation, which Beienburg says had been signed but had not yet taken effect because legislation takes 90 days to become law, with an opposition effort under way to block it. He predicts existing private schools will serve families who could not previously afford them, and that micro-schools and learning pods of the kind seen during COVID will emerge. Bob Zadek frames the debate as one between those who claim to know better what is best for citizens and the citizens themselves, and asks about the paternalism argument; Beienburg replies that the opposition to ESAs rests on mistrust, and in some cases contempt, for parents Arizona’s School Choice Reform is a Model for the Nation (2022).
Across episodes
Two episodes touch the 1619 Project—the Critical Race Theory episode with Jonathan Butcher and the Arizona school choice episode with Matt Beienburg—and the episodes show no development between them: in both, the Project appears as an example of contested content in K–12 education rather than as a subject examined in its own right, and neither guest responds to the other’s treatment.