Straight Talk With Steve: Stop CRT

The new ACT scores for the class of 2022 were released last week and the scores do not look good for Nebraska.

Nebraska’s composite score fell to 19.4, which is below the national average of 19.8. More importantly, though, is how Nebraska’s ACT composite scores have been falling over the course of the last five years. For instance, in 2017 Nebraska’s composite score was 21.4, then in 2018 it fell to 20.1, in 2019 it was 20.0, and last year it was 20.0 again. Nebraska hasn’t seen test scores this low in a decade.

While some may choose to blame the pandemic for these falling test scores, the real culprit is that we are spending less time stressing English, Reading, Math and Science, which are all subjects measured by the ACT, and more time stressing subjects that do not contribute to student success.

Last year we saw how the State Board of Education tried to reform the State’s sex education curriculum with extremist Left-wing ideology about gender identity and sexual orientation. This year the problem lies with Critical Race Theory (CRT).

The Nebraska Department of Education has been pushing CRT in our public schools. Last year the Department of Education put a link to the CRT Toolbox on their webpage for teachers to have easy access to the CRT materials. The link only recently disappeared. So, on Monday I joined Sen. Dave Murman of Glenvil in calling for an investigation into the Nebraska Department of Education for promoting the teaching of CRT in Nebraska’s public schools.

Critical Race Theory distorts the facts about America’s foundation, its history and its heritage in order to promote an extremist Left-wing narrative about racism in America. While there is no question that racism has been part of America’s past, it is wrong to distort the facts about our history and to teach those distorted facts to our school children.

In order to help you see how Critical Race Theory distorts the facts about America’s past, one needs to look no further than how Howard Zinn, the founder of the Zinn Education Project, a popular Critical Race Theory program, has distorted the facts about Christopher Columbus in his book, “A People’s History of the United States.”

Howard Zinn intentionally maligned the good character of Christopher Columbus in his book in order to mislead his readers into thinking that Columbus was only interested in getting rich. On the second page of his book he wrote about Christopher Columbus’s first encounter with the Arawak Indians of the Bahamas. Zinn insinuated that Christopher Columbus was only interested in finding gold, for he wrote: “The information Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?” Zinn clearly wanted his readers to conclude that Columbus was only in it for the money.

But, contrary to the very uninformed and biased opinion of Howard Zinn, Columbus described the primary purpose of his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean much differently. According to Columbus, his primary purpose was not the pursuit of gold; instead, it was evangelism.

Zinn conveniently left out the fact that Columbus had described the primary purpose of his voyage in his own personal log as to “…bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens.” Zinn also conveniently left out the fact that Columbus had forbidden his men to trade broken pieces of glass and pottery for gold with the Indians, and he conveniently left out the fact that Columbus died as a penniless man in South America – hardly the actions of a greedy, gold-digging explorer!

Nebraska’s students need to learn the objective facts of American history, not the very biased narrative presented by the advocates of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is laced with an extremist Left-wing agenda that is designed to convince all American students that the United States of America is an evil empire built on the faulty foundation of racism, and that is not an accurate portrayal of our history, our foundation, or our heritage.

If CRT is allowed to be taught in our schools, students will get a very twisted view of racism in American history. Critical Race Theory hides the fact that colonial Americans tried to pass anti-slavery laws but they were vetoed by King George III, that the Quakers of Pennsylvania founded the first abolitionist society in America as early as 1775, a year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and that Benjamin Franklin spent the last three decades of his life educating black students in Philadelphia and that he petitioned Congress in 1790 to abolish slavery.