No, Anti-CRT Laws Don't Actually Outlaw Lessons That Might Make Students Feel Uncomfortable

A widespread misconception makes the effect of these laws even more "chilling" than it needs to be

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The headline on this post is actually the one for a piece I wrote for The Grade, a newsletter about education journalism. It went up earlier today, and you can read it here.

I’m grateful that the editor, Alexander Russo, shares my concern about the many stories and columns that have appeared in the news media—including on NPR and The New York Times—reporting that state laws are banning the teaching of anything that might make students “uncomfortable.”

As I explain both in the piece for The Grade in a previous post on this site, what these laws actually ban is teaching the “concept” that students “should” or “must” feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or some other form of “psychological distress” on account of their race or sex.

To be clear: laws including that provision are dangerous and unnecessary. I’m not defending them. But teachers need to understand what the laws actually prohibit. Right now, it appears that many are shying away from teaching anything that touches on race—including slavery, the civil rights movement, and other aspects of Black history—because they’re afraid one kid might go home and tell her parents she was “uncomfortable.”

To me, it’s obvious that this is a serious issue. It threatens progress that’s being made across the country in getting more content into the elementary grades, usually through the adoption of literacy curricula that cover topics relating to history as well as science, the arts, and literature.

Elementary schools and often middle schools have long been wastelands when it comes to history The result is that students from all backgrounds, and especially those who have less access to historical information at home, arrive at high school unprepared to understand history and other subjects at the level the curriculum assumes.

You could argue that if teachers are avoiding historical topics at all grade levels, students’ lack of preparation won’t make much difference: those topics won’t be covered in high school either. But needless to say, that’s far from the optimal solution. If students graduate knowing little or no history—as is currently the case for far too many—they won’t be equipped to understand the world around them or exercise their responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

But it seems that many people—including some journalists and editors—don’t share my concern. I submitted a guest essay calling out this widespread misreporting to the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which have published the error in their own pages more than once. I have personal contacts on the editorial board of both publications, but I couldn’t rouse any interest.

A few days after the Times rejected my piece, I was taken aback to see the very mistake I had written about repeated in a major Sunday editorial there, about threats to free speech. The editors said a Tennessee law "makes lesson plans illegal if any students 'should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress.'"

After I wrote a letter pointing out that the law actually prohibits teaching the concept that anyone “should” feel those things on account of race or sex, the Times issued a correction. I don’t know if my letter spurred that correction. I only found out about it when I went back to reread the editorial, to cite it in my piece for The Grade. When I saw that the language wasn’t what I remembered, I thought for a moment that I was losing my mind. Then I saw the correction at the bottom.

This morning, it happened again. In his Times column, Charles Blow characterized a Florida bill—expected to be signed any day by Governor Ron DeSantis—as saying that “a lesson that may make a person 'feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress' should be banned.” In fact, the bill prohibits teaching that a person "must feel” guilt, etc., “because of actions ... committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex."

So I wrote another letter to the Times, and this time I got a response. The editors have changed the wording in the column and appended a correction.

It’s to the editors’ credit that they made the corrections, but this particular error is now so common that tracking down all instances of it could easily be a full-time job. (I did mention in my second letter to the Times that I had checked the laws of nine other states with such laws, in addition to Tennessee and Florida, and none of them banned just making kids uncomfortable. So maybe the Times, at least, won’t make this mistake again.)

In any event, there seems to be an assumption—among journalists and others—that the inaccuracy doesn’t really matter. One argument is that we know the legislators actually intended to ban anything that might cause discomfort, no matter what the law itself says. That argument seems implicit in a phrase the Times added to its editorial in the wake of my first letter. After accurately quoting the “should” language, the editorial went on to say that the provision was “aimed at avoiding the ‘distress’ that students might feel when learning about racist or misogynist elements of American history.”

Even if that’s true—which we don’t really know—that’s no reason to roll over and give in to the legislature’s intent. I would hope that any judge would disregard an argument about legislative intent if, as here, it contradicts the plain language of a statute. Not that teachers should have to test these statutes in court—but if the alternative is avoiding anything that might make some hypothetical student uncomfortable, I hope some will be courageous enough to do that.

Another argument is that it doesn’t matter whether the laws are reported accurately—or even if a law exists at all—because educators are so fearful they’re already censoring themselves. That’s the response I got from a recent panel of education journalists discussing “discomfort” laws. And there are, for example, instances of books disappearing from school libraries and classroom shelves preemptively, to forestall parents’ complaints, even where there’s no “anti-CRT” law on the books.

But that argument overlooks the fact that the news outlets themselves have contributed to this atmosphere of fear by falsely reporting that states are making it illegal just to make kids uncomfortable. Accurate news stories won’t completely solve the problem. But they could at least not make it worse—unless it’s already too late to undo the damage that’s been wrought.