Shane Phipps: Kids Aren’t Being Fed Propaganda, You Are (the real story behind the Indiana CRT scandal)
Shane Phipps focuses on a story circulating in Indiana alleging that public schools are secretly teaching Critical Race Theory. Where did this story come from?
This is part of a well-funded and organized attack on public education. Before taking any of it in, it is important to know the people behind the stories, those on the front lines of public education and those with a very frightening agenda cloaked in the well-crafted narrative that public schools are undermining the “American Way” by indoctrinating kids with a radically left-wing sensibility. With just a little investigation, it becomes clear that the shoe is on the other foot. While public schools are carefully straddling the line separating the interests of the Right and Left when it comes to educating students in a world that is changing faster than anyone can keep up with, it is agenda-driven special interest groups who are actually intent on wresting control of public education policy and indoctrinating students with their own narrow world view. And they are using all the deceitful and unscrupulous methods in their bag of tricks to accomplish their endgame.
Phipps establishes the history and context of these stories, and then explains how the “story” was created.
A man and woman come to the front office of the school and ask to speak to an administrator. They tell the administrator that they are new to town and are shopping around for schools to send their kids. They say that they are from a very conservative state and that they have heard that this community they are moving to is very conservative as well. They say they’ve heard some good things about the school but some things they have concerns with as well. They ask how this school approaches things like CRT and SEL. All the while, they are secretly video taping the whole conversation.
Now, put yourself in the place of the school official on the other side of the desk in this setting. Remember, they are in salesperson mode and trying to ease the supposed pre-conceived concerns of these parents/customers. In this case, the undercover agents have given the school official/salesperson the impression that they are most likely left-leaning parents who are concerned that the school’s curriculum might be too politically conservative in the way they handle those scary acronyms. This little detail is important and, by the way, it’s actually a brilliant tactic.
So, when these secret agent parents claiming to be new in town came to feel out these Indiana school officials, they came in as wolves in sheep’s clothing, making it seem like they had concerns about one thing while secretly trapping the school officials into saying things that they use as warning flags about their actual concerns. Once the deceitful seed was planted in the school officials’ minds, they shifted their “sales pitch” to try to reassure these fake parents that their schools did not lean to the conservative side. Now, please understand what I am about to say because it is absolutely essential to understanding how this whole kerfuffle is really much ado about absolutely nothing. Had these same undercover operators given the impression that they were worried that the school might be too liberal in their approach, the school officials would have assured them that wasn’t the case either.
The twisting can go even further than that.
In my investigation of this story, it has come to my attention that, in at least one of the cases shown in the Fox News story, the topic the school official was discussing on their segment of the tape wasn’t even CRT, as was implied in the story. In this case, the topic the fake parents and the school official were discussing was SEL, not CRT. Here’s the rub on that, Social and Emotional Learning curriculum is mandated to be taught in public schools by Indiana statute, (SB 297, 2017).