A spokesman for Defending Education, an organization dedicated to confronting what it sees as harmful agendas in K-12 schools that interfere with academic improvement, discussed its study of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) “Learning for Justice” curriculum in a webinar hosted by the Kansas School Board Resource Center (KSBRC).
Like The Sentinel, KSBRC is a subsidiary of the Kansas Policy Institute.
Paul Runko told KSBRC’s Dr. Tracey Frederick and Ward Cassidy that Defending Education was begun in response to parents’ concerns during the COVID lockdowns:
“A little over five years ago, we started right after the COVID pandemic, when parents started to see all of the interesting and arguably crazy things that their children were learning over Zoom school, and when parents started to rise up and demand that schools remove the political ideologies and return to academic excellence across the country in K-12 public schools. And so, we’re an organization of parents, grandparents, concerned citizens, working to reform schools back to academic excellence, and political neutrality.”
He says the SPLC, once a pre-eminent civil rights organization, has shifted focus in recent years:
“Like most institutions that we see in education, they’ve become very highly ideological, and a lot of their materials, if not all of their materials, skew towards a particular political bend. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been pretty famous in the last few years because of what they have on their website. Here’s our report.”
Runko poses a question for parents and school board members which may explain how the SPLC education agenda has infiltrated school districts in recent years:
“How many instructional resources used in a school district are formally adopted by the school board? And how many of them arrive through professional development, consultants, SEL (Social Emotional Learning programs), other websites, or teacher-created lessons? So, again, this idea of how much does the school board and the elected officials that oversee the schools for the public actually approve of what’s being shown to teachers and to students? I think what a lot of school boards, and even parents and other education advocates think of curriculum oversight, they think about the textbook; you know, what’s in the textbook? Everybody wants the textbook posted on the school’s website where everybody can see, and that’s great. We would agree with that, but it goes further than that, so we conducted a study of the SPLC Learning for Justice Curriculum.”
The SPLC Hate Map Includes “Moms For Liberty” in JOCO”
“The SPLC became famous because of this “Hate Map” they have. This is essentially a map of groups that they deem hateful, and that, I guess, are discriminatory and do bad things for our country. This became famous because a lot of the groups that were organizing in response to COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement back in 2020 were put on this list. Parents speaking up at school board meetings, just trying to get their schools to open or remove masks from their kids or stop teaching Critical Race Theory … were put on this map, and so full disclosure, we’re also on their hate map; our organization, Defending Education.
“But that’s not why we looked into this organization and their curriculum. The reason we did was because the SPLC made the news because they’re under investigation by the Department of Justice, for a few alleged things that they’re looking into, and so they were making the news, and I think parents and school board members and teachers were saying, ‘Oh, this is, you know, maybe something going on in California or New York, but it’s not happening here.’ And that’s when we always know to look into something. Is this a pervasive thing? Is this something that’s happening everywhere, or is it isolated and parents can kind of not worry about it? Our report tracks this in 43 states, 30 government entities, and 225 school districts. So, this was a pervasive curriculum, but this “Hate Map” essentially compares parent groups and parents fighting back at school board meetings to groups like the KKK.”
Learning for Justice
“In addition to this, they have their curriculum educational materials, which is called Learning for Justice. So it was formerly called “Teaching Tolerance”. I think they changed the name two or three years ago. According to the SPLC, Learning for Justice is a community education program that cultivates and nurtures dialogue, learning, reflection, and civic action from those closest to and harmed most by injustices in the South. Okay, well, that doesn’t really sound too bad. The next thing we found about how they themselves describe this program. It focuses on ‘education for liberation, community civic, and political action education, learning for justice complements the Southern Poverty Law Center’s work to increase power and capacity for multiracial, inclusive democracy.’ A lot of buzzwords going on in there.
“We wanted to alert parents that this entity and this program isn’t just something the federal government is looking into. I don’t really have to worry about it, or this is not in my area. No, parents and school board members across the country need to be looking, not only into this, but also safeguarding themselves, if this is something they realize they don’t want for their school district.
“We’re not debating here (whether)students (should) be learning about civil rights. Should they be learning about historical injustices, like slavery? Should they be learning about respect for others? ?I think we would all probably agree that students should be learning about that. The debate is really whether this type of political activism, this encouragement of political activism, especially political activism, for a particular ideological worldview, should be incorporated into schools and be set as educational objectives. And so, especially for the school board members and the parents and the advocates, I want you to think about where should your school be drawing the line between, let’s say, civic education, social studies, history, education, and this idea of civic activism, which is very prevalent in this Learning for Justice curriculum.”
SPLC Influence in Kansas
“Lawrence Public Schools has a program called “Parents As Teachers”, and it has an anti-racist parenting resource page, and you can see some of the things here that are mentioned: anti-racist parenting materials, equity resources, but here on the right, you’ll see Teaching Tolerance. Again, now it’s called Learning for Justice, but it’s the same program. And so this is recommended to parents, and really anybody who’s looking on the school website, as something that’s worthwhile to use as an educational material. It says, our mission is to help teachers in schools educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Okay, that kind of sounds nice. But then, kind of when you drill down into it, you see they’re pushing a particular ideology on students. Black Lives Matter- we can debate whether these things should be on the school website. And I think that’s a worthwhile conversation. But I also think it’s worth asking questions like, who approved this page? Is there a review process that went into this before this was posted? Was the school board aware that this was even on the school district website? How are these resources vetted?
“In Olathe, this was a part of a presentation that was given to the Board of Education about diversity inclusion back in 2020, so it was six years ago now. Again, sort of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all of the riots and stuff that happened in the summer of 2020. So it’s understandable that there was a focus on these materials during that time, although we would argue that they’re misguided. But anyway, so this presentation, the third thing is a Teaching Tolerance training with the ONEA (Olathe National Education Association.) So, 80 staff members participated in a training hosted by the teachers union in this school district on SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance. Now, it’s Learning for Justice.”
In conclusion, Runko offers several questions for board members and parents to consider when determining curriculum:
“How might we require greater transparency on external curriculum providers, professional development vendors, equity consultants, or just consultants in general, and supplemental resources that are brought into the classroom?
“How might we establish review procedures for things like those family or educator resources pages that I showed from Lawrence schools?
“How do we establish review procedures for classroom supplementary materials? And then how do we establish review procedures for things like district recommended websites? So, almost every single school district website I’ve ever looked at has links to all these external organizations and pages we think are really great. How do we have review procedures for those pages? Maybe it’s annually, maybe it’s every four years.
“How might we clearly define the distinction between civic education and political activism? So, again, I talked about this idea of, um, you know, part of what this Learning for Justice program tries to solve is civic education. I think, especially in the 250th year of America, schools are saying ‘How do we get our kids and our students thinking about our country and how to make it better,’ which I think is totally appropriate. But when do we cross the line, making sure our students understand the history of America, our Republican form of government, the ideals and values that our country is founded upon?’ When do we need to advocate for specific political solutions, and helping or instructing students in which political solutions are the correct or incorrect ones? So how might we clearly define which is which, and which to include, and which not to include?”
“And the last one is, how might we ensure board members can answer the question, ‘what is being taught, who created it, and how did it get here?”
