I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that your own particular school district might not be emblematic of the rest of the country. I live in an inner ring suburb of Chicago. It is hyper-liberal. There are no school districts in Indiana that resemble it, I am guessing. I realize that my district is an outlier. For most districts in Indiana, this whole thing is probably not that big of an issue yet (although the anecdotes from IUCrazy2 are terrible).
Here, in the name of racial equity they are eliminating honors classes in the high school in 2022, and have eliminated hierarchical teaching in my elementary school (pull out classes for advanced kids in math and reading, for example). My oldest will be a freshman when they experiment with trying to teach all levels of students within the same classroom--supposedly teaching the same "topic" while having kids read material and take tests geared towards their ability level (that's my term--administrators here don't recognize kids have different academic aptitudes because that, too, is not antiracist). Here, the belief among the administration and board is that honors classes entrench White Supremacy and that eliminating them is antiracist.
As far as curriculum, it is difficult to figure out exactly what is being taught because, in my district, they don't use textbooks, instead relying on handouts, etc. FOIA requests are outstanding but will no doubt be fought over. I can tell you that in the middle schools courses affiliated with social studies, they specifically teach Ibram Kendi's Stamped (the kids version), and will be integrating the 1619 Project this year (teachers individually used the materials last year but it wasn't formally imbedded in the curriculum yet). An effort to "decolonize" and "de-Europeanize" the curriculum is underway this summer in my elementary and middle schools; no doubt that has been achieved in the high school. Things are more advanced on the antiracist front in the other elementary and jr highs in Oak Park that feed into OPRF High, where the administrators believe "all schools are rooted in White Supremacy."
More generally, the notion of equity or antiracism permeates a lot of subjects and teaching methods, but my particular elementary district is not as bad as the high school (elementary and jr high is one district; high school is its own separate district). The teachers in my elementary and middle school district receive DEI training quite a bit (which is probably not worth the effort given how few minorites my elementary district has), we have quite robust SEL programs (which I'm a big proponent of), and they revamped all the books in the elementary school over the last couple of years to make it antiracist. (I'd love to tell you what they eliminated in this effort, but they didn't keep track).
At the high school, I couldn't list every way in which antiracism has been introduced into the curriculum and teaching methods. It is that school's #1 priority, above everything else. They emulate Evanston. Here's some of what Evanston does:
A friend who is a Chicago lawyer sent me the complaint. Evanston is the town just north of Chicago, where Northwestern University is located. The "training" and "teaching materials" described in this complaint are rather insane, and consistently confuse race...
leiterreports.typepad.com
quillette.com
