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A Georgia teaching activist has been placed on administrative leave after admitting he illegally smuggled critical race theory into schools and kindergartens.
Dr Quintin Bostic was busted bragging to an undercover reporter from Project Veritas about how he had implemented the curriculum into two school districts in the state.
He brazenly told how he passed it off as diversity, equity and inclusion lessons when the classes were actually packed full of the banned topics.
The content manager at Teaching Lab, a nonprofit pushing educational equity, said if he was caught officials would find prohibited books and theories throughout his work and admitted it was illegal.
Critical race theory was banned in Georgia in April after state legislators decided it was teaching ‘divisive’ academic concepts about racism.
Bostic also took a shot at Republican Governor Brian Kemp – who he branded an ‘idiot’ – and his wife – a former teacher – who would ‘nail’ him if she found out.
Bostic was caught on camera by an undercover operative for Project Veritas
The teaching activist sat down with an undercover Project Veritas reporter in what appeared to be bars and restaurants.
The clip starts as he says: ‘If you don’t say the word critical race theory you can technically teach it.’
The journalist says: ‘And it’s amazing you got schools to purchase the curriculum…’ But Bostic interrupts and says: ‘And they don’t even know what’s going on.”
He continues: ‘I would say I’m a good salesman… but I’m also an evil salesman. Like, so bad.’
Bostic admits the state has been paying for the curriculum without even knowing what is in it.
He says: ‘They have no clue, and I’m like this is great – this is good.’ Asked how many schools use his work, he continues: ‘Two, two districts actually. So, Fulton County and then Cobb County.’
The reporter asks him: ‘You curriculum that is in the schools here in Georgia is just kindergarten?’
He replies: ‘It’s just, the one here is just kindergarten yeah. Kindergarten, it’s so cool.’
On Governor Kemp, he says: ‘He’s like such an idiot. Like his wife does a lot of stuff on education here as a former teacher.’
Asked what she would do if he found out, he continues: ‘Oh I would be nailed, I’m sure.’
Bostin told the undercover reporter the tricks that he used to get CRT into schools
Bostic was open about his mission to ‘smuggle’ the ideas into schools in Georgia
Bostic said that Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, was an ‘idiot’
WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY?
Cornell Law School Prof. William Jacobson launched a CRT database CriticalRace.org
Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions and that they function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
The architects of the theory argue that the US was founded on the theft of land and labor and that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race. Proponents also believe race is culturally invented, not biological.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a social justice think tank based in New York City, was one of the early proponents. Initially, she says, it was ‘simply about telling a more complete story of who we are.’
He was then asked what his thoughts were on what parents who push back against CRT would say.
But Bostic says: ‘Who cares. I’m not part of the system. I can’t… I’m not going to lose my job over this.
‘The worst that’s going to happen is y’all going to be upset that I shared some knowledge. That’s the worst that’s going to happen.’
In another clip from a different conversation he says: ‘My license is already gone. So what you gonna do?’
Asked if he still teaches in schools, he says: ‘I do. Which is insane right? Which is still insane.’
In a third clip from the chat, the reporter asks: ‘You make that profit right, not the teaching lab? Good.’
He replies: ‘Yeah. mhm. I mean… The state pays for that, they do.’ Asked if they know if CRT is in it, he says: ‘Right of course, they don’t know.
‘They don’t know. I mean so basically it just goes into the account. My account.’
Later in the video, he’s asked: ‘Is CRT illegal in the schools here?’ He says: ‘It is banned. It’s still banned in the schools.
‘And on top of that if you don’t say the words critical race theory you can technically teach it.
‘And people don’t know what CRT is. So when they see the word. Alarm goes off. But if you teach the principles of it people are like ‘of course’.
‘They have no clue and I’m like this is great, this is good.’ Asked what they would find that was banned in the curriculum, he says: ‘Books, theories, CRT, even banned books.’
He said it was an option in some schools, but added there are teachers of color who are like ‘I want to use this’.
‘We’re teaching diversity, we’re teaching love all humans. And I’m like behind the scenes like teach this though, make sure you say and use these words and use this book.’
Teaching Lab, which has a $15million budget, initially defended Bostic – saying it never sold the curriculum in Georgia – but later backed down and placed him on administrative leave.
The DC based company describes itself as a ‘non-partisan, non-profit organization that supports teachers with research-backed professional learning that helps improve outcomes for students’.
A map on their website shows 24 states in which they work – and Georgia is not one of them.
‘Critical race theory is not a part of Teaching Lab’s professional learning model,’ they stated, adding that the views expressed were Bostic’s alone.
Quintin Bostic was caught on camera bragging about CRT in Georgia
Teaching Lab issued a second statement, saying the teaching activist has been placed on administrative leave.
‘Project Veritas, a widely discredited activist group, released deceptively produced and edited videos of a Teaching Lab employee,’ the nonprofit said.
‘The views expressed by the employee in these recordings are not the views of Teaching Lab, and are inaccurate and regrettable.
‘The employee has been placed on administrative leave pending further review.’ Bostic has not commented on the videos.
But others were incensed by the clip, with Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt tweeting: ‘But CRT isn’t in schools.’
Georgia Department of Education said: ‘State school superintendent Richard Woods is firmly opposed to the inclusion of CRT and other divisive concepts in Georgia’s public schools.
‘Furthermore attempts to promote or push these ideologies in Georgia schools are illegal under the Protect Students First Act signed into law in 2022.
‘We are in communication with both school districts explicitly mentioned to verify whether the information in the video is accurate and are working to ensure these materials have not been adopted in other districts.’
They added: ‘We will direct any district using these materials to discontinue their use.’
In October a study found critical race theory was being taught to millions of American schoolchildren every day.
Researchers at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank with a record of spotlighting CRT, found 93 percent of respondents, aged 18-20, had learned about at least one aspect of the controversial racial justice theory in schools.
Report author Zach Goldberg said the findings were ‘disturbing’ and stood in stark contrast to claims from some teacher groups that CRT was not taught to high schoolers, but was confined to university law courses.
‘Even assuming exposure is overestimated in the current data, it’s safe to say that a sizable share of the pre-college student population is being subjected to this stuff,’ Goldberg posted on social media.
It come amid debates over teaching racism and gender identity that have exploded into angry face-offs involving parents and teachers at school board meetings across the nation.
CRT rests on the premise that racial bias — intentional or not — is baked into US laws and institutions, and that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow racial segregation laws continues to create an uneven playing field for nonwhite Americans.
A think tank team surveyed 1,505 young adults aged 18-20 about their experiences at school
Opponents of critical race theory rallying outside a school board headquarters, in Ashburn, Virginia, in 2021
While most Americans support teaching high schoolers about slavery and racism in US history, many are opposed to CRT, which many conservatives see as a rewrite of history to indoctrinate children with ‘woke’ ideology.
As Americans tackled racial and social injustice after the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, several Republican-led states including Florida, Georgia and Texas enacted rules to limit teaching about the role of racism in the US.
Goldberg and other researchers involved in the study are colleagues of think tank fellow Christopher Rufo, who has largely set the right’s agenda on the teaching of gender ideology and CRT in schools.
The team surveyed 1,505 young adults about their experiences at school and found 93 percent had either been taught about or heard from an adult at school about one of the central components of CRT.
These included how ‘America is a systematically racist country, that ‘white people have privilege’ and ‘unconscious bias that negatively affects non-white people’ or that the nation was built on ‘stolen land’.
More than half of students either learned about or heard from an adult that the US was a ‘patriarchal society’ and that gender was an ‘identity choice, regardless of the biological sex you were born into’, researchers found.
While millions of parents would be happy for their children to study such topics in class, the study authors said the real problem was they were being presented ‘uncritically’, without competing ideas and as ‘undisputed facts’.
‘This is indoctrination, and governments should act swiftly to put a stop to it,’ said the report.
‘Unless voters, parents, and governments act, these illiberal and unscientific ideas will spread more widely, and will replace traditional American liberal nationalism with an identity-based cultural socialism.’
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