Defending Education discusses SPLC influence in K-12 curriculum in KSBRC webinar
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.”