Research outfit's survey calls for more "Anti-Bias" instruction in K-12
Rand Corporation's recent report on its own survey says 3 out of 4 teachers "provide anti-bias education."
Critical Race Theory is not being used or taught in K-12 schools. That is the line handed down by national teachers’ unions and school district officials across the country.
Yet a 2022 report by the Rand Corporation, which centers on its own educational survey, shows that three out of four teachers reported providing “anti-bias instruction” in their classrooms.
Rand Corporation is a global policy and research juggernaut funded through public dollars; mainly government contracts, and philanthropic donations. The company is registered as a 501(c)3. In 2020, tax filings show the organization pulled in a stunning $383,157,886.
The Rand report, titled “A Snapshot of Anti-bias Education in U.S. K-12 Schools,” draws from the 2021 American Instructional Resources Survey (AIRS). The survey was administered through the “American Teacher Panel, a nationally representative sample of K–12 public school teachers across the country.”
AIRS itself is a Rand-created project and the company is basically reporting on its own research. The report covers AIRS responses submitted by "7,217 K–12 public school teachers,” which were “administered in May and June 2021."
AIRS focused on how many teachers are using anti-bias education; teachers’ perceptions about district-required instructional materials, teachers’ anti-bias professional development, and teachers’ preparation programs.
The report defines "anti-bias" as centering on the domains of "identity, diversity, justice, and action," which are unsurprisingly components of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Taken as a whole, the report is really about poking around how many teachers are employing CRT concepts without actually using the term CRT. This is evidenced by the specific, up-front mention of Critical Race Theorist and activist Louise Derman Sparks, known for pioneering “anti-bias curriculum” infused with CRT into early childhood education:
Definition of Anti-Bias Education
The conception of anti-bias education on which this report is based centers around four main goals, dividedinto the domains of identity, diversity, justice, and action. This conception is drawn from the works on anti-biaseducation of Louise Derman-Sparks and colleagues in the realm of early childhood education. The conceptwas then built on by the organization Learning for Justice in the development of its Social Justice Standards,a framework for providing anti-bias education, and instructional resources for anti-bias education (Derman-Sparks and Edwards, 2020; Learning for Justice, 2016).
The findings show a disturbingly high level of “anti-bias” use reported by the AIRS respondants.
The survey results show that three in four teachers, or nearly three-quarters of teachers, said they provide "anti-bias instruction in some form," and that they commonly used Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula for that purpose.
According to the finding, teachers “especially likely” to use anti-bias educational materials and instruction in their classrooms were those with fewer years of experience, Black teachers, female teachers, Elementary Teachers, and English Language Arts (ELA) teachers.
"84 percent of novice teachers in their first three years of teaching reported engaging in anti-bias education, compared with 70 percent of veteran teachers with more than 20 years of experience,” the report says.
"Seventy-five percent of female teachers reported engaging in anti-bias education, compared with 65 percent of male teachers,” according to the report. “Seventy-nine percent of Black or African American teachers reported engaging in anti-bias education, in comparison with 73 percent of non-Black or non–African American teachers."
Only 27 percent of the AIRS respondents reported not providing anti-bias instruction at all. The remaining 71 percent of teachers said they engaged in anti-bias education to a “small, moderate, or large extent."
Notably, ELA teachers and general elementary teachers who teach multiple subjects “were more likely to engage in anti-bias education than their peers teaching math and science." In other words, English teachers and the majority of K-5 teachers are imparting CRT in their instruction.
Rand’s report also delved into taxpayer-funded school districts creating and providing "anti-bias" materials, with "roughly one-third of teachers reporting they were using “their school- or district-provided materials for their subject area for anti-bias education."
