The Future of Rye Public Education Is at Stake

There have been a number of articles about and responses to the Rye City School District Board of Education’s foray into the highly controversial and radical world of Critical Race Theory (CRT) through its recently formed Task Force on Race and its engagement of the NYU Steinhardt Center. The people of Rye are being misled by the Board into believing that this is just some sort of harmless racial sensitivity training exercise. It is not.

As others have already noted in letters, CRT is firmly rooted in Marxism. It holds that: all white people are evil oppressors and everyone else is a victim, including the immigrant who just arrived here; and that, in order to rectify this situation, the current merit-based system needs to be replaced by quotas and reduced standards in order to achieve “equity”.

CRT seeks to replace equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. If left to run its course, there will be no more AP or honors courses, class rankings, academic achievement awards, or disciplinary rules. What will replace it will be a social equity score that will depend upon a person’s degree of victimhood. Asian American citizens should be extremely concerned. If they are 5% of the population, but 10 to 15% of the college students, then CRT will dictate that they need to be scaled back to their proportionate share — 5%. Anything less would not be “equity”.

Instead of offering a hand up to those who need it, CRT seeks to stomp the heavy boot down on those high achievers among us. It should also be noted that by creating a culture where everyone is a victim then, ironically, it creates one where nobody is, which dilutes the very legitimate claims of African Americans.

There is a lot of talk about unity these days. What Steinhardt and CRT bring is divisiveness. There are better ways.

• Dennis McCormick