After highly-charged comments from parents Thursday and a response from a school board member on the subject of Critical Race Theory, Cobb school superintendent Chris Ragsdale weighed in on the increasingly controversial topic.
At Thursday’s Cobb Board of Education meetings, Ragsdale said that “as long as I am Superintendent, I will commit to keeping any theory or curriculum, which is not part of Georgia’s standards, out of every Cobb County classroom.”
Those comments were included in a statement the Cobb County School District issued Friday morning, prefaced by asserting that “Ragsdale made it clear that the staff in Cobb Schools will continue to focus on keeping Cobb’s schools, schools.”
The statement included links from the Cobb school district’s performances in standardized tests and other academic indicators.
“District data clearly indicates that the Superintendent’s laser-like focus on success for each Cobb student is working for our students, families, and county,” the CCSD statement reads.
A number of parents addressed the Cobb school board at Thursday’s meetings about Critical Race Theory, which asserts that racism is a social construct and has led to “systemic racism” that pervades law, policy, culture and other aspects of American society.
At Thursday night’s board meeting, parent Jeff Clark said that while “we need an honest conversation about race, this isn’t it. This is indoctrination.”
He said that “radical members of this committee [school board] are holding our children hostage. . . . Let us teach Dr. King’s message, not Mao’s.”
At a Thursday afternoon work session, East Cobb parent Amy Henry called Critical Race Theory “child abuse. . . . You’ve awokened Mama Bears all across Cobb. But we’re not woke, we’re just awake.”
“Woke” is a slang term used by racial and social justice activists in making references to social awareness.
Earlier Thursday, Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr wrote a letter to the Georgia Board of Education asking that it “take immediate steps to ensure that Critical Race Theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum.”
Kemp and Carr are among the latest Republican office-holders and conservative political activists to blast Critical Race Theory, and there are bills in some state legislatures to prohibit teaching it in public schools.
On Thursday, the Cherokee County School Board voted to ban the teaching of CRT in a packed meeting in which some attendees chanted “no CRT.”
Some Cobb parents making critical comments of CRT also accused the three Democrats on the school board for threatening to undermine the academic quality of the school district with their request for a special review by its accreditation agency.
Two of those Democrats, Jaha Howard and Charisse Davis, have been pressing for the Cobb school district to create the position of Chief Equity Officer to oversee, among other things, diversity issues.
No such position has been suggested by Ragsdale or the four Republicans who make up the school board majority.
The Cherokee school board also voted Thursday not to proceed with a “diversity, equity and inclusion” program that is being adopted by corporations, non-profits as well as K-12 and higher education institutions, including Georgia State University.
Cobb school board members didn’t respond to the public comments about CRT during their meetings.
But late Thursday night, Davis, who represents the Walton and Wheeler clusters, wrote on her Facebook page that “the Critical Race Theory (CRT) debate has been bizarre…mainly how it became a scripted conservative talking point 40+ years after its inception.”
She said in response to comments from Cobb school parents that “I would struggle to give you a complete definition of all that CRT entails and let’s admit that three people on a board of seven would not be responsible for CRT (OR the mask decision you don’t like for that matter). And please stop sharing MLK quotes in the arguments against CRT. MLK was considered a radical and paid for it with his life.”
In her post, Davis also linked to a story in Boston Review called “The War on Critical Race Theory” that was shared by Maureen Downey, an education journalist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“This week’s discussion of critical race theory, prompted by the crowds showing up at local school board meetings decrying what they consider the application of CRT in their schools, has led to comments by folks who only show up when we are discussing racial issues,” Downey wrote.
Over the last two years, Cobb school board members have openly clashed on racial topics. They couldn’t come to a consensus on an anti-racism resolution last summer in the wake of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis.
School board member David Banks of East Cobb said during his re-election campaign last fall that he considered “white flight” the biggest long-term challenge facing the Cobb school district, leading to accusations by Davis that he was “spewing racist trash.”
After the November elections, the four school board Republicans voted to abolish a newly-approved committee to examine naming policies for Cobb school district schools and buildings.
Among those facilities targeted for a name change is Wheeler High School, named after a Confederate Civil War general.
Howard accused his GOP colleagues of “systemic racism” for that vote and for requiring a board majority to place items on the board’s meeting agendas.
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