The Cobb County School District said Thursday that allegations it purchased curriculum materials promoting Critical Race Theory—against district and state education policies and Georgia law—are untrue.
Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said at a Cobb Board of Education meeting that an investigation into a claim by an Atlanta educational consultant that he sold CRT products to Cobb turned up nothing.
Dr. Quinton Bostic had been a content manager with The Teaching Lab, a Washington, D.C. educational non-profit.
In a video released by Project Veritas, a conservative media outlet, Bostic was secretly recorded saying he had sold CRT materials to the Cobb and Fulton school districts.
In the video, which was recorded without his knowledge or consent, Bostic described himself as an “evil salesman.”
“If you don’t say the words ‘critical race theory,’ you can technically teach it,” Bostic said in the video (see below), “and they don’t even know what’s going on.”
The Cobb school board last year banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory, as have the Georgia Board of Education and the Georgia legislature under what’s referred to as “divisive concepts” topics.
Reading from prepared remarks, Ragsdale said the Cobb school district “has no record of purchasing any product or service from The Teaching Lab or Quintin Bostic. We will continue to monitor the situation as appropriate, just as we would any other concerning allegation of state law, state board policy or a policy of this board.
“The CCSD team will continue to follow this board’s directive prohibiting using district resources and authority to promote unnecessarily divisive content aligned with personal political positions rather than Georgia educational standards. It unnecessarily districts and divides at the expense of instruction and is an abuse of the trust and authority of the public school district.”
Board members did not comment on Ragsdale’s statement or the investigation.
The Fulton County School System also said it has no record of purchasing CRT curriculum from Bostic or the Teaching Lab.
In the video, Bostic said the mission of the Teaching Lab, which he also has dubbed “the Scam Lab . . . is to fundamentally shift the paradigm of teacher professional learning for educational equity.”
He has been placed on administrative leave by The Teaching Lab, which has removed any reference to him from its website.
According to his website, Bostic earned bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in education from Georgia State University.
He was a teacher trainer and instructional content developer at the Atlanta Speech School and an instructor and graduate research assistant at GSU’s College of Education and Human Development.
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The truth will come out. I will stay tuned.