Washington Post: “The lesson today, class, is how to turn bipartisan legislation encouraging teaching of civics into an ideological food fight. The legislation in question seemed noncontroversial at first, even boring. It would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics education. The goal was to better balance a test-driven K-12 education system that focuses heavily on math and reading with a subject – civics – that has gotten less attention and far less money in recent years. Civics is critical, backers say, to maintaining a functioning democracy. But in recent days this bipartisan measure has run into a force more powerful than a schoolhouse rock. Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda. In a country where millions of Americans including the former president insist that a fair election was stolen, it’s not clear that anything related to civics can be noncontroversial. The bill is trying, partly by making clear that the federal government will not make curriculum decisions.”

“Nonetheless, it has become wrapped up in a fierce broader debate over how to talk about race and racism in education. A growing number of educators are putting increased emphasis on racial equity and addressing systemic racism in their policies and lessons. They say it is critical that marginalized communities are represented in school policy and curriculums. A backlash has ensued, in which critics allege schools are trying to indoctrinate children with what they call damaging lessons about critical race theory, a decades-old academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism. They say the civics grants could be used to advance that cause. An open letter to the pair from a conservative advocacy group called the National Association of Scholars argues Republicans cannot trust the Biden administration to implement the civics grants impartially. The administration, it asserts, ‘will instead direct the funds it authorizes to subsidize ideologically partisan political activism.'”