(Source: MIRS.news, Published 06/07/2022) Amid the "Critical Race Theory" debate nationally and in Michigan, the Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee moved legislation banning "race or gender stereotyping" from the classroom – but not before Democrats walked out.
At Tuesday's Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee, Rep. Andrew Beeler (R-Fort Gratiot) said his HB 5097 comes from a simple conversation between him and a family friend, whose child was assigned to write "an essay deconstructing and identifying elements of their own whiteness."
"I took the opportunity to talk to other parents, teachers, school administrators and even spoke with students themselves, who've shared similar stories. Each of these stories I believe, have a common-through line. They relied wholly or in part on race and gender stereotyping, which is precisely and exclusively what my bill seeks to ban in the classroom," Beeler said.
Under Beeler's legislation, lessons regarding a racial, ethnic or gender group holding the same "collective quality of belief" or that "cultural norms or practices" of one of these demographics "are flawed and must be eliminated" would be banned.
However, unlike SB 460 by Senate Education Chair Lana Theis (R-Brighton), which was moved out of committee on a party-line vote during October 2021, Beeler's bill does not include a portion withholding 5% from a district or public school academy's state funding for conducting such lessons.
"Simply put, this bill does nothing to impact an honest teaching of history. It only bans using history as a weapon against students based on their race or gender," Beeler told the committee. "This bill doesn't seek to punish teachers, but to uplift students. This bill doesn't seek to whitewash history, but to destigmatize it."
Sen. Ken Horn (R-Frankenmuth) abstained from voting on the legislation, claiming he hasn't had one teacher, administrator or parent in his Saginaw County district address him with a concern around "race or gender stereotyping" lessons being taught.
While the other Republicans on the committee approved HB 5097, Sen. Erika Geiss (D-Taylor) and Sen. Dayna Polehanki (D-Livonia) – the vice minority chair of the committee – walked out right after attendance was taken.
In a press release issued by the Senate Democratic Caucus, Polehanki said she is tired of white lawmakers like Beeler and Theis "lecturing Black people that the United States is post-racial and that things like 'privilege' or 'oppression' based on race no longer exist."
"Rep. Beeler's bill is yet another in a long line of 'happy history' bills introduced by Republicans, which are designed to terrify teachers into avoiding any meaningful discussion about racial discrimination or pain of losing their jobs or causing school funding to be withheld," she said.
Geiss described HB 5097 as not being serious, pointing at lines within the legislation prohibiting "gender stereotyping."
"The exact gender stereotyping of transgender students that their very own party has been promoting. While I'd love to applaud the representative for trying to protect transgender kids, doing so would be hollow since protecting transgender kids – like teaching the true history of America – was never the intent of this bill," she said.
In a May 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and its National Opinion Research Center (NORC), 37% of respondents said they believed their local public school system was focusing the "about right" amount on racism in the United States.
In the same poll – with a 1,030 sample of parents – found 34% of respondents felt their local public school system focused "too little" on racism and 27% said it focused "too much."
When it came to focusing on sex and sexuality, 40% of parents said their public school system was zoomed in "about the right amount," 31% said "too little" and 23% said "too much."
