The 1619 Project Creator said she doesn’t understand the argument “that parents should decide what’s being taught” to their children in school on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
The 1619 project was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The New York Times, and it promotes the idea that America’s ‘true founding’ occurred when slaves arrived in the colonies, framing the history of the country around race and slavery.
“I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science,” she said.
“We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area, and that is not my job,” Hannah-Jones said.
During a September debate, Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said parents should not make decisions regarding what schools teach their children.
“I’m not gonna let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” McAuliffe said. “I stopped the bill that I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
McAuliffe also vetoed a bill that would have required school districts to warn parents about educational materials containing “sexually explicit” content and require teachers to provide replacement instructional materials for any student whose parent requests an alternative.
“When the governor or the candidate said that he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just the fact,” Hannah-Jones said. “This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool because these are the professional educators, who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature, and I think we should leave that to the educators.”
Brenda Sheridan, chair of the Loudoun County Public Schools board in Virginia, criticized parents in October for protesting the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools, claiming “[t]here is no rational debate” on the issue.
Sheridan made the comments during an interview with Chuck Todd, during the Oct. 27 episode of “Meet the Press Reports,” a weekly podcast.
“I’ll echo that we are not teaching Critical Race Theory. It’s not in our curriculum,” Sheridan told Todd. “Critical Race Theory has been manipulated to replace what is really equity initiatives and teaching students about their biases and our teachers about their biases.”
Despite Sheridan’s denial, parents say there is evidence that principles of CRT are being taught in Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS). In March, a video leaked of an LCPS teacher asking a student to notice the race of two women in a photograph. The photograph came from a Daily Mail article about fraternal twins.