Are Ted Cruz's Children Being Indoctrinated With Critical Race Theory?

The senator from Texas would have you believe that he is concerned about Critical Race Theory in Schools. Not so fast.

Mar 25, 2022

Republican Senator Ted Cruz used his first round of questioning in the Senate’s confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson earlier this week to highlight some of the books that are being taught at Georgetown Day School. Jackson serves as a trustee at the school. It was a bizarre round of questioning in which Cruz held up books by anti-racist authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and proceeded to explain how they are poisoning the minds of young children.

Of course, the questions had nothing at all to do with Jackson’s fitness for the court and everything to do with the continued Republican campaign to rally their base through race baiting and and instilling an irrational and unwarranted fear of Critical Race Theory.

If you are gullible enough, you might have thought that Cruz’s interest in the welfare of children across the country is sincere, that is until you learn that his own children attend St. John’s School—an elite private school in Houston that has embraced much of the same agenda as Georgetown Day School.

A report today in The New York Times includes the following from the St. John’s School website:

‘St. John’s, as an institution, must be antiracist and eliminate racism of any type — including institutional racism — within our school community and beyond,’ wrote Mark Desjardins, then the school’s headmaster, and John Moody, the chairman of the board of trustees.
A statement on community and inclusion, approved by the board in 2018, says the school ensures ‘cultural intelligence and proficiency’ for all community members. It also incorporates ‘cultural proficiency, diversity, global awareness and inclusivity into all facets’ of the curriculum.

The school’s commitment to issues of racial equity and diversity go back as far as 2012. I did a bit more digging and found a site that highlights the school’s activity on this front over the past few years. The school has been quite active in promoting diversity training for faculty and staff and it is committed to encouraging “intellectual inquiry that will ensure that diversity, equity and inclusion are foundational aspects of our educational program.”

Senator Cruz’s children are currently in the middle school program and it is likely that they have already been exposed to curricular materials that reinforce the school’s diversity agenda and other school community events.

If they remain at St. Johns’s through their high school years they will be able to take a course called “Issues of Justice and Equity in the Twenty First Century.”

They will also be able to take a class called “Black Lives in Post-Reconstruction America,” which is described as follows in school’s course catalog:

The course will start by analyzing the landmark decisions that first limited the spirit of Reconstruction, justified Jim Crow, and then paved the road to Brown and beyond. Second, students will read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and analyze Malcolm X’s journey and experience in America. Finally, the course will analyze a selection of twentieth century historiography that analyzes the African American experience from Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, the Black Civil Rights Movement, to the present.

Sounds like there is the potential for the introduction and exploration of any number of “divisive concepts” in this course.

Either Senator Cruz isn’t aware of the culture of his children’s school or he is and doesn’t see any serious problem. I for one suspect that Senator Cruz is entirely satisfied with the education that he pays $32,000 annually for his daughters. There are likely very few differences between what you will find at Georgetown Day School or any number of other elite private schools that have embraced diversity and equity initiatives and his children’s school.

From the beginning I have maintained that we should be able to have a serious discussion about what our children learn at different stages and the materials that teachers use to accomplish their goals. But watching Ted Cruz perform for a national audience, along with Republicans across the country, who are doing much the same in their respective states is not the conversation that our children and parents deserve.

In fact, in my view all they have accomplished with their race baiting is demonstrate why schools like Georgetown Day School and St. John’s School have embraced these initiatives.

I will leave it to cartoonist Nick Anderson to close this one out.