PA: Going After Climate Change Porn

Wiser heads have pushed back in Kutztown, but it's worth noticing how the boundaries of what kinds of books students must be protected from just keep expanding.

Kutztown schools have a cool annual tradition, the One Boo, One School program, in which every student in every class reads a selected book, thereby allowing for all sorts of projects and discussion and shared educational experience, including a meeting with the author, and it's one of those things that makes me wish I could go back to the classroom to pitch it at my own school.

Only this year's program was almost scrubbed because some of the new conservative members didn't like the book choice.

Too much sexualized content? LGBTQ stuff? 

Nope. Climate change.

The book selected was Two Degrees, by popular teen lit author Alan Gratz. It's a sort of disaster/adventure story featuring teen characters who must navigate a world that has become hostile due to climate change. So readers get adventure stuff and also discussion of climate change issues. 

Board member Jason Koch did not like this idea. 

“We’ve gone through a couple of years where fear was used to shape our students’ perspectives,” he said. “Is that a good thing to continue as we talk about climate change, using a fear-driven book? Do we want our children to look at us in the way we live in this community and say it’s wrong?”

I'll give him credit for articulating what drives so much of these attempts to limit students' reading rights-- what if our children look at some aspect of our lives and say it's wrong--but not much else. 

And so, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, the program was axed:

The district superintendent, Christian Temchatin, had already called off the “One Book, One School” program before that board meeting, after some teachers told him they didn’t want to get dragged into a political controversy over a program intended to promote literacy. Call it a different kind of dangerous “climate change”: a political climate in which global warming is now joining racism and LGBTQ issues as under fire by culture warriors who don’t want young minds exposed to debate around such ideas.

That was a few months ago. Since then, the progressive grassroots organization Red Wine & Blue raised money to buy 200 copies to give away to Kutztown students. Gratz heard about the cancellation, and arranged to have a meet-and-greet at a local bookstore, with two signing events happening last Saturday.

“The reason I’m writing these books is because kids are asking me to write about these topics,” Gratz told me. “We always want to say we’re trying to protect children by keeping these kind of things from them, but honestly the world is coming at kids faster than before. The kids have been going through active shooter drills since kindergarten” and have also been exposed to debates over tough issues like racism at a young age. The world is coming at them, he said, “and I hope that books like mine can give them a way of seeing what’s happening in the world without having to experience it just yet.”

May 16 is election day in Pennsylvania, and in Kutztown, with several seats open on the board, the contest is heating up. On one side, a slate from the Concerned Citizens of KASD, who call for banning what it called “critical race theory” as well as diversity programs in the Kutztown schools, and which has been showing up at board meetings with signs like, “We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government.” On the other side, KOFEE (Kutztown Organized for Educational Excellence) running on an “Open Books, Open Minds” platform. Four KOFEE candidates were at the book signings Saturday.

Again, none of this was sparked by alleged porn or CRT or SEL or any of the ideas already on the Naughty List. Just climate change. The list of ideas that some folks want to hide from children just gets longer and longer. 

ICYMI: Happy Taxes Edition (4/16)

You've still got a couple of days--use them well. If you're already done, just hush. Nobody likes a showoff. There were bits of good news this week, including Oklahoma's decision to, at least for the moment, not authorize a Catholic cyber charter school. So here's your reading for the week.



The People We Need To Reach Aren't Online

At Book Riot, Kelly Jensen argues that social media is not where the fight over censorship is being won or lost. She also offers a sadly long list of some of what's happening out there.

Child labor push in Iowa forgets our history

A reminder from Iowa about the troubled history of child labors and the ubiquity of the business complaint, "But that kind of law would ruin us!"

What’s Behind the State Takeover of Houston’s Schools

Jeff Bryant at The Progressive breaks down the hostile takeover of the giant Houston school district. Spoiler alert: it's not about education.

School Choice Is Just A Ploy To Defund Public Ed

At Texas Observer, David Brockman looks at " the latest front in Christian nationalists' battle to undermine separation of church and state."

A Well of Conservative Support for Public Schools in Rural Texas

New York Times (so mind the paywall) look at the conservatives who are putting up resistance to subsidizing private schools for rich folks in the cities, all at the expense of rural public schools.

Education Profiteering Accelerates in Texas

Didn't realize we were going to spend so much time in Texas this week, but Thomas Ultican has dug up some of the connections between the players in Texas.

School's transgender policy trumped teacher's religious rights, US court rules

In one of many "you can't make me use the students' preferred pronouns" cases in the country, the court finds in favor of the district. 

St. Pete school will continue showing movie about Civil Rights icon

That Florida school that was contemplating the cancellation of a movie about Ruby Bridges decided to do the right thing and show the film.

Success Academy Attrition Worse Than Ever

Gary Rubinstein has always tracked the real numbers at Success Academy, and he's done it again this year. 100% graduation rate? Not really.

'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco

Well, that doesn't seem to have worked out so well. 

Competing schools or competing families? The segregative effects of neighborhood racial change and a school lottery in Washington DC

Interesting look at how school choice plays out when it comes to segregation.

Where parental snooping is becoming the law

Among the scary laws being floated out there are laws that would require tech companies to give parents full access to their child's online activity. Politico breaks it down.

Exercise your Rights, Parents!

Vanessa Hall blogs in Virginia, and she has some thoughts about the performative Parents' Rights bill the GOP is bating around in DC.

As a parent, I sympathize with my students' moms and dads – not politicians using them

It's true--a huge number of teachers are also parents. Larry Strauss takes the balanced look at USA Today. 

Iowa Parents Deserve Real Rights

Amy Adams lives in Iowa and argues here for the rights that parents really need (and they aren't the ones right wing groups are talking about)

Catholic leader accuses Ron DeSantis — who has positioned himself as a defender of the Christian faith — and Florida Republicans of seeking to criminalize empathy

Florida is getting ready to pass yet another dumb law--this one could criminalize giving your undocumented immigrant neighbor a ride to church. 

The US Finally Started Building A Functional Childcare System During The Pandemic. We’re About To Tear It Down.

Bryce Covert at Talking Points Memo looks at how pandemic funding helped build child care --with money that's about to run out.

Adventures in Censorship: The Adventures of Schloomphy Boopher!

David Lee Finkle dug back into the Mr. Fitz files for a story of book censorship in schools that could have been written right now. 

School Reformers’ Pledge of Good Conduct

Larry Cuban digs out an old code of conduct for education reformers, and it's not bad. It's not been used, but it's not bad. 

Fox Chapel seniors win first place with video on suicide prevention

From a district in the Pittsburgh area. No implications for school policy (other than, isn't it nice some schools can afford a digital media lab), but a nice reminder of the good work that students can do.

What Spongebob Taught Me About Optimism In The Now

One of my most fun theater gigs in a long time was pit conducting for a production of Spongebob The Musical, so this post from Jose Vilson hits me right in the feels. It's true--the show is a fabulous celebration of a positive view in dark times. 

What kind of mind does ChatGPT have

This Cal Newport piece in The New Yorker (mind the paywall) is hands down the best explainer I've seen about how chatbots do what they do (which does not involve actually understanding anything). Everyone should read this piece.

As always, you're invited to sign up for my free substack, because these days it's good to have more than one way to connect on line. It's free, and you get everything that I'm throwing out into the void.

The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession

This is a fascinating working paper from Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Melissa Arnold Lyon (University at Albany). It's from last fall, but it's one o0f those papers to just hang on to because its relevance will not fade any time soon.

Kraft and Lyon tracked four aspects of the profession-- prestige, interest, preparation and satisfaction.

Prestige means the "reputation and social standing" of the profession, as measured by a variety of studies that look at that sort of thing by examining many factors. Interest looked at how many people wanted to get into the profession via traditional college teacher prep programs. Preparation--how many people are coming out of the pipeline? And satisfaction looks at measures of teacher job satisfaction.

The paper is a brisk 68 pages, and it reaches a conclusion that is simple and clear:

The time-series figures we present on the state of the teaching profession reveal dynamic and surprisingly consistent patterns across all four constructs. We find compelling evidence of three major periods of change in the status of the teaching profession across the last half century. Prestige, interest, preparation, and satisfaction declined rapidly in the 1970s, rose swiftly in the early to mid-1980s, remained somewhat steady for the next 20 years, and then began declining precipitously around 2010.

Emphasis mine. 

Ordinarily I would write up a study like this over at Forbes.com, but that space calls for a less personal approach, and this study surprised me by being extremely personal. I went through high school and college in the 70s, started my first teaching job in 1979, and retired in 2018. So this study basically covers my life, and it rings absolutely true.

So the study lays out its methods and data clearly, and it's right there for you to examine (it all seems solid to me), but I'm going to talk about how all this looked on the ground at the time.

The drop of the seventies was real enough. After I left for college, my old school district had its first teacher strike in pretty much ever. Many of them had started around the same time, and were middle-aged family guys who were noticing that wages hadn't kept up with life.  I graduated from a school where most folks were pre-med or pre-law; nobody was breaking down the doors of the ed department, and we understood that we were never going to be rich or beloved.

In 1979 I landed in Lorain, Ohio, just in time for a strike. By the late seventies we had all reached one of those moments that comes when everyone sort of agreed that teaching paid poorly, yet it took lots of noise and uprising to do anything about it, accompanied by the usual handwringing ("Yes, teachers should be paid better, but when they go about this it's so unseemly, and doesn't help their cause at all.")

And as the study suggests, right after I started in the profession, things got better. Pay got better, respect got better. And it stayed better for quite a while.

That precipitous decline of 2010? Well, that was a year. It was sinking in that the budgetary hammering of education from the Great Recession was not going to be followed by a rebound. It was also sinking in that Barrack Obama, rather than reverse the high stakes testing and manufactured failure policies of No Child Left Behind, was actually going to double down on them. We were all just starting to hear about Common Core by the end of the year. And Race to the Top and the Core were both premised on the idea that US public education was failing, and that failure was the root of other societal failures (like poverty), and that the cause of this massive failure was probably all those bad teachers. Even the president of the NEA, the Very Unfortunate Dennis Van Roekel, supported the Core not just because he thought it was swell, but because he appeared to buy into the whole Massive Failure of Public Education narrative. If you were a classroom teacher in the early teens, it seemed that nobody--not Republicans, not Democrats, not even union leaders--was supporting you. 

On the ground, there was a marked shift in how all these Great New Reform Ideas were delivered. Under No Child Left Behind, the emissaries from the state department of education descended upon us for waves of professional development, but it was all designed to win us over, to get us to buy in. They would talk, explain, cajole, and construct convoluted metaphors to try to get us to buy in.

But sometime right around 2010, that changed. The delivery of the Latest Big Thing became, "This is what's happening. We don't give a rat's ass whether you like it or not. You'll shut up and do as you're told, or we'll just roll over you." Well, in more bureaucratically diplomatic language, of course.

2010 was the Year It All Sank In, finally. The insane demands of high stakes testing, the ones that required every district to have 100% above average test scores by 2014, the ones laid out on a curve that shifted from a gentle upward slope to a steep cliff (a shift that was set up to coincide with Bush's successor), the ones that guaranteed that in 2014 every district in the country would be either liars of failures--all of this was a feature, not a bug. 

On a personal professional level, 2010 was about the year that I started losing the juggling battle. My life as a professional had always been about getting one more ball in the air, finding ways to be more efficient so that I could squeeze one more piece of learning into the year. But 2010 was around the point where my professional development became about not losing any more than I absolutely had to as the school took away days and weeks of teaching time to give practice tests, actual tests, and "We'd like you to start using these workbooks we've bought--we think they'd help get some of our at risk kids to achieve higher test scores." Data days. "We got you a sub so you can spend these days in a department meeting to align the curriculum with the standards (and in a few years, we'll do it again)."

And all of this, on the state, federal and local level, done to teacher-- not with them, and certainly not while consulting their expertise. "No thanks," said all the Powers That Be. "You've done enough already, what with destroying the US education system and global standing and economy and all." 

In other words, this part of the study's findings was completely unsurprising. But it's nice to have independent research to corroborate our lived experience. 

The Libertarian Argument Against Religious Charters

The Catholic Church's proposal for a religious cyber charter school in Oklahoma has been denied, though the church has been given a month to revise their application and take another run at it, so the game's not over yet. 

I could argue--again--all the many reasons that religious charters are a terrible idea, but today let's change it up and let somebody from the school choice camp make the case. Here's Neal McCluskey from the Very Libertarian CATO Institute:

The danger of entangling religion and government when government decides which schools can exist is real. Most directly, an authorizer might reject a charter application because it is religious, or of a disfavored religion. But even if that were not the motive, it could easily be suspected, with religious applicants wondering if their religious status led to their rejection, and possibly to open accusations of religious animus. On the flip side, a non‐​religious applicant that was rejected might point to a religious one that succeeded and suspect religious favoritism by the authorizer.

Now, this argument is based on some erroneous assumptions, including the notion that charters are public schools, but his central point is solid--there is no way to have religious charter schools without also having a real de facto, or implied Government Department of Deciding Which Religions Are Legit. People from many places on the political spectrum can agree that's a bad idea.

McCluskey also argues that religious charters would "end up enrolling students who otherwise would have attended private schools."

Religious chartering would carry a strong incentive for private schools to give up much of their autonomy in exchange for the financial security of being “free” public schools. But that could well be a net loss of choice: Yes, it could make more schools available to families, but also constrain what those schools could do or teach, making each one a less meaningful option.

So, if you give parents these particular choices, they won't make the correct choice. 

If the goal is more freedom in education, choice supporters should put their resources into advancing private choice, such as the universal programs that have ballooned over the last few months. It avoids government entanglement concerns while fostering much more true choice. Indeed, as Shaka Mitchell of the American Federation for Children just argued, charters should be looking to become private schools, not vice versa.

So, if the goal is not to serve the needs or desires of students and families, but to defund public education to the greatest possible extent, then charters must yield to vouchers. 

The tension between charter and voucher advocates has been around for years, and was a notable subtext of Betsy DeVos's rise to Ed Secretary. 

I think McCluskey is wrong to imagine that similar entanglements between government and religion will not happen in a system of private school subsidy vouchers; ultimately the government is going to be forced to decide whether or not each religious group has been properly subsidized to a non-discriminatory amount. 

But he's absolutely correct that religious charters will result in government involvement in religion. One more reason that a secular, religion-free public system is the better choice. 

Moms For Liberty Plays Victim Card

A press release just hit my inbox from the PR firm employed by Moms For Liberty, declaring that a vast conspiracy is out there trying to make the Moms look bad:

Moms for Liberty Co-Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich released the following statement today warning of a targeted effort by some who oppose the parental empowerment movement in America. The allegations against their members accuse them of spreading “bigotry,” “hate” and “violence.”

There are no actual sources for those quotes, but M4L would like you to remember the last time they were being repressed:

The recent misinformation and false stories appear to be aimed at reviving the U.S. Department of Justice effort to target Moms for Liberty members as “threats” and “domestic terrorists” because they spoke out against Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine requirements for children.

That's an "effort" that never actually happened, and it especially didn't happen in a way that "targeted" Moms for Liberty. School Boards freaked out a bit over previously quiet meetings now erupting in threats of violence against board members and other parents, and they asked if the DOJ couldn't step in. AG Garland told the department to look into threats of violence against board members while still specifically respecting "spirited debate." But M4L is sure the feds are out to get them.

M4L would also like us to know that this is a vast conspiracy.

Justice and Descovich said, “There appears to be a coordinated effort underway aimed at marginalizing and discrediting the serious concerns of our members about the public K-12 education system. This effort is using false allegations and misleading stories - often taken out of context and without any original sourcing.

There is no sourcing in the press release for these allegations.

The reality is that we are Joyful Warriors, passionate defenders of our country, fighting for its survival with a positive and optimistic attitude because we know our children are watching. We reject any accusations of dangerous behavior made against us as false. We strongly reject any attempts to portray our members as violent or threatening. In fact, we have a Code of Conduct for members that instructs them to act professionally and respectfully at all times or they may be removed from our organization. We firmly believe that our peaceful activism and unwavering commitment to the values of democracy and freedom will ultimately prevail.

This joyful warrior business is a real balancing act challenge for M4L (and not just because it also Kamala Harris's tag line), which on the one hand wants to talk about how to work with people they might not agree with, but on the other hand plans to fire everyone and publicly calls people they disagree with groomers and pedophiles. They've roused a lot of rabble and used a lot of rhetoric about taking schools back and tried to pretend to be non-partisan even as they boost Ron DeSantis like crazy. 

It's easier to pull off that balancing act if you can portray yourself as a victim, as someone who's been forced into a corner by Those Others and so justified in striking back to defend yourself and your embattled values. That's more of a challenge when nobody has actually made you shut up, the DOJ has bever actually said so much as "boo" to you, and your members are commandeering school boards with inconsistent-yet-still-alarming frequency. Not since Barrack Obama didn't come to take anybody's guns has such a Cry of the Oppressed been so overblown.

It's a political shell game, and this press release suggests that M4L needs another jolt of money or support or attention, so they refer to the appearance of some coordinated effort to bring up the allegations that the DOJ didn't actually make, but which were some ill-considered words that the people who did use them (the National School Boards Association) quickly backed away from. 

And of course none of this addresses any of the actual issues, like book bans and personal attacks on anyone who dares disagree with them.

It's the kind of maneuver that suggests, once again, that M4L is less about concerned parenting and more about pushing a political and cultural agenda. 

And, as always, when a whole lot of people look at you and say, "Why are you being such a jerk?" there are two possible explanations. One is that a whole bunch of people who are not closely connected have somehow come up with the connections and coordination to pull off a broad batch of attacks; the other is that everyone is noticing that you are being a jerk. Well, there's a third possibility, which is that you're exaggerating how large the crowd of jerk-callers actually is. Pick whichever option feels right this time. 

 

Chester Finn's heretical insights

Can we have both school choice and shared institutions?

That's not my question, but was actually asked by Chester Finn, Fordham Institute honcho emeritus and long-time fan of market-driven school choice. And now, it appears, one of the reformy crowd noticing that their most recent allies are not so much on the same page.

He leads by making sure we understand his bona fides:

I’m a decades-long supporter of school choice in nearly all its forms and likely to remain that way so long as traditional, district-operated public schools ill-serve so many kids, produce such widespread mediocrity by way of achievement, give parents so little say in so many matters, and cater to the interests and priorities of the adults in the system more than the needs and interests of children, taxpayers, and the general public.

This reads like a combination of false premises and versions of "I prefer bicycles, because a vest has no sleeves," because this is not the interesting part. He wants his peeps to know he hasn't changed teams, and it's useful for us to remember the same. 

Finn has always been a genteel kind of guy, and he admits to finding some current trends bothersome.

I’m getting seriously unnerved by how the country is coming apart, by how many people are putting pure self-interest ahead of anything smacking of the public interest, by mounting intolerance of those who are different or who disagree, and by diminishing confidence in the shared values, institutions, principles, and traditions that have held us together as a nation, most of the time anyway, for the better part of three centuries.

And now he's ready to admit the nearly-heretical thoughts. Gonna put these in bold:

Which forces me to wonder whether putting all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands” just might be contributing to—at least moving in tandem with—other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets that we inherited from earlier generations.

Well, yes. Yes, they are.

The free market and the invisible hand are really good at many things, but uniting people around shared stuff is not one of those things.

The market separates. It picks winners and losers, both among buyers and sellers, and in doing so, it highlights and accentuates those differences. Modern school choice has always insisted that the choice has to be welded to free market (yet taxpayer subsidized) forces. It has treated the endless stream of bad actors, fraudsters, looney tunes, and incompetents as flukes and outliers, when they are in fact a completely predictable feature of an unregulated free market. 

I suspect that folks like Finn figured there was some sort of gentleman's agreement, some sort of cultured understanding that the crew would take a carefully surgical sledgehammer to parts of public schools and not take a torch to Really Important Things like, say, the culture at large. Many of us have been saying all along that this was foolish, that some folks were in the choice camp precisely because they wanted to burn things down. 

When fans of subsidized choice decided to ally themselves with the culture wars, that shouldn't have been a surprise. Hell, the DeVos family was in the culture war camp before it was cool. Nor should anyone be surprised that they were never going to be satisfied by just burning a few careful, select corners of school and culture. The alarm among the more truly conservative choice crowd reminds me of establishment Republicans when they invited the Tea Party into the big tent. "Sure, we'll let you in to swell our ranks; you've coined some really effective rhetoric. Just take a seat quietly in the back and-- no, really just sit quietly and-- wait--no-- oh hell, they really mean all that stuff they said!"

What really got Finn's attention is that survey about Americans walking away from traditionally American values, and I don't want to head down that rabbit hole right now, either--there are many explanations for those results.

Finn nods to the probability that some of this is coming from the lefty side of life. And then, more heresy:

But maybe we who yearn for more and better schooling options for America’s kids should try to do our part. Maybe we should pause for three seconds and ask whether there are ways of furthering choice while also helping to sustain, even strengthen, the shared inheritance.

We’ve known—I’ve surely known—for years now that pure market forces in K–12 (and higher) education do not reliably yield more effective schools and better-educated children. Sorry, Milton F and Corey D and a host of other living colleagues. Too many things go awry in that marketplace, from parents who make bad (if understandable) choices to greedy school operators who don’t care about outcomes, not to mention kids who lack competent adult guides.

Yes, yes, and yes. Finn stops just short of calling public education the foundation of democracy, a phrase that has too many of the Other Team's cooties on it. But right here there is not a single word with which I would disagree. I could have written that--but it would mean far less coming from me than from Chester Finn.

Finn continues to argue for a regulated marketplace, including making sure that vendors are legit and that options produce results. Yet, he also worries that the Other Team is inclined to restrict the market too much. Regulation of the education market, he says, is a "necessary evil," though not one that will necessarily solve the shared culture problem.

It also has to be noted—this really hurts—that we’re seeing mounting evidence that increases in public-sector school choices, charters especially, are bad for Catholic parochial schools and perhaps for other “traditional” private schools that, on the whole, have striven to maintain some of that inheritance via faith, values, morals, and example. Will the spread of ESAs send more kids back into those private schools? Or will more choice result in more coming apart?

He already knows the answer. 

Yes, I want it both ways. I want a plethora of quality school options for families, but I also want our “education system” in its variegated forms to strengthen rather than weaken our shared inheritance and pull us more together than apart.

Finn is stuck because he can't bring himself to let go of that forced marriage between public education and the free market. The solution to everything that is bothering him is to end taxpayer-subsidized, market-based choice. We could have a robust school choice system without ever having to involve the invisible hand or turning education into a marketplace (how we do it is a whole other post that I swear I'll write soon-ish). We just build it all under the roof of the public education system we have.

No, it would not end the various battles over cultural values, but--spoiler alert--nothing will. However, letting everyone go sit in their own bubble will only make things worse. One cultural value worth preserving is the value of functional co-existence with people who believe differently. This is something that market forces are especially ill-equipped to do. The market does not ask us to get along; it promises that we can have things our own way.

Finn also believes that while allowing for curricular diversity, well...

it should be possible to develop a framework of shared curricula spanning big chunks of the main K–12 subjects, curricula that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Americans and could be taught in the vast majority of schools of all sorts. Schools would naturally add and embellish, and in time, perhaps two-thirds of the curriculum might be “common” across almost all elementary and middle schools, maybe half in high school. If it pains you to think of commonality across state lines, we’d get somewhere by pulling it off within them.

You know how I know something like this could be doable? Because we would have to argue about it endlessly, with non-stop eternal debates about what would be in that core. And in education, any time someone says, "Use this answer. It settles everything and we never have to talk about it again," they are absolutely full of it. 

The real solutions in education don't look like solutions at all; they just look like long heartfelt debates and discussions that never, ever end. 

That shared curricular core would be most doable in a shared public system, not a subsidized market ecosystem.

A regulated marketplace and partially-shared curriculum can’t be the whole story. I’m not so bold as to forecast a truce in the culture wars. But what else can we devise that might better balance our hunger for school choice and diversity with America’s need to preserve the best of its inheritance?

Yes, Finn too often seems like a guy yearning for the schools of 1962. But in this piece he makes some legitimate observations and asks some of the right questions. He needs to carry his train of thought through to a few more stations, and it's unlikely that he'll be heard over the culture war yowling of some of his colleagues, but it's still nice to play What If every now and then. 

Website for Tracking CRT Panic Bills

The Critical Race Studies Program at the UCLA School of Law has a useful (albeit depressing) tool for folks trying to track just how far and wide the CRT panic has spread. UCLA has long been at the forefront of CRT studies, so this is a natural fit. 

The project is called CRT Forward, and "is dedicated to utilizing data, policy, and legal analysis to support and advance an accurate representation of Critical Race Theory (CRT)." 

The Tracking Project, CRT Forward’s flagship initiative, identifies, tracks, and analyzes local, state, and federal measures aimed at restricting the ability to speak truthfully about race, racism, and systemic racism through a campaign to reject CRT. The Tracking Project analyzes how these anti-CRT measures, at all levels of government, attempt to limit truth telling within K-12 education, private businesses, non-profits, state and federal government agencies, and higher education.

The project let's you use either a map or a table to see what is going on, not only on the state level, but at the local government and school district level (I prefer the map, because maps are cool). It includes both those proposed and those adopted, with details about the language used. 

It's not encouraging--the current map includes 619 CRT panic efforts floated at the federal, state and local level. But it's an excellent one-stop location for tracking down info on these ongoing attempts to control conversation. Check it out and bookmark it.