'We're not giving up': Failed 'anti-CRT' legislation fueling school board races

Earlier this year, Indiana lawmakers tried to put new restrictions on what teachers in the state’s K-12 schools could say in the classroom about, among other things, race, sex, politics and religion. But after months of debate, efforts at the state level to ban certain “divisive concepts” and give more control of curriculum to parents failed.

So, supporters of such proposals are taking a different approach. School board candidates in suburban communities around the state are running on the promise of finishing what conservative lawmakers at the Statehouse started – at least locally.

The four largest districts in suburban Hamilton County have slates of candidates running together, looking to secure a conservative majority on their respective school boards. In each district, the platforms are similar, pledging to get “back to academics” if they’re elected. Dig into those platforms, and you’ll see promises to steer districts away from social emotional learning, curb efforts to incorporate more diversity, equity and inclusion work and give parents more control of their children’s education.

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A slate of three candidates for the Carmel Clay Schools board say they’d stand against the teaching of critical race theory.

“We oppose any thesis, policy or ideology that differentiates any person based on his or her heritage or race, and such ideologies are themselves racist by definition,” says the joint campaign website for Jenny Brake, Greg Brown and Adam Sharp.

Candidates in other suburban Indianapolis communities – including Avon, Center Grove, Brownsburg, and Mt. Vernon – are running on similar platforms. They call for limiting discussion of certain issues and more transparency in school curriculums.

Matt Keefer, a candidate for the Zionsville school board who says he was inspired to run after the district put a mask mandate in place, says he wants schools to “teach students how to think, not what to think.”

Nearly all of these issues echo provisions that were included in House Bill 1134, legislation crafted in response to debates about the place of race, sex, gender identity and politics in classrooms that swept across suburban communities like Carmel last year. It was inspired by the opposition nationwide of primarily white, suburban parents to what was called "critical race theory" but was more often about social emotional learning and diversity, equity and inclusion work. It would have banned several "divisive concepts" and given more power over curriculum and classroom activities to parents.

Despite majority, Republican bill failed at Statehouse

It was a controversial bill, opposed by a broad coalition of educators, civil rights organizations, religious groups and members of the business community. Even with a supermajority, Republicans in the Statehouse failed to strike a balance between members who thought the bill went too far and those who thought it wasn’t strong enough.

Beatrice Dunn, a candidate for the Clark-Pleasant school board in Johnson County, supported the bill. She spoke in favor of it during a statehouse hearing. Dunn, a retired educator and administrator, served on the Clark-Pleasant board from 2011 to 2018. She decided to run again after feeling that schools are going in the “wrong direction,” which she says is due to schools focusing on “nonacademic things.”

Dunn continued to say that she wants to be back on the board again to “help restore some common sense and American social, moral and academic values.”

One reason for the decline in academic success is schools, according to Dunn: the use of social emotional learning. Schools are required by the state’s academic standards to teach some components of SEL, but Dunn says more schools including diversity, equity and inclusion work and that concerns her.

While CRT has become a catch-all term for many conservatives opposed to SEL and DEI, they are different concepts. Schools are required to teach some SEL, which focuses on life skills, and many have started to undertake DEI initiatives to ensure schools are supportive environments for all students. CRT is an academic framework that examines systemic racism in the country’s legal system and is not taught in K-12 schools.

While she’s supportive of more diversity in schools, Dunn said that when schools try to address equity issues, it means that standards are lowered for some students or certain students get excluded to bring up other students. The drops in scores on state standardized tests – first seen statewide when Indiana switched to a new test in 2019 and then exacerbated by pandemic-related learning loss – are signs that schools aren’t focused enough on academics, she said.

“I don't want to spend all my time on dwelling on the past history or what the inequities were in the past,” Dunn said. “I want to spend my time on looking to see what I need to do now to try to get our children back up academically because with COVID and everything, they are so far behind.”

Dunn said if an “anti-CRT” bill came back in the next legislative session, she would be supportive of it passing again.

Lawmakers are expected to file similar legislation in the next session, which starts in January. But, Rep. Chris Jeter, R-Fishers, admitted it would be an uphill battle.

Speaking at a campaign event for a slate of conservative candidates looking to gain the majority on the Hamilton Southeastern Schools board, Jeter said that Republicans struggled to get some of these bills passed because the fight over many of these social issues isn’t impacting all school districts across the state. Urban school districts have been largely immune from the CRT debate.

And, in many rural communities, Jeter state lawmakers are close with the local superintendents and school board members.

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“Which is why, really, this battle has to be fought at the school board level,” he said.

Jeter was a co-sponsor of a wide-reaching bill to, among other things, limit what schools can teach, how they can interact with students, and allow parents to sue schools for violating provisions of the bill. It was a more extreme version of the “divisive concepts” legislation, House Bill 1134, that lawmakers attempted to pass. Jeter said supporters of “anti-CRT” legislation would try again in the next session to pass something but acknowledged it would be an uphill battle.

“We're not giving up,” he said. “We're going to try to give you the support that you need at the Statehouse level. But it's hard. It’s hard to craft a statewide solution to a local problem.”

Candidates pushing for return to academics

A pair of candidates in another suburban district also want to see their schools get back to academics.

In Noblesville Community Schools, Misti Ray and Melba Kiser are running together in hopes of flipping the ideological majority on that board. Should they win, they’ll join current board member Laura Alerding to form a conservative majority on the five-member board.

Ray and Kiser say they’re not politicians – they’re a parent and a grandparent, respectively, of school-age children who just want to see the district provide a top-notch education for all students. Ray's website says that she wants "to get back to the basics of teaching academics & stop wasting their education on SEL, CRT & politics!" Kiser's goals include increasing student proficiency in math and reading and also working on the district's budget "so that we do not accept the federal money in exchange for our kids’ childhood."

That hasn’t stopped some of the region’s most conservative politicians from lining up to support them, though. A recent fundraising event was held at the campaign cabin of U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz, a conservative Republican representing the north side of Indianapolis and suburbs to the north and east.

Several Republican elected officials, including the county sheriff and a member of the Indiana General Assembly were among the 20 or so attendees. So, too, was Micah Beckwith – a conservative Christian pastor and one-time candidate for state office. Greg Garrison, the far-right Republican candidate for county prosecutor was a speaker for the event, as was Ryan McCann, the executive director of the Indiana Family Institute, a conservative Christian policy group. The group also has a PAC that McCann said they’re using to back local school board candidates that align with their ideals.

The right views this as an issue they can win.

“We’ve seen in Florida, and other states, people are voting the bums out and they’re voting good school board members in," McCann said. "I think there’s a lot of parents, even that wouldn’t always agree with us politically, that would agree with us on these issues and it’s a huge opportunity to protect our communities.”

Christopher Lubienski is the director for the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University and said he thinks the fact that the anti-CRT legislation failed to pass in Indiana has influenced current school board races, especially for those candidates who support Republican-backed measures like the anti-CRT bill. 

“It kind of indicates a displeasure with the party leadership for the party that they support,” Lubienski said. “They’re upset that the party didn't fulfill their agenda on that particular issue.”

Lubienski pointed to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign in 2021, which heavily stressed that CRT was infiltrating Virginia schools, as evidence that campaigns running on CRT issues can be highly effective.

“I think the parents who may have seen signs or evidence of critical race theory, even if they’re not really there, and then they feel like that their party leadership had not gone to bat for them, then that’s definitely a motivating factor for people to get involved in this,” Lubienski said.