Inside one school district's confounding struggle to define critical race theory
LOS ANGELES — Inside a wood-clad meeting room in Orange County, five school board members sat before a sign-waving, opinionated crowd. For more than three hours, the trustees listened, debated and asked questions as they tried to decide whether to ban classroom teaching on a hard-to-define topic not taught in their schools: critical race theory.
The board members of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District had even turned to the trusted pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, copying the entry for critical race theory into a public resolution that could become the legal policy of the district.
"I don't think that this definition is really good," trustee Marilyn Anderson said after reading the dense entry. "I think it needs to be really specific. It needs to spell out the specific theories that we do not want taught in our district — like that the United States is fundamentally or systemically racist."
At the end of a long night, the board postponed the vote. But what emerged during their session revealed far more than
