Research Tools: UCLA Law Launches Project to Track Attacks on Critical Race Theory

From UCLA:

UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program has created an innovative project to track and analyze legislative, regulatory and administrative efforts to block or undermine the teaching of a more complete history of the United States in schools across the country.

Critical race theory, or CRT, is the study of systemic racism in law, policy and society. It has come under fire from local school boards, state legislatures and even federal-level inquiry, all of which have discussed or adopted measures that would ban its teaching.

“The project was created to help people understand the breadth of the attacks on the ability to speak truthfully about race and racism through the campaigns against CRT,” said Taifha Natalee Alexander, project director of CRT Forward.

The law school’s CRT Forward Tracking Project is the first in the United States to precisely identify, catalog and contextualize all of these efforts at the local, state and federal levels. The project not only identifies and tracks anti-critical race theory activity, but also analyzes the substance of the activity in its database to identify:

• the type of conduct that is restricted or required;
• the institution targeted for regulation;
• the specific features of the conduct being targeted;
• enforcement mechanisms used to regulate the conduct.

The CRT Forward Tracking Project is the only database that compiles anti-critical race theory activity at local, state and federal levels in a single location. Finally, the project is an interactive database that allows users to filter for content based on factors that are important for their purposes.

Many of these efforts to influence K-12 curriculum development have used the term “critical race theory” incorrectly, and have affected plans to include ethnic studies more broadly for students before they get to college.

Learn More, Read the Complete Launch Announcement, Findings; View Video

Direct to CRT Forward Tracking Project

Direct to CRT Forward Tracking Project Methodology

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