The law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, has created an innovative project to track and analyze legislative, regulatory and administrative efforts to block or undermine the teaching of critical race theory in schools across the country.
Critical race theory, or CRT, studies systemic racism in law, policy, and society. It has come under fire from local school boards, state legislatures, and even federal-level inquiry. Some jurisdictions have banned the teaching of critical race theory.
The law school’s CRT Forward Tracking Project is the first in the United States to precisely identify, catalog, and contextualize 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 team has screened nearly 24,000 media articles and identified 479 instances of anti-CRT activity since August 2021. Most anti-critical race theory proposals have been in the states of Florida, Virginia, and Missouri. An interactive map documenting the anti-CRT efforts in each state can be viewed here.
