The Hidden Extremes of Buckeye State Classrooms

Across the United States, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are battling over which curricula will be taught in K-12 schools, especially when it comes to race and gender. Initiatives like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory, and social-emotional learning (SEL) have become common sources of aggravation as they have been sprinkled throughout various subjects in public and private schools. Many conservative and religious parents have canvassed school board meetings to protest these topics in the classroom.

In Ohio, disputes over racially biased learning have flared up in two very different ways, as if to prove that injecting one type of fanatical politics into the classroom is likely to cause the growth of an equally extreme counterreaction.

On the surface, the two examples could not be more different.

In the first case, a school administrator from Upper Arlington near Columbus was secretly recorded on video asserting that he and his colleagues would continue to insert DEI themes into lesson plans regardless of what the state legislature does.

“There is more than one way to skin a cat,” Matthew Boaz mused to the undercover reporter from Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group.

Another administrator gleefully proclaimed, “there are some parents that—you know—they don’t fully understand, so it’s when we . . .  trick them, you know?” She was referring to how school officials assuage parents’ complaints by explaining they are not teaching CRT or DEI beliefs in their classrooms, when in reality, they are.

The second case, reported recently at Vice News and other outlets, involves the findings of an investigative “collective of Antifa activists” exposing a couple from the Wyandot County town of Upper Sandusky teaching their children explicitly racist and anti-Jewish lessons, as well as promoting devotion to Adolf Hitler. The couple, who called themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon” ran a Telegram channel called “Dissident Homeschool” and aimed to reach other parents with Nazi beliefs—aiming especially at those unconverted but disillusioned with mainstream education…