Back on July 14, 2021, this column welcomed the news of Ms. Bessinger’s brave and lonely battle against the destructive ideology embraced by the educational establishment and noted:
The conceit at the heart of the campaign to embed critical race theory in American education is that U.S. schools have been teaching a whitewashed version of our nation’s history, a nationalistic rendering that ignores the country’s flaws. But of course anyone educated in the U.S. knows that left-leaning academics who are highly skeptical of American tradition have been dominating the field for generations. The current battle is really about whether largely factual critiques of America written by liberals will now be replaced by anti-American screeds written by propagandists who aren’t particularly concerned with accuracy.
This column has been hoping that the mostly liberal teachers who stand at the front of America’s classrooms will be roused to declare—loudly— that they are not Marxists or racialists and do not endorse the fact-challenged radicalism now being promoted by their union leadership. Today brings some cause for optimism…
Ms. Bessinger’s victory brings even more—the hope that more teachers will go from quiet anguish to open defiance of a false and destructive rendering of U.S. history.