Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin won election in 2021 in no small part on education policy, including a promise to ban critical race theory in schools. His first executive order instructed the Superintendent of Public Instruction to review curricula and end the use of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.”
The Black Lives Matter at School organization promotes an annual “week of action,” which took place Feb. 6-10 this year. The VEA encouraged its members to participate and offered an instruction manual “to be used as a resource guide for advancing racial justice in Virginia’s schools,” as Taisha Steele, director of the Human and Civil Rights division at the VEA, wrote in a memo with the materials.
By “advancing racial justice,” she means following the highly politicized agenda of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The materials show this isn’t an attempt to teach black history as part of American history, or to fill in the gaps in black history that no doubt have existed in instruction in the past.