Did the NEA effectively replace its Presidents’ Day lesson with radical CRT?

The National Education Association (NEA) is under fire for quietly removing its Presidents’ Day lesson from its website.

The Daily Signal revealed the deletion and reported the last time the lesson was found on the teachers’ union’s website was June 17, 2020, one week after the funeral of George Floyd.

Floyd’s death while being arrested resulted in riots nationwide, including the removal or defacing of statutes of many American historical figures like those of Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

“[The removed] Presidents’ Day lesson plans included ‘George Washington: A National Treasure,’ which celebrated Washington as an American hero, and ‘George Washington: Centerpiece of a Nation,’ where students studied the characteristics that made the first president a great leader,” the Signal reported.

Ironically, just last month, NEA head Becky Pringle took to Twitter to warn about the censoring of history.

“If we censor lessons, ban books, and whitewash history, we harm our students—leaving them unprepared to go out into the world and thrive,” Pringle wrote.

Pringle did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls by The Lion. 

But it seems the NEA is guilty of the sort of censorship it publicly opposes

The Signal also notes the NEA now hosts lessons from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Learning for Justice program, which uses a radical deviation of critical race theory (CRT).

The program has been criticized by the civil rights organization, The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), for its “analysis of systemic racism” and “rejection of the foundations of all systems implicated,” including, apparently, the rejection of past presidents of the United States. 

“This new, radicalized version of CRT rejects, in particular, two crucial interrelated principles: (1) the existence of objective truth; and (2) the existence of a common human nature,” said FAIR. 

Richard Reinsch, director for Heritage Foundation’s Center for American Studies, called the deletion of the Presidents’ Day lessons “regrettable, pathetic, and quite frankly, anti-American.”  

“The National Education Association’s removal of content on the great former presidents of the United States would seem to indicate they no longer value them as such or believe their ideas and examples in leadership merit study by American culture,” said Reinsch.