Same content, different labels: Inside the stealthy agenda push investigators found in yet another Texas district

November 14, 2023

By Tim Worstall

Accuracy in Media has once again gone undercover to find out what is really happening in Texas schools.

As with our other investigations, the problem is that public school districts are teaching the way they want to rather than way that parents or even the legislature tell it to do. This is just the usual problem with the way that a bureaucracy works, the groupthink that happens in any closed system. 

Parents and even school districts themselves have tried to remove Critical Race Theory from the teaching program. Or, as it has often been renamed, Social and Emotional Learning. So, what actually happens?

This time, our investigators were in the Beaumont and Lumberton ISDs.

“The district was intentional to switch out SEL, to ‘Behavior Adaptations,’” according to Jenny Angelo, director of curriculum for Beaumont ISD. Change the name and carry on as before. It really doesn’t matter what parents, the legislators, any form of oversight, desires or even commands. Bureaucratic systems carry on as bureaucratic systems want to carry on.

“We have SEL all the way through from pre-K on up,” Angelo said. Just like an educator AIM spoke to in Idaho said, “changed the label, same stuff.”

 As AIM President Adam Guillette says, “Administrators are lying to parents, and deceiving parents, ignoring laws to push critical race theory into every facet of public education.”

Which leads to the base problem here. If we – parents, voters, legislators – don’t want our children to be taught this stuff, this way, then what can we do about it? Telling the teachers, telling the bureaucracy, doesn’t work. They just change the words used to describe it and carry on teaching exactly the same stuff – no matter whether parents or legislators want it taught. 

The only possible answer is that teaching is done without that bureaucracy that cannot be reformed. As Guillette also says, “The solution is universal school choice. Fund students, not systems.”