Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) and parental rights are front and center as Carroll Independent School District (CISD) residents go to the polls again for a special election to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Dave Almand from the school board in July.

The election will be held on November 2 with early voting beginning on October 18.

Two candidates have filed to fill the position: Stephanie Williams and Andrew Yeager.

Williams is a member of Dignity for all Texas Students (DATS) that is committed to passing the controversial CCAP in CISD as a diversity and inclusion plan that will “provide a safe environment where students can take risks, make mistakes, and grow from experience.” She has spoken at school board meetings in favor of CCAP, saying, “Critical race theory is not in CCAP.” She has also declared that “CRT is not taught in CISD and will not be taught in our district.”

However, Southlake Families, a political action committee that has endorsed Yeager, opposes CCAP because they believe it creates more problems than it claims to solve. They say its sections relating to microaggressions are especially problematic, where students are “permanently penaliz[ed]…for unintentional verbal or nonverbal actions.” The group also opposes critical race theory and its outgrowth from being promoted in CISD.

Critical race theory has its roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. It then seeks to deconstruct cultural institutions it defines as racist.

Although the theory itself may not be taught in local school districts, its critics say it lays the foundation for divisive identity politics that group people as either victims or oppressors. Language that grows out of CRT can often be found in curricula and training materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, like CCAP, or social and emotional learning concepts.

Yeager says on his website that “I will also work to ensure our primary focus is on education, not indoctrination. Students should be taught ‘how to think,’ not ‘what to think.’”

The tide is turning in the fight against Critical Race Theory (CRT). Following the exposure in 2020 of CRT training in agencies throughout American government, the Trump Administration issued a ban on CRT at the federal level. President Biden overturned that ban on his first day in office, but the war has gone on—and it’s turning in the direction of reason, common sense, and the American tradition of equality before the law. State legislatures from Texas to Florida have put forward bans on critical race theory. Meanwhile, local activists and parents have taken the fight to their local school boards.

On May 1, two school board candidates in Southlake, Texas converted these media, administrative, and legislative advances into a political win. In a high turnout election marked by intense media coverage, the two anti-CRT candidates for the Carroll ISD School Board won in a landslide—by a 40-point margin. The Southlake victory provides a blueprint for conservatives elsewhere to emulate as they fight to win elections against CRT in school boards across America.

Carroll ISD’s Five-Year Plan

In the fall of 2018, a video of several teenagers singing along to a rap song went viral; the song’s lyrics included a racial slur. The video was filmed at a private post-Homecoming party in Southlake, a largely conservative suburb of Fort Worth and Dallas. The teens were students at Carroll ISD, the prestigious public high school that consistently ranks among the top school districts in Texas. Progressive activists wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to implement (CRT) in Carroll ISD.

The district formulated a “Cultural Competence Action Plan” (CCAP), which set forth ambitious goals, first of which would entail hiring a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer to oversee implementation of the Plan. Students and their teachers would be pressed to discover their racial bias and confess their white privilege. Anonymous tip lines would be set up to report alleged “microaggressions” and to impose punishment. “Focus groups” of radicalized students would be organized to report directly to the DEI administration. External auditors would be hired to reshape every District policy, organization, and curriculum in the name of advancing racial equity.

The CCAP adopted all of the quasi-Marxist aims and methods characteristic of CRT. It was even described by its own proponents, unironically, as a “Five Year Plan.”

In some school districts, faculty would have toed the line, parents would have bowed to the wisdom of Progress and Equity, and students would have let it all pass them by. But this is Texas—and Carroll ISD’s mascot is the Dragons.

Beginning in 2020, Southlake conservative families formed a political action committee; they filed a barrage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; they showed up in record numbers to speak at school board meetings; they educated the community about the evils of CRT; and they recruited winning school board candidates. Hannah Smith and Cameron “Cam” Bryan campaigned for almost 4 months, meeting with community members in 70 meet-and-greets all over Southlake and shared their positive vision for the future of Carroll ISD. Their campaign volunteers went block by block and door by door across Southlake to tell voters the truth about CCAP.

On May 1, Smith and Bryan won with supermajorities of the vote (69 percent and 68 percent, respectively). Local voter turnout for a municipal election broke records, with over 10,000 votes were cast, up more than 150 percent from the previous high.

More than twice as many Republicans voted in the 2021 Carroll ISD election than had voted in any previous May election. In fact, more GOP voters turned out to vote than had turned out in the last two Republican primary elections for President and U.S. Senate!

But massive turnout among independent voters was key to the victory over CRT. In Texas, political affiliation is determined by participation in party primaries, not by party registration, and almost all of the voters who participate in the May elections for school board are also regular primary voters. In Carroll ISD, independents normally make up about 17 percent of the May electorate—an average of less than 500 votes. But this May, independent turnout surged to over 3,500 raw votes and the independent share of the electorate doubled to 35 percent.

There are four lessons to learn from the Southlake victory:

• Use Freedom of Information Act requests to get the real story
• Recruit qualified candidates who reflect the community’s values
• Start early to build a real grassroots base
• Run a professional political campaign



Controversy over a trustee’s social media posts and allegations of critical race theory (CRT) elements in school curricula have drawn multiple challengers for three incumbents on the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (CFISD) Board of Trustees this year.

Parents in the state’s third-largest public school district have been asking questions about curriculum since the board adopted a “Resolution Condemning Racism” in September of 2020.

Written by trustees John Ogletree, Julie Hinaman, and Gilber Sarabia, the resolution states that the district will “lead through policy and practice to eliminate racism, systemic racism, discrimination, injustice, and inequality in any and all its forms,” and commits to hiring a third party to conduct an “equity audit” in order to develop equity policies.

According to documents obtained by The Texan, CFISD has contracted with Millennium Learning Concepts (MLC) for an estimated $75,000 to conduct an equity analysis and to “provide recommendations on how to alleviate the policies and practices that are contributing to inequitable experiences and outcomes for students.”

President and owner of MLC, Roger Cleveland, is a professor of education who frequently presents to schools and districts on implicit bias and using equity to ensure that “equality is the outcome.”

Since then, parents have voiced opposition to plans to show a video on “implicit bias,” a Black Lives Matter protest video shown to third graders, and materials from controversial professor Tyrone Howard used in teacher training materials. Trustees have vehemently denied that the district uses any curriculum under the CRT label, but parents say ideas derived from CRT are presented to students under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-racism materials.

Critical Race Theory has roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. Drawing on Marxist philosopher of education Paolo Freire’s theories asserting that teaching is never neutral but always political, materials containing elements of CRT seek to use education to deconstruct institutions and culture deemed racist.

Ogletree has also come under community scrutiny for a slew of social media posts that invoke racial conflict. In one case Ogletree posted a Washington Post opinion piece comparing police officers to the Ku Klux Klan. In other instances, he shared a racially tinged comment about GOP congressional candidate Wesley Hunt who is black, and a comment reading, “This country was built on bad theology with white men holding Bibles.”

As a high school debate coach, I’ve watched critical race theory crush the souls of students for years. When it began to creep into the honored and honorable academic pursuit of policy (CX) debate, it lowered standards, created division and sundered relationships.

Let me explain how. Policy debate pits two two-person teams against each other. The Affirmative team (Aff) presents a plan that falls within this year’s topic; the Negative team (Neg) argues against that plan. This requires immense research and study; if the year’s topic is, say, the oceans, teams must be prepared to argue against plans ranging from the Law of the Seas Treaty to plastics to overfishing.

But some years ago, a new tactic emerged. Why argue that the Aff plan is terrible, when you can simply argue that the United States is terrible? Or worse, that the Aff team is terrible?

This kind of argument is called a kritik—debate jargon for employing critical theory (including, and especially, critical race theory) to undermine not the plan you’re supposed to be refuting, but the very legitimacy of liberal society, Western history and even debate itself.

Writing in an article called “The Corrosion of High School Debate—And How It Mirrors American Politics,” one former debater recalled how “Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.”

The language of critical race theory is new to most Americans, but debaters have been parsing these words and phrases for years. “Equity” is in; fairness is out. Black bodies, colonialism, “words are violence,” ontological death—these concepts are tossed around in classrooms and tournaments throughout Texas.

Here’s what I saw first-hand. One of my teams, two Senior girls, went into a round as the Affirmative team. I don’t recall the topic that year (a decade ago), but I do remember them emerging from the round in tears. They lost—and were told they lost—because the Negative team argued they should lose. As two white, privileged students from a private school, Neg claimed, the Affirmative team embodied everything wrong with America.

I thought there had to be some mistake. But when I saw the ballot a couple of hours later, it was true. The judge wrote that in the interest of social justice, he handed the win to the Negative team—even though Neg offered not a single argument against the Aff plan.

In another round, one of my teams was a little confused when a member of the opposing team got up and left just as the round started. The judge didn’t object, so my guys went on as usual—making their speeches, organizing their thoughts and crafting their arguments. In the penultimate speech (Second Negative Rebuttal), the absent Neg team member returned, holding a can full of coins. He argued that Neg should win because instead of wasting time in the round, he was out collecting money for a climate change charity—real-world action should trump ineffectual speech, he said (mind you, at a speech tournament). Neg won that round.

What does one kritik-dependent team do when it comes up against another kritik-dependent team? I’ve watched those rounds devolved into a morass of intersectionality. “You may be female, but I’m Hispanic.” You may be Hispanic, but I have a learning disability.” “Your school spends more per-student than mine.”

How can debaters respond to critical race theory and similar arguments? They can’t; CRT is non-falsifiable, and to take any position against it is to display “white fragility”—an argument I’ve seen used against non-white students.