Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Coppell Independent School District after discovering that officials were illegally teaching critical race theory (CRT).
The lawsuit follows a video exposing Coppell ISD’s Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Evan Whitfield, explaining how the school district has bypassed restrictions on CRT.
Whitfield said in the video that “despite what our state standards say,” the school district does “what’s right.”
“When asked if the district would be in trouble for violating the Governor’s recent orders, the most recent of which includes prohibitions on use of CRT in state rules, policies, and curricula, Defendant Whitfield stated, ‘we’ve gotten around it by saying we’re not teaching it [(CRT)],'” the lawsuit explains.
“Demonstrating a continuing pattern for disregard for state law and executive direction, during the video, Defendant Whitfield further stated that Coppell continues to use ‘Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-ish’ curriculum, even though that curriculum had never been approved by the State Board of Education and textbooks have been rejected for including similar approaches to environmental education,” the filing adds.
“Liberal administrators who want to ignore state law and unlawfully push divisive and racist CRT curriculum in classrooms will be held responsible for their actions,” Paxton said in a statement on the lawsuit. “Texas children deserve to receive the best education in the world, not have woke ideology forced upon them. My lawsuit aims to put an immediate end to this illegal and hateful curriculum and immediately stop the blatant refusal to follow state law by certain officials at Coppell ISD.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill in 2021 that defined how educators may discuss current events and American history in K-12 classrooms. The law prohibits schools from pushing that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
