User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/TX law

House Bill 3979 which was signed into law by Governor Abbott in May 2021 during the Eighty-seventh Texas Legislature and came into effect on September 1, 2021, was intended to limit how race-related subjects can be taught in public schools in Texas. A follow-up bill to HB 3079—TX Senate Bill 3 —authored by Senator Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) and others, which was filed on July 9, 2021, passed on July 16, 2021, and becomes law in December, essentially bans the teaching of CRT in Texas schools.

House Bill 3979
Governor Abbott signed HB 3079 into law following the regular session. Bill 3979 had included the reference that the Ku Klux Klan was "morally wrong." The removal of this reference was one of the changes brought in with the Senate Bill 3.

Senate Bill 3
Senate Bill 3 is a follow-up bill to Bill 3979. Senator Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) said that HB3979 was "watered down" and he wanted to ensure the CRT was abolished in Texas. He authored Senate Bill 3, filed it on July 9. In a July 16 interview with KLTV, Hughes said, "We don't want to teach those little white children that they should feel guilty because of what previous white people did generations ago, and we don't want to teach those little black children that they're doomed, that they can never succeed in America. We don’t want to teach that America is inherently racist and can never recover." According to Hughes, his Critical Race Theory bill—Senate Bill 3—"says we're going to teach Texas history, warts and all...[it] says we're going to teach you about the good and the bad in Texas and we're going to talk about slavery, which was a horrible blight. A horrible piece of our history. It's a big piece of it we're going to teach you about slavery, we're going to teach you about Jim Crow, we're going to teach you about segregation and that civil rights, and we're going to teach you about how we continue to overcome these things, and as Americans we can move past these things."

Model Act
HB 3979 is similar to legislation in other states that have sections of the model act or model state legislation, Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA), published in 2021 by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) by Stanley Kurtz—National Review education writer and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center—to limit the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Sections of POCA—particularly sections 6 and 7— has been used by Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Montana, Utah, Georgia, and South Carolina in drafting their legislation. to draft legislation. South Carolina House representatives, Bennett and Jones, introduced a POCA act on May 13, 2021. a model act originally proposed by Stanley Kurtz, according to a February 16, 2021article in the National Review.

Section 6 of POCA reads, "No teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any state agency, school district, or school administration to affirm a belief in the so-called systemic nature of racism, or like ideas, or in the so-called multiplicity or fluidity of gender identities, or like ideas, against his or her sincerely held religious or philosophical convictions."

In Section 7, Kurtz wrote, "No state agency, school district, or school shall teach, instruct, or train any administrator, teacher, staff member, or employee to adopt or believe any of the following concepts: (a) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (b) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (c) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race; (d) members of one race cannot or should not attempt to treat others without respect to race; (e) an individual’s moral standing or worth is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (f) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (g) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; (h) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race; (i) fault, blame, or bias should be assigned to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex."

Section 8 reads, "No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall approve for use, make use of, or carry out, standards, curricula, lesson plans, textbooks, instructional materials, or instructional practices that serve to inculcate the following concepts: (a) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (b) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (c) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race; (d) members of one race cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race; (e) an individual's moral standing or worth is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (f) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (g) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; (h) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race; (i) that the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or (j) that, with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality."