Bill to curb racial teachings advances in North Carolina

RALEIGH, N.C. — A state Senate hearing on how racial concepts are taught in North Carolina classrooms devolved into chaos Tuesday when one of the state’s highest-ranking Republicans shouted at a prominent Democratic lawmaker and stormed out of the room. Democrats on the committee grilled Robinson, saying he and other Republicans could not identify a single case where the bill — if signed into law — would prevent such cases of “indoctrination” from taking place. Republican Senate leader Phil Berger revised House Bill 324 last month to add five prohibited concepts and clarify that such ideas could still be taught as long as educators did not “promote” the beliefs by forcing pupils to personally adopt them. Demi Dowdy, a spokeswoman for GOP House Speaker Tim Moore, said the chamber will review the changes once it clears the Senate but noted Moore “certainly agrees with the fundamental premise of the bill.” While there is no evidence of K-12 teachers in North Carolina explicitly teaching the theory to students, Republicans have previously pointed to left-leaning districts hosting trainings, workshops or guest speakers espousing beliefs the GOP argues are central to the theory. Tuesday’s task force report identified cases of some teachers offering questionable class assignments, including a book called “George” about a transgender child coming to terms with gender identity and a vocabulary sheet that mentions Trump in a sentence describing the term “xenophobia.” ___ Follow Anderson on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BryanRAnderson.