...but let's have a closer look at the new Illinois standards and their prospects for approval.

The Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards are less about education than political re-education. The new rule mandates, for example, that teachers, "assess how their biasesaffecthow they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.)" You might think it impossible to "mitigate" the "unearned privilege" of being white, male, or straight, but Bettina L. Love, a prominent advocate of Critical Race Theory in education, holds that "White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy." By this she means therapy that combats "White emotionalities" or what Robin DiAngelo famously calls "White fragility." The committee that drafted the new rule includes an article touting white fragility training sessions to help teachers "move past their whiteness" in the readings it offers to explain the standards.

In other words, the new Illinois standards are saying, "Don't allow your racism to keep you out of therapy designed to extirpate your whiteness." And if teachers don't enter such therapy voluntarily, the new standards will make it easy for schools to force them into therapeutic "mitigation" of their "whiteness." Complaints about a teacher's failure to embrace "progressive" perspectives or let go of "Eurocentrism" (say, by assigning too many novels by white male authors) could easily subject hapless educators to DiAngelo's cure for their whiteness. Licensure and certification are at stake.