When Arkansas public schools resume for the 2024–25 academic year, a legal battle over whether and how teachers can teach critical race theory (CRT) might be ongoing despite a state law that prohibits political indoctrination in the classroom.
Earlier this spring, Little Rock Central High School teacher Ruthie Walls, three students, and two parents sued Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Arkansas Department of Education Secretary Jacob Oliva.
The lawsuit states that the state leaders violated their freedom of speech and racially discriminated against them by no longer recognizing the African American Studies curriculum as a state Advanced Placement (AP) course with college-level credits.
Ms. Walls and two of the three students listed as plaintiffs are black. According to their March 25 complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, students who completed the course before the implementation of the Arkansas Learns Act executive order last year received AP college credits.
In August 2023, Ms. Walls was told that the state no longer recognizes African American Studies as a college-level course because it was a pilot program. She also said the state has not determined which colleges would accept the credits.
“The class could run afoul of the governor’s executive order on teaching implicit bias,” the lawsuit asserts, according to court papers.
On May 7, U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, an appointee of President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary partial injunction that allows Ms. Walls and her colleague Colton Gilbert to continue teaching African American Studies and related subject matter with no threat of reprimand from their school district or the Arkansas Department of Education as long as they don’t “compel a student to adopt, affirm, or profess a belief in a theory, ideology or idea, including CRT, that conflicts with the principle of equal protections under the law.”
The ruling does not close this case. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare Section 16 of the Arkansas Learns Act unconstitutional and return the African American Studies class as an AP course that carries college credits in the state of Arkansas.
State officials submitted a motion on May 14 asking for dismissal, saying the allegation that a ban on CRT violates free speech has no basis.
Even though the partial injunction was granted to the plaintiffs, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said the ruling confirms what he has said all along.
“Arkansas law doesn’t prohibit teaching the history of segregation, the Civil Rights movement, or slavery,” Mr. Griffin said in a May 7 statement.
“I’m pleased that the district court entirely rejected the plaintiff’s vagueness claims. And the very limited injunction merely prohibits doing what Arkansas was never doing in the first place.
“I look forward to continuing our enforcement of the statute as written rather than as the plaintiffs would choose to wrongly interpret it.”
Ms. Sanders announced the Arkansas Learns Act in January 2023 as a response to low literacy rates, poor grades, high teacher turnover rates, and lack of high-speed internet access in public schools across the state.
In addition to increasing school funding and outlining corrective measures to improve student and teacher performance, the executive order prohibits instruction that indoctrinates students with ideologies, including CRT.
Section 16 of the act notes that history, concepts, and any ideas taught in a course that individuals “may find unwelcome, disagreeable or offensive” are not prohibited. However, it states that no public school teachers or students should be required to attend training or orientations based on prohibited indoctrination or CRT.
“The governor’s executive order directed the secretary to comb through those [Department of Education] materials to ensure Washington bureaucrats can’t bully Arkansas schools into teaching racist indoctrination,” the LEARN website reads.
“As Governor Sanders and Secretary Oliva have said, Arkansas will teach students how to think, not what to think.”
In court papers, Judge Rudofsky criticized the defendants for not providing a definition for or examples of CRT.
To provide clarification for both parties, he cited examples from nearby North Little Rock High School, where participants were instructed to acknowledge that they “harbored unconscious bias” and teachers were directed to hold classroom discussions around systemic racism that included a video demeaning police officers and justifying looting during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots in 2020.
The course taught at North Little Rock High School also “encouraged educators to curtail disciplinary policies if they disproportionately affected minority students,” court papers state.
Before the May 7 injunction, Ms. Walls was asked whether and how she had self-censored to avoid indoctrination practices since the LEARN Act was implemented.
Ms. Walls said she avoids “certain topics of intersection” (race, gender, disability, and class) and no longer assigns students to read “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
And she no longer uses The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project” materials in her classroom, according to court papers.
The Epoch Times reached out to one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Michael J. Laux, for comment but received no reply by press time.
