‘Why Are You Guys Scared To Say This?’ CNN’s Audie Cornish Confronts Parent Activists Over Concerns About Racism Education
CNN Anchor and Correspondent Audie Cornish confronted parent activists-turn-school board members Amy Cawvey and April Carney over their concerns about racism education and other “woke” policies they’d like changed.
Cornish’s new podcast The Assignment with Audie Cornish launched this week with an episode devoted to the parent activism that exploded at school board meetings across the country beginning during the pandemic, and catapulted Cawvey and Carney into action.
The episode began with historian Adam Laats tracing the history of this sort of parent activism to a 1974 controversy over multicultural textbooks.
Cornish then interviewed Cawwvey and Carney, and noticed what she thought was a pointed reluctance to say they’re trying to “roll back” progress:
Audie Cornish: So let me ask at this point, would you like to see a rolling back of classroom discussions based on the current events of the last five years? So LGBT issues, for one, certainly how race and history are discussed in the classroom is certainly another.
Amy Cawvey: I think what we would hope to be done is just to adhere to the standards of providing each side without bias. So if you want–
Audie Cornish: But do you see why I’m asking? Like if if you feel like something has gone to excess it sounds to me like the remedy is to pull back.
Amy Cawvey: Or you can say that they haven’t been following. What, um… let’s see… you got people going on the extremes you know, so…
Audie Cornish: And you want to roll those people back?
April Carney: Yeah, I got a lot of rolling back as the right term. And I’m, I’m I have to agree with Amy. It’s about getting back to basics and teaching the standards.
Audie Cornish: So getting back is the term you’d prefer to use?
April Carney: Yeah, I think it’s back to basics. We need, like I said, we have so much learning loss that’s happened because of the pandemic.
Audie Cornish: Right. But either way, it’s a it’s a going back of something you want to draw back on what’s happened.
April Carney: Yeah, I think we need to focus on what’s important and that’s, you know, educating our children to be able to graduate from high school.
Audie Cornish: Why are you guys scared to say this? And I’m not picking on you. I’m genuinely confused. If you’ve both seen and excess, you’ve seen something go too far. Why the fear around saying, let’s pull back from a thing that’s gone too far?
Amy Cawvey: Well, it makes it sound like you want to roll back to the times when, you know, like, we’re going to go back to Jim Crow laws or something like that. It just sounds like this negative connotation when actually all we want to do is have school, be a place where you’re focused on reading, writing, arithmetic. We’re focusing on all of these other issues that can be addressed at home with the parents.
Listen above via CNN Audio’s The Assignment with Audie Cornish.
