This article originally appeared in the Thomas More Society 2024 Impact Report. To explore the full Impact Report, click here.

In November 2022, the Pennsylvania Department of Education rolled out its “Culturally-Relevant and Sustaining Education” (CR-SE) Guidelines. If you’re trying to make sense of what that means, you wouldn’t be the only one. The guidelines had nothing to do with math, reading, or true educational competency standards. Instead, they sought to mandate that teachers affirm and impose on their students highly ideological beliefs about contentious social and political issues.

This curriculum mandate wasn’t about fostering inclusivity, but was instead a heavy-handed push to force educators and students to adopt a vague, divisive ideology or face dire consequences. The CR-SE guidelines made teachers prioritize concepts like “microaggressions,” “unconscious biases,” and “marginalization” over spelling, addition, and subtraction. Teachers were ordered to “disrupt harmful institutional practices” and hold “critical conversations” to confront their own supposed biases. Impressionable students were to be fed curricula questioning societal power structures, while terms like “microaggressions”—vaguely defined as subtle, often unintentional slights— were weaponized to police speech.

Non-compliance meant schools could lose state funding, a financial guillotine hanging over districts like Laurel, Mars Area, and Penncrest. It was a ‘woke’ overreach that trampled free speech, local control, and common sense. Picture Matt Barker, a teacher at Laurel School District, forced to inculcate his students on what “microaggressions” are, based on murky and ideological criteria, risking his job if he voiced his disagreement. Or consider parents like Matthew and Lisa Bartlett, whose child, “L.B.,” could face discipline for not parroting the state’s ideological script.

Moreover, this curriculum mandate called on educators to “disrupt” their own schools’ policies, a ‘woke’ demand to insubordination that clashed with professional ethics. The state’s education bureaucrats bypassed public input and legislative scrutiny, and flouted the Public School Code’s emphasis on local governance to enact these so-called standards.

Thomas More Society attorneys intervened, representing several affected school districts, teachers, parents, and board members. In April 2023, the TMS attorneys filed an 86-page Petition for Review in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit was a precision strike, arguing that the

CR-SE Guidelines were an illegal mandate masquerading as guidance.

The constitutional arguments were airtight. The CR-SE mandate violated the First Amendment by compelling teachers to adopt woke ideologies, running afoul of settled constitutional precedent that bans the forcing of citizens to confess prescribed beliefs. The lawsuit also showed the state’s bureaucrats unlawfully usurped local school boards’ authority under the Public School Code and contradicted the Code of Professional Practice and Conduct by encouraging defiance of school policies.

On November 13, 2024, the Commonwealth’s Department of Education caved, finally agreeing in a mediated settlement agreement to rescind the curriculum mandate. They issued a public statement confirming the CR-SE framework’s demise and notified all school districts and educator programs that it would no longer be required in their classrooms. This victory was a resounding rejection of ideological overreach, restoring free speech, local control, and sanity to Pennsylvania’s schools—ensuring teachers and families could shape education free from the state’s ideological grip.

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