Republicans embraced a solution to school violence; now they're denouncing it as "Woke"

In 2018, GOP politicians promoted social and emotional education as a tool to stop mass shootings.


A recent school violence in a North Texas school district has led to conservative activists denouncing these programs as "woke", the cause of school violence. It started with political mailers sent to thousands of homes.

“The School District put ‘woke’ politics over the safety of our children,” the flyers read in all caps, above a news clipping about the Timberview shooting, which reportedly resulted from a fight between two Black students. The flyers, paid for by
a conservative political action committee, warned that the Mansfield school district had “stopped disciplining students” based on “Critical Race Theory principles.” As a result, it said, “kids were nearly killed.”


But the mailer omitted a key detail:

Some of the local school policies that it was attacking were initially implemented three years ago,
not as part of a liberal takeover of the suburban school system, but at the urging of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Trump administration.​