Once again the Politfact brain trust has rated a “mostly true” statement “mostly false.”
Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Winsome Sears said in an interview on January 17th “We know last year the Loudoun County School Board spent about $300,000 – that’s real money, that’s going-to-jail money – to bring CRT in some form or fashion to the school system.”
Alleged fact checker Warren Fiske rated her statement “mostly false,” writing:
Sears has a little ground beneath her. In 2020, the school system paid a consultant $34,167 to conduct seminars for senior officials on critical race theory and equity training. But that sum is almost nine times less than the $300,000 Earle-Sears claims. We asked her office three times how she came up with the figure and did not get an answer. It appears that she has greatly overstated the cost of the seminars.
As is always the case with PolitiFact, they missed something.
The Daily Caller’s education reporter Chrissy Clark found the proof that Loudoun County did indeed spend over $300,000 on critical race theory related materials in the form of seven payments to Equity Collaborate LLC, a consulting firm that helps disseminate CRT propaganda in public schools.
.@PolitiFact is calling out @WinsomeSears for “falsely claiming” that LCPS paid “about $300,000” for critical race theory-inspired training.
Well, your humble Poynter alumni is here with receipts. And LCPS DID pay upwards of $300k for such traininghttps://t.co/67dfCjaORz pic.twitter.com/OXT78tRiHm
— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) January 25, 2022
Equity Collaborative’s website says they specialize in “equity” coaching; “Our goal is to help organizations develop their own capacity to create educational equity and social justice by addressing bias and oppression. Tackling bias and oppression requires solutions beyond the technical approaches of implementing policies and ‘best’ practices.” One past seminar they’ve held is titled “Introduction to Critical Race Theory”
Equity Collaborate confirmed their relationship with Loudoun County schools goes back to 2019 in a blog post from last month; “Since 2019, The Equity Collaborative has been working with Loudoun County Public Schools on assessing and improving their educational equity efforts.”
HotAir’s John Sexton’s noted that Parents Defending Education (the source for the payment figures) “actually split the district’s spending into two categories, $34,000 for Equity Collaborative training including CRT and another $314,000 for EQ “training.” Maybe this is the gimmick that Politifact is relying on. Only $34,000 was explicitly about CRT while the rest was merely CRT adjacent.” Or it could just be the case that PolitiFact is deliberately misleading their readers (again).
The only thing Sears got wrong was the timeframe – the wasteful $300k+ spending in question began in 2019, it wasn’t only spent last year. Regardless, that hardly justifies the “mostly false” rating PolitiFact gave her statement.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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