Teacher Exposes CRT: My Job Was No Longer About Teaching

A veteran teacher of 15 years, Kali Fontailla cared deeply about her students’ wellbeing. So when Kali discovered that her California public school was indoctrinating students with the lies of Critical Race Theory (CRT), she felt she had no choice but to speak out.

Three months after the Goldwater Institute released an exclusive video and investigative report where Kali exposed CRT in California public schools, she’s using her platform to sound the alarm again. In a new video for PragerU, Kali explains her decision to leave the profession she loved and urges parents to support Goldwater’s policy solution: a landmark academic transparency reform that shines a light on public school curricula.

“I taught my students that if they worked hard and accepted responsibility for their actions, they would succeed,” Kali says of her five years teaching English as a second language in Salinas, California. “But in the last few years, they were hearing something different in their other classes…that their race was their destiny…that socialism is compassionate, communism isn’t so bad, and capitalism is cruel.”

Kali investigated further and found the curriculum for a mandatory “ethnic studies” class. While she expected an anti-America bent, what she discovered shocked her:

“I found classroom activities such as a ‘privilege quiz’ where students would compare and contrast their gender, race, class, and sexual orientation with those of their classmates.

“I found another exercise which involved conducting a mock trial to ‘charge various persons implicated in…genocide against Native Californians,’ in order to ‘create a social justice…counter-narrative.‘

“None of this should be surprising because the ‘guiding principle’ of the curriculum was to ‘critique…white supremacy, racism, anti-blackness…patriarchy…capitalism…and other forms of power and oppression.‘”

Put another way, as Kali wrote in The Orange County Register earlier this year, “Just about every single lesson had some element of Critical Race Theory in it.”

Kali’s discovery flies in the face of the prevailing narrative from public education officials around the country—a narrative that seeks desperately to conceal what’s happening in our public K-12 system: children’s minds being filled with a toxic ideology claiming that America was founded on institutional racism, that public institutions must treat people different based upon skin color, and that the American Dream is a lie.

But it gets worse. In 2020, Kali, who is half-Jamaican, took her concerns to the Salinas school board. “In response, the board president, a professor of ethnic studies at a local college, called me ‘anti-people of color,’” she tells PragerU.

As Kali wrote in The Orange County Register: “If you’re wondering whether Critical Race Theory is a good thing for our country, try speaking out against it and see how people treat you. For me, that was when the real racism started.”

Kali decided to leave the teaching profession and move to Florida, explaining that her job was “no longer about teaching.” But she’s continuing to advocate for families and fight the radical teachings of CRT in the classroom.

“An obsession with race…has taken root in our educational system. It’s the weed that’s rapidly overtaking the garden,” Kali adds in the PragerU video. “What can we do to get rid of it?”

A huge first step, she says, is to arm parents with knowledge: “Demand that your school district’s lessons and materials be made accessible online, so you can see what your child is being taught.” That’s exactly why the Goldwater Institute crafted our Academic Transparency Act to protect parents’ right to find out what their children are learning in taxpayer-funded schools. This revolutionary reform, which has been passed in legislative chambers across the country, requires public schools to publish a list of instructional materials and activities used during the academic year on a publicly accessible portion of their website so that parents can exercise informed school choice.

“Public schools are trying to divide the next generation of Americans based on race. There’s a word for that—racism,” Kali wrote in The Orange County Register: “But parents—and teachers who truly care about their students—can fight back. They can demand transparency.”

You can find out more about Goldwater’s academic transparency reform here, and you can read more about Kali’s story here.