There’s valid debate about microaggressions, structural racism. Let future Pa. teachers discuss it.

Let’s suppose you’re instructing a class of education majors — who are preparing to be teachers — at an American university. One of them declares that differences in average academic achievement between Black and non-Black children reflect “institutional racism” in public schools. A second student offers a contrasting perspective. Jim Crow and other forms of legal apartheid disappeared many decades ago, she notes. While differences in academic performance may reflect the legacy of that past, she says, they cannot — in and of themselves — demonstrate discrimination in the present.

Who’s right? I can imagine good cases for both claims. But I can’t imagine the students actually engaging in that debate if their professor follows a new set of state guidelines for “culturally relevant and sustaining education” in teacher preparation programs and professional development activities in Pennsylvania.

That’s because the guidelines impose simple answers to our hardest questions.

I’m glad that the state Department of Education released standards for teaching Pennsylvania’s increasingly diverse students. But I also worry that the guidelines will indoctrinate our teachers — and, by extension, our students — about race, instead of educating them about its complexities.

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Consider the second “competency” in the guidelines, which begins with the statement that professional educators should “know and acknowledge that biases exist in the educational system.” It then instructs them to identify “professional learning opportunities ... to understand more about the manifestations of racism and other biases at institutional and structural levels that can result in disadvantaging some groups of learners ... while privileging others.”

This all sounds like a worthy goal. But I wonder: Will those professional learning opportunities include readings by Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter? I doubt it because McWhorter questions the premise that structural racism in schools can explain why some kids underperform.

He doesn’t deny that racism — including the structural kind — exists, of course. An African American who grew up in Philadelphia, McWhorter has experienced various forms of racism across his life. What he questions is whether it is baked into our educational institutions, as the Pennsylvania guidelines declare.

Here he cites a famous 1997 study by African American scholar Clifton Casteel, showing that most Black students said they did schoolwork for their teachers and most white students said they did it for their parents. The white kids imagined school as part of their familial comfort zone; the Black kids didn’t.

“If much of the black underperformance in school is due to a subtle attitudinal factor, then it won’t work to look at the numbers and say they are due to ‘racism,’ ‘systemic’ or not,” McWhorter concludes. “It isn’t that the system devalues the kids, but that they either devalue, or perhaps feel wary about, the system themselves.”

I’m not arguing that McWhorter is right (or wrong). I’m simply saying that informed and reasonable people differ — sometimes radically — about the role structural racism plays in schools. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at the state guidelines.

“Reasonable people differ about the role structural racism plays in schools.”

Nor would you know that scholars dispute the meaning and effect of microaggressions, another competency in the guidelines. Teachers should “believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real,” the guidelines declare, “and take steps to educate themselves about the subtle and obvious ways in which they are used to harm and invalidate the existence of others.”

Coined a half-century ago by the Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce, microaggressions refer to repeated slights that nonwhite racial groups suffer. Although each individual insult might be small, they may take an accumulated toll.

Yet according to the late Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, we do not have evidence that the targets of microaggressions consistently experience them as offensive. Nor do we have solid research showing that repeated exposure to these terms harms their mental health.

Let me be clear: I fully understand why “You don’t seem Black” would offend an African American, or “Asians are good at math” can be off-putting to a person who descends from China or Korea. But according to Lilienfeld, researchers don’t have enough evidence to show that these unfortunate remarks cause consistent harm.

Of course, we don’t need social scientists to show us that we should try to avoid statements that insult people based on their ethnic or racial backgrounds. But we should also be honest with our teachers, and expose them to diverse voices about microaggressions, instead of pretending that it’s a settled matter. They might find reason — as others have — to disagree with Lilienfeld, who died in 2020. But simply ignoring his critique insults all of our teachers, in the guise of informing them.

In the first competency they enumerate, the Pennsylvania guidelines urge teachers to engage in “critical and difficult conversations” about race. I believe in that goal, as deeply as I believe in anything else. Nothing in the guidelines prevents education professors from raising the nuances I’ve described here with their students. But the way the guidelines are worded, they’re more likely to generate a single “right” answer than a genuine set of questions.

There’s nothing critical — or difficult — about a conversation in which different people feel compelled to arrive at the same conclusion. Our teachers — and their future students — deserve better than that.