Special Issue Introduction: Demystifying Academic Understandings of Critical Race Theory to Transform Discourse With Policy Makers

In this introduction to the special issue, we describe the socio-political context that spurred our efforts to disrupt the anti-critical race theory (CRT) that has seeped into popular and political conversations about the US educational system. Noting the lack of preparation educational researchers have for sharing their nuanced, academic CRT understandings to policy-making audiences, we endeavored to address this issue. With use of funding support provided by the Spencer Foundation’s Conference Grants Program and in conjunction with Penn State University’s Research-to-Policy Collaboration, we identified a panel of CRT experts, facilitated their training in translating research into policy factsheets, and hosted a Day on the Hill conference during which the factsheets were shared with policy-making professionals. This introduction provides additional details about our process and about the resulting special issue which pairs together two written products covering the same CRT topic from each author, one written in the format of a traditional academic essay and the other as a two-page factsheet. Taken together, we hope that the paired publications serve as an example for how education researchers might demistify academic understandings of CRT in order to transform discourse with policy makers.