This is splendid! Medium should show more people your explanation of Critical Race Theory, instead of all the relatively uninformed explanations by people who have neither taken nor taught it. (I also have neither taken nor taught it, but I have at least read a couple of books.)

I would offer a three additional reasons why people think CRT is being taught in schools.

First, Christopher Rufo decided it was a lovely-sounding label to demonize, basically independent of the actual content: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory

Secondly, there was no name for the kind of anti-racist educational topics that were inspired by Critical Race Theory (the actual one that you describe) and the mostly-academic offshoots like Critical Race Theory of education (https://www.unco.edu/education-behavioral-sciences/pdf/TowardaCRTEduca.pdf), Whiteness Studies (https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-5--Delgado and Stefancic include it under CRT in their eponymous book, so it ought to count), and so on.

Thirdly, you can find K-12 curricula that sound like it was cut-and-pasted out of summaries of what Critical Race Theory is. Compare Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory):

Intersectional theory: The examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their intersections play out in various settings

and this ethnic studies curriculum goal:

Evaluate the influence of the intersections of identity, including but not limited to, gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, physical and mental disability, and class on the living histories and experiences of peoples, groups, and events.

That's, like, the exact same thing. (This is not the only parallel in the curriculum, but it's notable for just how identical the language is.)

At some point, if you're teaching kids about waves and particles and uncertainty, but not demanding that they solve Schrodinger's equation (or even know what a Hamiltonian is), you may as well just say that you're "teaching quantum mechanics"...just the version that you can manage to teach to kids.

I think, combined with your three points, we come to a pretty complete understanding of why people think CRT is being taught: lack of understanding, a common core, high politicization, AND explicit propaganda, lack of adequate nomenclature, and instances of a direct parallel.

Then there is the question of--what is to be done?

As someone who loves precision, I would prefer if the term "Critical Race Theory" could be reserved for the legal perspective since it provided (and perhaps continues to provide) important insights that had been overlooked, and those important insights stand to get lost if the term is co-opted.

Furthermore, it pains me to allow someone (Rufo) to win any sort of battle, even a definitional one, when it is explicitly founded on the idea of using misinformation as political propaganda. That's wretched.

But I wonder if by now the horse isn't out of the barn. Critical Theory, from which Critical Race Theory takes its name, is explicitly transformational in nature; in launching the field, Horkheimer was at pains to point out that the critical theorist was to be also an activist and an agent of social justice. Ladson-Billings and Tate embrace the same type of activism (see first link). So it wouldn't be wholly unfitting if those topics and approaches spawned in large part by Critical Race Theory ended up adopting the name. Presently, there seems no alternative: anti-racism is too broad, as there are approaches to anti-racism that avoid intersectionality, don't assume deep and pervasive systemic racism, and so on. And I, at least, am not aware of any other alternative name. So perhaps it's time to just embrace the term as something that applies more widely, and fight the definitional battles over what legitimately should count, rejecting outright falsehoods or unrelated concepts, but embracing the ideas that are plausibly intellectual heirs of the legal movement.

Or maybe not--maybe it's better to keep the term clean, and pick some better name for the things people want to talk about in education.

Anyway, I think your explication of Critical Race Theory is much-needed! I hope people notice.

Addendum: the examples of so-called history you showed are horrific...those should be expunged immediately, regardless of what we call the effort to not teach lies instead of history.