by Ruth Sheets
Teachers are amazing. Every day during the school year and often for summer school too, they get up, travel some distance (it varies), arrive at school, try to catch up on communications that came to them overnight, and set up their classrooms for the day. That’s all before the students arrive. Once that happens, the race is on to give students their very best, sharing information, facilitating discussion, evaluating understanding and progress for their many students, maintaining some level of order, and making the students’ learning experience valuable. Then, for secondary and some elementary teachers, the process begins again when the next class comes in, then the next and the next to the end of the day.
Most teachers are competent and knowledgeable about their subject(s), and invested in their own learning. In most districts, to earn tenure, teachers must have a Master’s degree in education or their subject area before 5 years have passed. Teachers are watched, evaluated, thrown into challenging situations for which they are not fully prepared, supplied with inadequate resources, working in rooms that are too hot, too cold, too small for the number of students. They work with students who have inadequate access to technology, but are evaluated as to student success despite the obstacles. These mostly well-trained, creative, caring, kid-loving professionals are now the target of scared uninformed, mostly white parents and politicians. These folks in more than a few of our states are now expecting teachers to regularly lie by commission and omission.
Over the past year, Republicans have taken aim at our public education system, well, more than usual. Teachers have weathered such attacks in the past by doing their jobs even better. Many teachers left the profession, though, because they decided that they no longer wanted to accept the stress and abuse. We are now seeing that the people in the field are those seriously committed to our kids, their learning, and their future.
The problem now, Republican school boards and politicians are doubling down on techniques used all over the world by authoritarian governments to make education everywhere in their realms uniformly dedicated to the business of indoctrinating children to just what the government wants kids to know. That is not the way in a democracy but it does not seem to matter to the perpetrators of the attacks on our schools and libraries
In this iteration of going after our schools, The Trump cult has passed laws in several states that forbid teachers from telling the truth about a lot of subjects to their students. They can’t share the “1619 Project” on racism in America or teach the Holocaust without presenting “the other side” or mention LGBTQ rights or talk about racism and slavery as anything but a personal choice by practitioners. No controversial topics are to be discussed. In some places, evolution (a fact) and climate change (also a fact) are not to be included in the curriculum or even discussed. No sex education either just in case same-sex relations are mentioned or inspire questions by students.
The goal is to keep white children from feeling guilty or uncomfortable or as if they might want to positively change things. These fragile white kids, their parents, and just about anyone else can now report any teacher who covers any of the above topics, and the financial penalties can be substantial. Yay! vigilantism! Thanks, Texas, for getting things started with that!
In our own state, Pennsylvania, there is a bill pending that would allow anyone in the state to report a teacher who has discussed any difficult topic. In other states, mostly in the former Confederacy, there are proposals to live stream classrooms so anyone can watch and report. Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, and South Dakota right now are among the worst, but Texas, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and others are following right behind. In at least one state, teachers must report to the parent if a child asks a “challenging question,” whatever that is.
The reporter I first heard fully discuss this had to do the “balance” thing and equated the above with colleges prohibiting abusive speech and bullying toward other students. Sorry, but it’s not the same, not even close
The legalized lying about what teachers are teaching and forbidden to teach is so egregious every citizen of this country should be screaming. The process is reminiscent of the Communist and Fascist crushing of speech that doesn’t fully support their propaganda, going on now in Russia, China, and other countries, and which consumed the Nazis throughout Europe, Franco’s rule in Spain, and the many Communist regimes in the last century.
I partially blame the Supreme Court for magnifying this anti-democratic insanity. I believe the approved lying got traction with the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in 2013. The decision was based on the lie that the former Confederate states and a few others no longer should need to check in with the Department of Justice to make voting rules changes; they had learned their lesson and would no longer discriminate. This allowed states to target voters and put into place all kinds of voter suppression policies, lying that they were necessary to stop fraud (practically non-existent). This action by the Court led to disenfranchisement of people of color, students, and poor citizens who couldn’t get past all the new obstacles quickly placed in their way. When people can’t vote, a whole lot of people who shouldn’t be in office get elected.
The media was a major force in permitting or even promoting the lying. You’ve got to present “both sides” of every issue even if there are not 2 legitimate sides. The media knew, for example, that Donald Trump as candidate and president lied a good part of the time (more than 30,000 times in public in his 4 years in office). The best the media could do was say or imply that what he said might not be exactly fair or was an exaggeration. They were lies!! The word “lie” is rarely used even now. Reporters will sometimes say falsehood or incorrect. The word should have been “lie.” It could have helped people who were only listening in passing to know that Trump is a serial liar, but the opportunity to stop it passed.
How does this impact our public education system? Well, it has normalized lying among many Republican and conservative groups. Claim teachers are brainwashing their kids, it must be happening. Claim the 1619 Project is filled with lies and they don’t even have to read it. Ban books that promote sex or being gay or Black supremacy, they don’t have to read the books before lying about them either.
Let’s face it, the reality is, a lot of white people are scared that somehow the increases in the number of people of color living in our nation will take away their white privilege that they don’t even admit they have. They don’t want their privileged kids to be confronted by the fact that white people have committed all kinds of atrocities throughout history. They want their sheltered kids to think that they have earned all the privilege they have and that it is those horrible others who are trying to take it away. Those others include African-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, LGBTQ persons, Muslims, historians, teachers, writers, and anyone who is not them and wants those white kids to learn about people other than whites.
Teachers have always been targets for whatever flavor of lying and mythmaking Americans are indulging in at the time: Remember the Alamo, the honorable nature of the Confederacy and the good treatment of slaves, the necessity of interning Japanese-Americans and invading Iraq, and so much more, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes because teaching the “lies/myths” was ordered (as propaganda).
We know better now but my guess is this current limiting of what teachers can say and what students can discuss will expand before common sense takes over, if it does. We have lived a pandemic and are still in it and many of those same scared legislators and parents have ignored medical advice and have preferred lies about ineffective drugs and the suggestion that mask mandates infringe on their freedom. Clearly the truth is just too hard for some adults to manage even if it is easier to digest and will keep them healthier and alive.
I can’t help but wonder if any of those white legislators and parents have even considered the trauma their kids’ classmates of color have experienced from the bullying, false history, segregation, harassment by police, poverty, and more. Nah!
With these new restrictions on education, will students of color and LGBTQ students ever feel safe enough to share their feelings with their white classmates and if that sharing happens unbidden, will the teacher be blamed, prosecuted? What happens to the students then?
Let’s face it, little white kids are not fragile. They can read the books the former Confederacy wants to ban and expand their understanding. They can hear about LGBTQ persons without suddenly becoming gay, but learning about it could save their life when they are trying to figure out who they are.
It seems to me in this case, parents are the problem. They worry their sons and daughters may get to know and appreciate the challenges faced by our nation and want to ask their parents what they have done to make things better. Perhaps the parents have nothing to contribute and they don’t like it.
Clearly, we can’t count on the current Supreme Court, but we should be able to count on the non-right-wing media to keep what is happening in the states in people’s faces. Political candidates who truly support democracy need to find clever, honest ways to get the word out to citizens about how voters are being used to keep others down by Republicans who are OK with taking away their rights in power.
Above all, teachers, don’t quit. That is just what Republicans are hoping for. If you quit, they can break our schools and our unions, then dump anyone in classrooms feeding kids the BS that right-wing lies are really truth. Already there is a teacher shortage and all kinds of inexperienced people are being allowed to be unsupervised in classrooms with vulnerable kids. Hey, who cares what the kids are being fed as long as they are in person in school. Parents have to work, you know.
It is really hard when lying becomes the law of the land or at least in certain states. We need teachers to find creative ways around these appalling laws/lies and we need to find ways to keep any of the bills now in state legislatures from passing. We also need to fight these laws with everything we have – are you listening media? We owe this to our kids, all our kids, even the “fragile” white ones.
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