How Teachers Are Being Silenced by Rightwing Activists
Educators are being driven from their careers by conservative activists
Photo Credit: Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP
Issue #167 Education November 2, 2022
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As many of you know, I am a retired educator of all grades from Pre-K through university levels. I taught in public schools and charter schools, with classes of almost all-white students, almost all-Black students, and a mixture of all races.
I previously published two “We Are Speaking” articles about how I taught school fifty years ago.
When I was a teacher back in those days, I didn’t receive very much pushback about the topics I taught.
Over the past few years, however, conservative organizations have been pushing against teachers who try to teach the entirety of educational topics and about all of life in America in the public school system. The “culture wars” have been brought into the classroom.
Teachers are being accused of indoctrinating their students with “woke” and “CRT” education, that is, teaching anything that has to do with race in America. Teachers are not allowed to teach about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or anything having to do with the Civil Rights Movement. Books intended for all grade levels that are by and about Black people, other non-white or non-Christian communities, or LGBTA+ people are being banned.
Teachers who are “caught” teaching any of the above are being harassed, doxxed, and fired. Some of those teachers have had their teaching licenses revoked so that they cannot ever teach anywhere again in this country.
School districts and school boards are also being accused of being “groomers,” meaning the teachers are actually pedophiles who sexually prey on their students or teach their young students to be sexually active or question their gender identity at age six.
Curricula or individual lessons that encourage students to be empathetic or caring towards others are being challenged and eliminated. Anything that may make (white) students feel “uncomfortable” is flagged and eliminated.
Curricula are being rewritten by right-wing organizations and other sources such as the conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan, which now has a “1776” K-12 history and civics curriculum based on American exceptionalism, Christian nationalism, and whitewashed American history. Parts of this curriculum teach the “originalist” philosophy that only what the Founders “thought” in the 18th century is valid, and also the fact the “separation of church and state” was just an “opinion” by Thomas Jefferson.
Teachers are then mandated to attend “workshops” where they are forced to teach this narrow curriculum with no input from the teachers allowed.
One of the most ridiculous accusations going around today is that teachers are encouraging their students to become cats as their “gender” because they (the teachers) may keep kitty litter in their classrooms. In actuality, both teachers and custodians keep a supply of kitty litter close at hand because it is an excellent and quick way to absorb and clean up after students who have had “accidents” or vomited in the classroom. But the parents spreading these falsehoods don’t care about the facts.
School board members and even school principals who mandated mask-wearing during the height of the COVID pandemic have been attacked orally and even physically by parents who feel that mask mandates were against their “freedoms” and the COVID vaccines government overreach.
Many of the parents screaming for “parental control” really mean that they only want to be taught what they think is important, and that does not include anything having to do with race, inclusion, empathy, actual American History (the good, the bad, and the ugly), what they consider to be “woke,” and so on. All of those things are considered to be “radical leftist indoctrination.”
One of the primary reasons I left teaching was because the people in the “ivory towers” who never spent a single day in a classroom were always mandating what we should teach and how. Every year there was a new “program” that would magically solve all of our teaching challenges and the standardized test was the holy grail.
If teaching was hard then, it’s a thousand times harder now. So many teachers are leaving the field that many school districts are forced to hire anyone with a pulse to teach our children.
It is just more of the authoritarian mantra that the right-wing wants to make permanent in American society, and it’s very frightening.
What are your thoughts on the state of public education today? Let us know in the comments.
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