We have met the enemy, and it is us ???
If you are wondering how teachers got to be the bad guys, you are definitely in the right place. Of course, it's complicated.
Take a profit-driven industry pissed off about labor costs,
Mix in a bunch of taxpayers pissed off about paying taxes,
Sift together free-market monomania, political ambition and religious fanaticism,
Marinate in racism, sexism, and a scoop of toxic nostalgia (at least overnight, over centuries is best),
Stir in memories of all the terrible teachers you ever hated and
Voilà!
Teachers are viewed by the privileged and powerful as the delivery systems for dangerous ideas such as LGBTQ+ rights and race equity (don't say anti-racism!) and, of course, income equality. Therefore, educators are at the nexus of legislation prescribing what can and can not be taught (and how), and the implementation of those laws. In other words, teachers are responsible for sanctioning and distributing certain kinds of knowledge while delegitimizing and withholding others.
We'll start with the laws. I'll focus on "CRT," sex, and "parents' rights" for now and leave most of the mask mishegoss for next post when we'll get to the who and why of all the bashing. (For those of you looking for a school choice rage party, please be patient.)
It's not just for Florida anymore. It never was.
UCLA School of Law has a CRT Forward Tracking Project. It has an interactive map and, as they describe it, "includes state and federal legislation but also goes much further, into areas where systematic research tools are sparse. It tracks actions by school boards and other local governments, as well as non-legislative actions at the state level, such as regulations, executive directives and attorney general opinions."
The ACLU has an interactive chart "Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislature[s]" that links to the text of bills and provides each bill's status.
Parents' Rights are all the rage, and they serve as the rich canopy under which anti-CRT, "don't say gay," and rules for book-banning and outing kids to their parents, can grow and flourish. These PR bills may take first place in the "words mean what I want them to mean" race.
Most of what's in most of the bills is a rehash--this time louder and in ALL CAPS--of stuff parents already have and can do. Section 445 of the General Education Provisions Act (first passed in the 1970s and re-upped in 2020) gives parents the right to view instructional materials and opt their students out of surveys and "analysis" based on challenged materials. When it comes to sex, most states already require parent notification and offer an opt-out (or opt-in) to families. That doesn't stop these folks from passing the same "new" law over and over. Red meat eaters need red meat.
This is the latest from PEN America. Read it and weep.
They get away with birthing this calamity in part because the laws hurt the people the base wants hurt, and partly through rhetorical legerdemain. The language of the bills is both redundant and deliberately ambiguous. Concepts like "age-appropriate" and "unsuitable" rely on nonexistent good faith and invite parent/?/activists and the billionaires who own them to contest lessons and materials that conflict with their personal (corporations are too persons!) ideologies.
As a result, the laws that claim to promote transparency and protect a parent's right to "direct" their child's education function as a way for those parents to also direct the educations of other parents' kids. Rights for me, not so much for thee.
The bonus is the ability for parents to sue for damages and costs along with "injunctive relief" if the school district does not rectify the issue to the parent's satisfaction. This is the main mechanism for chilling speech and erasing disfavored knowledge, experience, history, and people from the public conversation that occurs in schools.
If you're thinking that most people won't go so far as to sue a school, or that they can't afford to, you might be right. But there are a lot of interested groups that are eager to finance just such an effort, and as anyone who has worked in a school can tell you, the bosses are terrified of lawsuits. So terrified you don't actually have to bring them. Maybe one or two.
Reminds me of The Maltese Falcon:
Gutman: "Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill."
"Sure," Spade agreed, "but they're not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down."
For now, the lawsuits can go both ways. But not smoothly.
Of course not all of these legislative grenades make the national news and when they do, as in the New York Times here and the Washington Post here, NBC here and ABC here, the reports have often just reviewed some of the hundreds of bills proposed. And in Congress, a federal "Parents' Bill of Rights Act" remains under the radar and has so far made barely a ripple.
Even when it does occur, reporting on the bills is usually smothered in partisan horse-race "analysis" that rarely pierces the veneer of process and "for the children" bad faith. Instead, these articles split their inches between dramatic horror stories from the frontlines and tedious "who's winning?" back-and-forth conflict porn.
What is much harder to find is an honest investigation into the origin and purpose of these culture wars. Kathryn Joyce who writes for Salon and Vanity Fair among others, has this, about which we will hear more next time (Vanity Fair also has this and this.) The New Yorker has this and that.
In the blog and blog-adjacent universe, Peter Greene @palan57 does a great job connecting the dots at Curmudgucation, Forbes, and The Progressive.
Anne Lutz Fernandez @lutzfernandez puts it together on her substack.
Steven Singer @StevenSinger3 is a Gadfly on the Wall who has been at it for a while.
Nancy Flanagan @nancyflanagan is a Teacher in a Strange Land.
Jan Resseger @JanResseger brings the hammer on her blog, sometimes reprinted on the awesome...
...Network for Public Education @Network4pubEd website (boasting a team that includes Executive Director Carol Corbett Burris @carolburris and Leonie Haimson @leoniehaimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters), and on...
...Diane Ravitch's essential blog that serves as a crucial platform for amplifying these voices along with many others.
For the digitally inclined, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are masters of the domain with their podcast, Have you Heard.
For the enlightened and antediluvian, there are books! I haven't read them all, but I'm still young (at heart) and still learning. The following titles are a sample of those I've either bought, started, finished, or had recommended to me.
A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Schneider and Berkshire
Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek Black
And anything from Diane Ravitch, but especially The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
☝
There is a lot more than culture wars legislation in the work of these writers. If you want to know what's really going on out there, you should start here. Read their stuff. Listen to it. Follow them on twitter. Don't spend your career in a silo like I did.
Next up, the guest of honor. The hero responsible for bringing together all the bad ideas and shitting them out as a state-sized turd hanging off the asshole of the country. Florida Man.
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