GOP War on Teachers Moves to Full-on Fascism

Republicans warring on history and other teachers have moved into full-on Fascist actions. They’re supplementing racism with book banning, Brown Shirt-like intimidation tactics, and recruiting informants to report teachers to government thugs. We begin with this article out of Dallas, Texas. “On the floor of the Legislature, lawmakers brandished a small picture book. Republican legislators’ sudden interest in the title — Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness — appeared to stem from complaints from Highland Park families. Texas lawmakers touted the book — a story about racial justice and racism told from a white child’s perspective — as justification for a vague new state law that restricts how teachers can discuss racism and ‘controversial’ topics in the classroom. Since the law went into effect last month, parents across the state have successfully campaigned against several books and questioned curriculum that delves into challenging subjects, including those addressing social justice and LGBTQ issues. ‘We’ve been observing a growing number of challenges to books about racial injustice, Black American history, and the lived experience of Black, indigenous and persons of color,’ said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. In Richardson ISD, a mother’s testimony during a school board meeting went viral across social media. She took issue with a list of book club options available to her daughter’s eighth grade class and read a passage to trustees that included descriptions of sexual assault. School officials responded by ‘pausing’ classroom activities that involve teacher-selected book options to make sure they can be vetted.”

The article goes on to tell us, “In a Houston-area district, parent concerns led to a canceled — now rescheduled — event with the author of an award-winning book told from the perspective of a Black student going to a mostly white school. Also in that area, a school system banned from its elementary school libraries a graphic novel featuring a transgender character. And recently, Carroll ISD trustees voted to reprimand a teacher after parents complained a fourth grade student brought home This Book is Anti-Racist. Education advocates and librarians worry about the power these complaints will have on students’ access to literature, especially as schools work to make their reading materials more diverse and inclusive. Teachers say curriculum and books that reflect students’ identities are essential to keeping them interested in learning. ‘Teachers and librarians want to at least have that literature available and accessible for the students who want to read it,’ said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America. ‘So the idea that the loudest groups right now should be able to dictate what is available to everybody is of great concern.’ “

To see how ridiculous these people are, we have this: “RISD mom Sherry Clemens read a passage from a book on her daughter’s optional book club list at a recent board meeting. ‘The strong language and sexual content in seven of the 10 books is enough for any parent to be outraged,’ she said. Later, after a video of her testimony gained traction online, she appeared on a conservative podcast. She said several titles contain ‘left-wing ideology … there’s homosexuality, there’s a lot about gender identity, which I think is a huge hot topic right now and scary for our girls to be exposed to.’ In an email, she also said she was troubled by a book that discussed suicide and that other titles had ‘themes revolving around race, gender and sexual identity.’ ‘I believe students should come to school and it be a safe place where all values and beliefs are accepted, and the teaching is neutral and presents all sides,’ she wrote. ‘When 7/10 books have mature content and themes that are divisive, how is this neutral?’ ” That idiot has no clue about her own child, who probably has heard every type of profanity from her own family and her friends already, and who most definitely has questions of her own about sexuality and about what her friends are talking about.

Showing the spinelessness of elected officials, the article continues, “The district’s response was almost immediate. The day after Clemens complained in the public comment section of Richardson’s school board meeting, district leaders announced that some of the books in question indeed contained inappropriate material. As a result, RISD temporarily suspended book clubs across the district until administrators could review guidelines and criteria for teachers in charge of selecting books. Now, a district group will create a rubric for such choices and hopes to have criteria outlined by the spring, at which point the clubs can resume. ‘It’s quite the undertaking because one could argue any text,’ said Lindsay Mikulas, an RISD reading and language arts director. While some parents are concerned about access to controversial materials, some of which had required a parental permission slip, RISD mother Michelle Meals said she wants her sons to encounter difficult topics in books. That way her boys can work through the real issues teenagers face with the help of teachers and parents. ‘Even though it can be extremely difficult and messy through literature, I’d much rather them encounter it through a book than through TikTok,’ she said.” Now there’s someone who is thinking.

Enter a Republican racist. “Earlier this year, Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, zeroed-in on a complaint from a Highland Park parent about a children’s book that he argued ‘teaches critical race theory to little kids.’ He held up the cover from the House floor. But the book in question was never part of district materials, Highland Park ISD spokesman Jon Dahlander said. The book’s author describes the story as being about a white child who sees news about a white police officer killing a person with brown skin. The child explores the history of white supremacy in America and determines they should work to dismantle it. In Southlake, Carroll ISD teachers were presented a rubric to determine which books could remain in their classroom libraries, NBC News reported. The guidelines instructed teachers to omit books with a ‘singular, dominant narrative’ that could be ‘considered offensive.’ Teachers questioned how they could know what each of their students’ families found offensive. Controversies over book titles are nothing new. In 2014, Highland Park ISD suspended seven books after parents complained about sexual content and references to rape, abuse and abortion. Earlier this year, a Leander ISD community member spoke against some titles chosen for student-led book clubs while waving a sex toy around to demonstrate her distaste. The district eventually removed more than a dozen books from optional book club lists after they were deemed inappropriate or unfit, according to The Austin-American Statesman. Spring Branch ISD recently banned from its elementary schools a graphic novel with a transgender character following a parent complaint, The Houston Chronicle reported. Richardson dealt with similar tension last year when some parents complained about books dealing with gender identity and LGBTQ topics. Such titles had been available in district libraries for years and as part of an effort to promote inclusiveness, more were added last school year, Superintendent Jeannie Stone said at that time.“

This article about Fascists in Arkansas tells us, “A state lawmaker says he’s asking the Arkansas Department of Education to instruct teachers and schools they could face legal repercussions for teaching critical race theory. Republican  Rep. Mark Lowery of Maumelle says he’s asked Education Secretary Johnny Key to make districts aware of a recent opinion by Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge that says teaching critical race theory is unconstitutional. Speaking in a news conference Tuesday, Lowery, who requested the opinion from Rutledge, said it strengthens the rights of parents to review and challenge the content being taught to their children. ‘These parents are finding out that as they make requests, if they asked specifically about any materials specifically related to critical race theory, those instructional materials have been hidden behind other terminologies,’ Lowery said. ‘Those terminologies might be diversity, it may be equity, maybe fairness.’ A law passed in the most recent legislative session, Act 684, allows parents to request school officials not to teach certain instructional materials. Lowery was also the sponsor of two failed bills that would have restricted the teaching of the 1619 Project as well as other concepts that he says “isolate students based on race, gender, political affiliation, social class, or other distinctions.’ Lowery said contacting school officials should be the first step for parents concerned about critical race theory, though they now have the option to take legal action against schools and even individual teachers. ‘We’re also wanting to alert parents that they have this extra tool in the toolbox, so to speak, of not just protesting materials, that’s probably the first step… but to give them an additional resource, that is they can take, not just the school district, but they can take the teacher to court.’ “

Showing how journalists by an large, with a few exceptions, are dropping the ball on reporting on CRT, the article continues, “Critical race theory is defined as an academic concept that seeks to critically examine the intersection of race and U.S. law, and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. Lowery says teaching the theory, which he says labels white students as being ‘oppressors’ or ‘privileged’ ultimately has a negative impact on all students. ‘It hurts students when you tell them they are an oppressor or that they are privileged, but it equally hurts Black students if you point at them and you don’t recognize their ability to achieve and you instead say that they are victims,’ Lowery said.” Lowery is lying. CRT is nothing like what he claims. The journalist writing this story doesn’t call him out on that lie, which is a disservice to the readers, to the teachers, to the schools, to the students, and to the community at large.

The article goes on to show more Republican lying and using the legal structure to lie to the people and intimidate teachers. “Rutledge’s opinion released Monday states that teaching the theory in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by treating white students differently than students of color. Lowery’s actions come amid a national outcry from Republican officials and activists, who claim critical race theory unfairly excludes white people from the conversation, and that it inaccurately describes the U.S. as a systemically racist nation. The U.S. Senate last week narrowly approved an amendment to a budget reconciliation package proposed by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that would prohibit federal funding for schools that teach the theory. ‘But it was the thinnest majority possible, 50-to-49, and all 49 of those Democrats are going to have to answer at the ballot box… about why they think your tax dollars should go to indoctrinate children to think America is a racist nation,’ Cotton said in an interview Sunday on Fox News. Lowery said while he supports teaching the history of racism in the U.S., teachers in Arkansas aren’t equipped to teach the theory in a way that does not ostracize white students. ‘That is exactly where we need to start, and so in the meantime we should be banning the teaching of critical race theory in our classrooms until we know the teachers are adequately prepared to be able to hear, in a fair and balanced way, the conversations, the input of all students regardless of their race or ethnicity.’ ” The lying never stops.

Professor Walter Stern contributes this essay. “As Republicans continue their attacks on the teaching of ‘divisive concepts,’ they have trained their sights on timeworn targets: universities, professors and schools of education. Consider Republican Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, whose campaign website describes a vicious cycle in which people on the left ‘take hundreds of billions of American tax dollars and send it to universities’ that propagate the supposed central tenet of critical race theory: that ‘America is an evil, racist nation.’ According to Vance, ‘Those universities then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.’ Since critical race theory is far more nuanced and has far less influence on the nation’s decentralized K–12 curricula than Vance suggests, Americans could simply ignore the right’s attempt to capitalize on voters’ anxieties about their children’s education. But to ignore the charge means missing an opportunity. The need to cultivate teachers and students who are brave — and patriotic — enough to think critically about the nation’s past could not be more urgent. Without independent thinkers who care enough about the nation’s well-being to wrestle with, rather than retreat from, its complex history, the country is ill-prepared to tackle current and future challenges. A society, after all, can’t solve problems whose existence it refuses to acknowledge. That’s why Americans must reclaim patriotic education from the right. Universities have a key role to play here. Universities can train teachers who are uniquely positioned to do exactly what Republicans say they want to do: develop patriotic citizens. I know, because it’s how I and countless other professors teach.”

Professor Stern continues, “I’m a historian whose published work explores how school policies institutionalized white supremacy. Vance probably had people like me in mind when he recently celebrated Richard Nixon’s proclamation that ‘the professors are the enemy.’ He and other Republicans might also shudder to learn that my colleagues and I teach a course on the History of American Education to more than 200 students each year, a significant portion of whom are future teachers. In fact, unlike many teacher certification programs, my university requires prospective teachers to take our course or another like it. On the first day of class, I clarify that history is not simply what happened in the past; it is a debate about how and why events unfolded in the ways that they did and the consequences of those events. Specifically, I emphasize that history involves the interpretation of the past based upon factual evidence. I discourage students from relying strictly on my lectures as the source for their evidence-based interpretations of the past. Instead, I ask them to weigh the interpretations they encounter in lectures and assigned readings alongside firsthand accounts from educators, reformers, parents and students. Throughout the semester, students grapple with the educational visions of luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, Frederick Douglass, and John Dewey. They also encounter the educational aspirations of lesser-known figures such as Priscilla Mason, who chastised ‘despotic man’ for denying equal opportunity to women in her 1793 graduation speech at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia; Peter Pitchlynn, the inaugural superintendent of the public school system that the Choctaw Nation established in 1842; and Septima Clark, a Black public school teacher and activist from South Carolina who profoundly influenced the Civil Rights Movement. This past semester, students analyzed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R) executive order barring school districts from requiring masks. They also examined Black students’ accounts of the expanding police presence in desegregating schools. When students consider these sources, I encourage them to pay as much attention to the questions that they raise as they do to the answers they appear to provide. The best classes end with more questions than answers: When does governmental power over education preserve liberty, and when does it suppress liberty? Why have some emphasized the university’s responsibility to prepare students for jobs, while others, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, emphasized its capacity ‘to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life?’ What is the purpose of education, and how can people in a democratic society determine the ends it should serve as well as the means for achieving those ends?”

Professor Stern also tells us, “Do I put my fingers on the scale? Absolutely. I make sure students know that the Civil War was about slavery, that the land the United States seized from Indigenous people provided the financial basis for state school funds and that state-sponsored segregation and exclusion undermined educational opportunity in the South, North, and West. I have no interest in indoctrinating students. I instead want to provide them with a factual basis for interpreting what diverse Americans wanted from education at different moments in time, who got what they wanted, who didn’t and why. Republicans such as Vance want professors and K–12 teachers to provide ‘honest, patriotic accounts of American history.’ In the spirit of Mason, Dewey and Clark, who valued independent thought and the critical appraisal of the relationship between the nation’s practices and professed values, I aim to do just that. I hope my students go on to teach a similarly honest and patriotic version of American history in their K–12 classrooms. Throughout history, totalitarian regimes have provided chilling evidence of Thomas Jefferson’s contention that ‘those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.’ Their reliance on censorship and disinformation has also affirmed Jefferson’s assertion that ‘the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.’ Unfortunately, Republicans who oppose the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ have little interest in illuminating minds. They want, in Vance’s own words, ‘to force’ schools to provide uncritical exaltations of the nation’s past. Such an approach is neither honest nor patriotic. It is authoritarian, and it would prepare students to follow rather than lead, to obey rather than think for themselves and to ignore all that might make America great.”

Credit…Nichelle Dailey for The New York TimesTop of FormBottom of Form

In this opinion piece, Charles M. Blow writes, “The Republicans behind those bills can bang on about how they are banning the teaching of critical race theory, but what they are really banning is the teaching of the horrific history of white supremacy and how it spawned the oppression of nonwhite people. The truth is that critical race theory is generally not taught in grade school, but that was never the point, in the same way that in the 2010s conservative lawmakers were never really concerned about what they called the threat of Shariah law in the United States when they introduced bills to ban it in American courts; what they wanted was to advance a racist, Islamophobic agenda. As a 2019 report born of a partnership between USA Today, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity pointed out, conservative lawmakers had drawn on the same basic rubric for these bills, a model perfected and touted by a network of far-right activists and organizations like the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded in the 1980s by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official ‘who pushes conspiracy theories alleging radical Muslims have infiltrated the government.’ The report detailed how ‘at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.’ Critical race theory is the new Shariah law, a boogeyman the right can use to activate and harness the racist anti-otherness that is endemic to American conservatism.”

Mr. Blow continues, “Republican lawmakers learned long ago that a surefire way to activate their base was to stoke fears of cultural change and inclusion. They are constantly looking for new issues to hitch this wagon to, and they believe that they have found one this cycle in critical race theory. Lawmakers have only just begun to push anti-C.R.T. bills. Politico reported on Wednesday, ‘Legislators in at least a dozen Republican-controlled statehouses — including in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio — plan to push dozens of bills in upcoming legislative sessions that aim to halt teachings about race and society and give parents more say in what’s discussed in classrooms.’ Republicans believe that these bills could propel what one called a ‘huge red wave’ in the midterms. But the right’s opportunistic, politically motivated, repression-rooted culture war crusades are by no means new; they are enduring, central features of American politics. You can see it in the recent rash of anti-trans bathroom bills, again largely focused on schools. One could argue that they are in part a backlash to the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage in 2015. … Critical race theory isn’t really what’s being targeted right now; it is progress. And for Republican lawmakers, the issue is just the latest acid tablet they can place on the tongues of the members of their base to keep them raging and spastic.”

This essay by Liat Olenick, an elementary school teacher, tells us, “Healthy democracies don’t hate their teachers. But the last year has made clear that powerful Americans do—on both sides of the political spectrum. And until this changes, our democracy, our children, and our futures are in grave danger. As an educator with ten years experience teaching in New York City, I have never felt so hopeless about the future of public schools in this country. The first week of 2022 was a nightmare for both teachers and students, but instead of offering support or investment in measures that could help schools survive this Covid surge, politicians and pundits attacked us for asking for minimal Covid protections. These attacks came after a particularly brutal year for education: Since 2020, teachers across the country have been threatened by fascists for teaching about race and human rights. Indeed, attacking teachers and schools over both Covid-19 and ‘critical race theory’ is a primary Republican organizing strategy. As of December of 2021, eight Republican-controlled states had passed anti-democratic laws restricting teachers’ ability to teach the truth about US history. In Tennessee, teachers who teach about the history of racial discrimination risk losing funding for their schools. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators passed a law that would result in multi-thousand-dollar fines for teachers who mention topics like race or equity. In Texas, teachers are being required to teach ‘both sides‘ of topics such as the Holocaust and slavery. And in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has introduced a bill that would empower parents to sue teachers for teaching the truth about US history. Meanwhile, just last week, a school board in Pennsylvania explicitly instructed teachers not to teach about the January 6 insurrection.”

She continues, “And now, a year after a fascist insurrection and nearly two years into a pandemic that has upended the education system, teachers like me are under renewed assault simply for asking for basic protections during a Covid surge that is sending record numbers of children to the hospital. In cities across the country, teachers have spent the last month asking for no more, and no less, than adequate testing, masking, and improved ventilation to prevent Covid from spreading in schools. With few exceptions, most districts have ignored our pleas, resulting in the Covid chaos we saw in schools last week. While the media has consistently skewed these requests as radical demands to shut down schools, in fact teachers like those in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia have resorted to asking for temporary remote schooling only after school districts refused to increase testing or improve ventilation and masking. What makes the chaos of the last week particularly frustrating is that it could have been avoided. Even though everyone knew an Omicron surge was coming, most school districts failed to ramp up testing, masking, or ventilation—all of which would have made it easier to keep kids in school safely. Instead, districts did little to prepare for this ultra-contagious phase of the pandemic; in New York City, educators and families were told by their new mayor—who is determined to keep schools ‘open’ but has so far refused to make them safe—that ‘swagger’ would protect them from Covid, a nonsensical and profoundly inhumane message for a city that has lost tens of thousands of people to the virus.”

She also writes, “What unites all these attacks are the right-wing, anti-union billionaires who benefit from them: The anti-CRT furor is a coordinated attack on the institution of public education and multiracial democracy, designed to justify defunding public schools and replacing them with segregated charter schools and voucher programs. The current attacks on teachers over Covid safety demands serve the very same purpose. The hedge fund managers and billionaires who have funded the charter school and school voucher movements for the past two decades are the same elites who stand to benefit from this latest raft of anti-teacher, anti-union vitriol. The failure to confront authoritarianism and the failure to defend public schools and educators from Covid is the same failure. When an institution is a cornerstone of democracy, you fight for it, you fund it, and you respect it. Democrats ignore attacks on teachers and schools to their peril. There is no democracy without public education. There is no public education without qualified, caring, and dedicated teachers. But teachers are worn down and a mass exodus is coming. This week, I’ve seen hundreds of social media posts from veteran teachers ready to quit the entire field. Every teacher I’ve spoken with is heartsick, furious, and exhausted. Public schools cannot survive if all the teachers quit. Which, again, may well be the goal. The question is whether politicians will wake up and realize that if they don’t stand for both democracy and educators now, soon there will be nothing left.”

Next we look at this article concerning teachers in Indiana pushing back against the Fascism. “A controversial Indiana bill that Republican lawmakers contend would increase transparency around school curricula has drawn opposition from dozens of teachers who testified Monday at the Statehouse that the legislation would censor classroom instruction and place unnecessary additional workloads on educators. The bill is one of several moving through the Indiana Legislature that seek to require all school curricula to be vetted by parent review committees and posted publicly online, in addition to banning schools’ ability to implement concepts like critical race theory. … Scott Miller, superintendent of the School City of Hammond, emphasized that addressing ‘sensitive topics’ in the classroom is necessary to help young people learn how to evaluate the truth. Attempts to keep students from learning about dissenting ideologies, he continued, ‘will only end up driving our youth straight to those ideologies.’ Miller said he believes the legislation stems from ‘fear that diverse perspectives on our country’s founding will lessen the strength and patriotism of our young people.’ ‘Addressing that fear by attempting to chill classroom discussion and silencing certain worldviews will only further divide our children,’ he said.”

The article also tells us, “Paul Farmer, a teacher in the Monroe County Community School Corporation, noted that the bill’s language requiring educators to separately post all classroom curricula online for parents — including lesson plans, worksheets, presentations and other materials — would be an additional workload for already stressed teachers. ‘Is this really going to decrease the number of teachers that go into education? The answer is yes, it will, because it’s going to scare them … because you can’t do it all,’ Farmer said. Laura Falk, an educator and diversity initiative specialist with the West Lafayette Community School Corporation, said she questioned the bill’s intentions amid recent nationwide discussions around ‘white fragility, and focus on the systemic racist policies that have been so deeply woven into our nation’s fabric.’ ‘When I look through my lens as a Black woman, I find many of these items are interesting, as I’ve experienced decades of discrimination and learned through my experience that there are certain groups that are still discriminated against today …,’ Falk said. ‘Our students deserve an honest and accurate education that enables them to learn from our past mistakes to help create a better future possible. Instead of focusing on possible distress that students might experience.’ “

According to the article, “Rep. Tony Cook, a former teacher and school superintendent who authored the House bill heard on Monday, echoed fellow Republican lawmakers, saying the legislation only strives to ensure educators ‘remain impartial in teaching curriculum’ and ‘ensure that students are free to express their own beliefs and viewpoints concerning curricular materials and educational activities without discrimination.’ He noted, too, that at least two forthcoming amendments to the bill are expected to be discussed in the education committee on Wednesday, the same day lawmakers are slated to hear additional testimony and vote on advancing the bill to the full House. A nearly identical proposal in the Senate, which Republican bill author Sen. Scott Baldwin maintained is intended to prevent certain ‘discriminatory concepts’ from being taught in classrooms, sparked more than eight hours of testimony last week. Baldwin’s exchange with a teacher during testimony on that bill sparked criticism after he said teachers must be ‘impartial’ when discussing Nazism and other political ideologies, although he has since walked back those statements.”

This article tells us the Fascist wave is already having a deleterious effect on teacher training. “A Florida school district canceled a professor’s civil rights history seminar for teachers, citing in part concerns over ‘critical race theory‘ — even though his lecture had nothing to do with the topic. J. Michael Butler, a history professor at Flagler College in St. Augustine, was scheduled to give a presentation Saturday to Osceola County School District teachers called ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement,’ which postulates that the civil rights movement preceded and post-dated Martin Luther King Jr. by decades. He said that he was shocked to learn why the seminar had been canceled through an email Wednesday but that he wasn’t surprised because educators feel increasingly intimidated over teaching about race. Less than 24 hours before Butler was informed of the cancellation, a state Senate committee advanced legislation Tuesday at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to block public schools and private businesses from making people feel ‘discomfort’ when they’re taught about race. DeSantis also wants to empower parents to sue schools that teach critical race theory. ‘There’s a climate of fear, an atmosphere created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that has blurred the lines between scared and opportunistic,’ Butler said in a phone interview. ‘The victims of this censorship are history and the truth,’ Butler said. ‘The end game is they’re going to make teaching civil rights into ‘critical race theory,’ and it’s not.’ “

This article on the same subject gives us more information. “Butler, the author of multiple books about Southern and civil rights history, including most recently ‘Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-1980,’ planned three presentations, covering historic milestones like the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the March on Washington, the integration of the University of Mississippi, and the Montgomery bus boycott. Seminar attendees would then work with a curriculum specialist to translate that history into grade-appropriate lesson plans and classroom resources. A seminar agenda noted that teachers would receive two children’s books to consider for classroom use: the elementary-targeted ‘White Socks Only‘ and, for middle schoolers, ‘The Watsons Go to Birmingham.’ Butler saw the training as part of his career-long mission to teach that ‘people who are marginalized have a history too, and it’s a very inspiring American story.’ But last Wednesday afternoon, Butler and his colleagues learned that Osceola school officials were forcing NCHE to cancel the seminar. The district, he was told, had instituted a review committee to investigate all training materials for the possibility that they might promote ‘critical race theory,’ and its curriculum director worried the seminar’s advance reading materials would raise ‘red flags.’ According to NCHE executive director Grace Leatherman, district officials were particularly concerned about the seminar’s use of primary source materials, including decades-old political cartoons about the Great Migration and Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that established segregation’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, as well as images of contemporary civil rights protests like Colin Kaepernick kneeling on a football field. Since the committee wouldn’t have time to review those materials before Saturday, the seminar was canceled and wouldn’t be rescheduled.”

The article tells us, “To Butler, this was not just the culmination of Florida’s year-long demonization of so-called critical race theory — however vaguely or inaccurately defined — but also the realization of something he warned his students about years ago. ‘When our former president used the term ‘fake news,’ I told my classes to be aware of what’s coming next, and that’s fake history,’ he told me. ‘If there’s a topic that can be censored today, that means there’s a precedent for the censoring of any topic in any state moving forward. And that should scare all teachers.’ On Thursday, after Osceola’s participating teachers were sent notice of the seminar’s cancellation, with no explanation, Butler took to Twitter to warn that this is ‘what the war against CRT in Florida is really about’: not keeping teachers from ‘going rogue,’ or protecting white children from feeling guilty, but ‘making it difficult — if not impossible — to teach any history that considers the Black experience,’ period. At the broadest level, the seminar was yet another victim of the nationwide right-wing crusade against CRT. In vying to emerge as the face of that fight, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has launched numerous attacks against CRT, or related targets, over the last half-year. These have included policies equating teaching ‘that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems’ with Holocaust denialism; bans on schools using The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ or pedagogical concepts like ‘culturally responsive instruction’; requirements that civics classes teach ‘portraits in patriotism‘; and two bills currently under consideration to establish an annual ‘Victims of Communism Day,’ mandating that schools observe the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution to teach about communist dictators, and DeSantis’s ‘Stop W.O.K.E. Act,’ which would empower private citizens to sue school districts they believe are teaching CRT.”

According to the article, “Butler says he has heard from numerous Florida public school history teachers who say their lessons are being scrutinized to see whether they run afoul of the DeSantis administration’s new laws and policies. One teacher, Butler relayed, ordered photocopies of a handout for a lesson about the infamous Birmingham church bombing of 1963, only to have her request trigger a phone call from district authorities to her principal, asking what was going on.” In Dunedin High School in central Florida’s Pinellas County, history teacher Brandt Robinson has been the target of one parent’s attacks for months. First, a student’s mother accused him at a July school board meeting of promoting ‘Marxist indoctrination of our youth,’ because he’d urged his school board to stand firm against the growing attacks on CRT. Then, after her son briefly enrolled in, and then dropped, Robinson’s elective African American history class last August, the mother lodged multiple formal complaints about his curriculum. Specifically, she charged that Robinson’s use of historian Nell Irvin Painter’s 2006 book ‘Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present‘ must mean that Robinson was violating Florida’s new ban on teaching materials from the ‘1619 Project’ — even though Painter’s book was published 13 years before the Times series.” These would-be Brown Shirts are stupid as well as Fascist.”

This article tells us the Fascist governor of Virginia wants to establish a “tip line” for would-be informants to turn teachers in to the state thugs. “Virginia’s new Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has set up a tip line for the parents of children being taught at schools in the state, to report any teachers that teach ‘divisive’ subjects. The tip line is specifically for parents to come forward and report any state schools they believe to be ‘behaving objectionably’.  ‘We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,’ Youngkin said. ‘Help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.’ “

This article tells us one of his would-be Brown Shirts is taking advantage of it. “In a move to prevent ‘wokeness’ from infiltrating her children’s upbringing, a Short Pump mother used the tip line Gov. Youngkin to alert the administration of the upcoming film ‘A Journal for Jordan,’ sources confirmed Wednesday. According to sources, the tip line, which was implemented by Youngkin as a means to alert the administration to divisive practices and critical race theory being taught in school, was used on Wednesday morning by a frantic West End resident regarding the upcoming film. ‘This film is nothing more than an attempt from the Hollywood elites to indoctrinate our children with racist propaganda,’ Susan Wyndham, a 49-year-old mother of two, explained in an interview, adding that other concerned parents should call the tip line to ensure the Denzel Washington film should not be used to expose such poisonous media in public schools. ‘Regardless of whether or not this material is going to find its way into our youth’s social studies classes, I have the constitutional right to express my opinion that it should be left out of the school curriculum. Just look at the color — I mean, characters, in this film, that the media is exploiting to maintain its narrative. The liberals may have taken over our beloved Monument Avenue, but we have to send the message that they can’t take over our schools.’ At press time, Wyndham was reportedly making follow-up calls to the tip line to request confirmation that the film had been removed from any upcoming educational courses and had requested schools show the 1915 film ‘Birth Of A Nation’ in its place.” Presumably she would like to attend a showing and wear her KKK robes to the event.

This article tells us not even Pulitzer Prize-winning books are safe from the Fascist book banners. “A Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust has been banned by a Tennessee school district, prompting blowback from critics who say it’s essential to teach children about the genocide. The 10-member McMinn County School Board voted unanimously earlier this month to remove Maus from its curriculum and replace it with an alternative, which hadn’t yet been decided at the time of the vote. ‘We are here because some people objected to the words and the graphics used in the book,’ board member Rob Shamblin said during the meeting, according to the minutes posted on the school board’s website. News of the Jan. 10 meeting trickled out this week as the world was preparing to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945. ‘Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors,’ the U.S. Holocaust Museum said in a series of tweets. ‘Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.’ Maus tells the story of author Art Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor, and it depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman said this week that the school board seemed to have a ‘myopic’ focus on potentially offensive words and limited nudity in the book, and that the decision smacked of something more sinister. ‘It has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it,’ Spiegelman said on CNN. ‘I think of it as a harbinger of things to come.’ At issue are ‘eight curse words’ and an image of a nude woman, according to McMinn County Schools director Lee Parkinson. The board discussed censoring the language and imagery it deemed inappropriate, but ultimately decided to discard the novel outright. Jonathan Pierce, the board member who initiated the vote to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, said during the meeting that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, but this was not the book to do it.”

The article continues, ” ‘Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history … that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It’s not acceptable today,’ Pierce said, according to the meeting minutes. ‘[But] the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies.’ There’s been growing momentum recently among some Republican leaders to ban certain books in schools, particularly those dealing with issues of race and LGBTQ identity. According to the American Library Association, the number of attempts to ban school library books was 67% higher last September than in the same month the year before. This isn’t the first time Maus has faced a ban. Russia pulled the graphic novel from bookstores in 2015 over the swastika depicted prominently on its cover, because the country was trying eliminate depictions of the symbol as it commemorated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.”

Here are the guidelines teachers will be forced to adhere to in Osceola County, Florida:

As Kevin Levin points out, “If you follow this it is impossible to accurately teach the history of the Jim Crow era. The laws passed during this era embedded white supremacy in America to uphold white supremacy.”

This article tells us attacking teachers is nothing new. “The war on teachers is back. This week, in Virginia, new Gov. Glenn Youngkin set up a ‘tip line‘ to report teachers who teach ‘divisive’ ideas. And in Florida, lawmakers proposed a bill to install cameras in classrooms to monitor supposedly subversive teaching. That builds on a bill called the ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ introduced late last year and sponsored by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which would allow parents to sue schools for teaching so-called critical race theory. It’s tempting to see these efforts as merely ridiculous, and pranksters immediately flooded Youngkin’s ‘tip line’ with knock-knock jokes and fake tips about ‘divisive’ teaching at Hogwarts. But, as one Virginia teacher reflected, Youngkin’s tactics represented a very serious ‘threat to education.’ That teacher added: ‘You want to know what I teach, just ask.’ For a full century now, conservative politicians have attacked teachers to score easy political points. This, despite the fact that teachers, as a group, tend to consider themselves ‘moderate’ (43 percent) or even ‘conservative‘ (27 percent), and their political views have long tended to match those of their local communities. Nevertheless, scare tactics about subversive teachers have been too tempting for politicians to resist. But although targeting teachers might score a short-term payoff at the ballot box, those attacks have always harmed public schools by driving teachers away. In the first round of our modern educational culture wars, for example, lawmakers in Kentucky considered a bill to eliminate suspect teachers from their public schools. Their 1922 bill would have banned teaching evolution as well as atheism or ‘agnosticism.’ Casting a wide net, the bill outlawed the teaching of any idea that might ‘weaken or undermine the religious faith of the pupils’ in public schools. In addition, if any alert citizens suspected an educator of surreptitiously teaching science, they were enjoined to report the teacher, who would be interrogated within five days by the school board. If the school board considered them guilty, the teacher would be fired. The bill failed to pass, but only because a few conservative lawmakers received assurances from the president of the state’s flagship university that teaching evolution would be banned in practice, even without the new law.”

The article continues, “In the 1930s, too, politicians were quick to accuse teachers of subversive schemes. In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed a law to force teachers in the public schools of D.C. to abjure any mention of communism, either inside or even outside of the classroom. Teachers were required to swear their innocence each time they picked up their paychecks. The law’s sponsor, Texas Democrat Thomas Blanton, even sent questionnaires to D.C. teachers, asking them if they believed in God or belonged to a union. In this case, the response of teachers’ defenders was swift and successful. Critics pointed out that schoolchildren would not be allowed to learn anything about global current events, the Soviet Union, or even the course of the First World War if the law were enforced. Due to the intense criticism, the law was repealed in 1937. Blanton’s law’s defeat did not deter teacher bashing for long. After World War II, political attacks on teachers only grew more intense. In 1948, for example, the House Committee on Un-American Activities published a quick guide to community spying on local teachers. The committee’s conclusion—the hundredth ‘thing’ it wanted every right-thinking citizen to know—was that the solution to communist subversion was vigilante action. Every American, the committee concluded, must ‘work in your own community’ to unearth hidden communism, ‘whether in the school system or anywhere else.’ “

It also tells us, “As Augustin Rudd, a right-wing activist from the American Legion, had warned for years, spying on teachers and classrooms required a trained eye. It was easy to miss the use of ‘weasel words,’ meant to awaken American children to the problems in American history and society. Subversive teaching, he warned, was often ‘very subtle.’ Teachers might seem to be discussing innocuous historical subjects such as the conflicts between rich and poor, Black and white. In practice, however, such sneaky teaching left children feeling discomfort about the heroic histories they had been told. The solution, for this legionnaire, lay in relentless surveillance. He called on every post of the legion to ‘investigate the school situation on its own account.’ Taken as a whole, the results were tragic. Back then, unrestrained spying on teachers, along with accusations of anti-American sentiment, drove teachers out of the profession and out of schools. Some of the cases made headlines, but more often the results were only visible in a desperate shortage of teachers willing to endure the abuse. The high-profile cases set the pattern. In New York City, for instance, teachers suspected of communist affiliations were driven out of their jobs in the 1940s and 1950s. Most famously, Minnie Gertrude, a 17-year classroom veteran, killed herself just before Christmas in 1948 after enduring interrogation by a congressional committee about her political beliefs. In 1950, New York City suspended eight teachers, then, in 1951, fired eight more. The investigations deprived the district of some of its best teachers. To give just one example, in 1952 teacher Mildred Flacks had been teaching for 19 years. Her annual evaluation by her principal included the usual glowing praise. ‘I have long been convinced,’ the principal told Flacks in 1952, ‘that your sincere and effective work, coupled with your skill in the newer methods of elementary education, have been in large measure responsible for the excellence of our elementary department.’ Less than a month later, Flacks was dismissed, victim to the political ambitions of school superintendent William Jansen. Jansen had promised to investigate his schools and purge any suspect teachers, and Flacks found herself in the crosshairs of the hunt.”

The article concludes, “Today’s attacks on teachers are just as misguided and just as destructive. Politicians who set up ‘tip lines’ and surveillance plans for teachers are making the job less attractive than ever. Recent surveys have found that about 1 in every 4 teachers is considering quitting, based on stresses from the pandemic and political pressure. Just like in the 20^th century, those teachers represent a precious and irreplaceable community resource; they make up the expertise and experience that make public education possible. Calling on citizens to snoop on, and report, their children’s teachers is a venerable American tradition; it is also destructive to the goals of public education. Desperate school leaders are already taking desperate measures to find teachers—including calling in the National Guard—yet politicians are willing to make the problem worse, in order to score points in the ongoing war over America’s public schools.”