Our guest author is Julie Vogtman, Senior Director of Employment Quality, National Women’s Law Center.
Did you know that Saturday, October 5, was World Teachers’ Day? According to UNESCO, one of the organizers of the day, this year’s theme is “Valuing the voices of teachers: towards a new social contract for education”, whose objective is to “underline the urgency of convening and addressing the voices of teachers to address their challenges” and “most importantly, recognize and benefit from the expert knowledge and contributions they bring to education.”
This is a vital mission, one that deserves much more than a day to honor it. And it’s particularly important right now, when teachers in many U.S. school districts feel that “the expertise and contributions they bring to education” are being ignored more than ever. When at least 18 states have enacted laws restricting K-12 public school teachers’ instruction on issues related to race, gender, sexuality and other so-called “divisive concepts”—and PEN America has documented more than 10,000 cases of book bans in Solo in the 2023-24 school year: Many teachers across the country lack the autonomy and respect for their profession that they desire and deserve.
At the National Women’s Law Center we wanted to know more about what teachers are experiencing in states where these book restrictions and bans are in place, so we asked them. In recent interviews conducted by the Topos Partnership with 25 teachers from Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and several other states, teachers described a loss of agency as their expertise is ignored in favor of “canned curricula” and “scripts.” ”. —their voices were drowned out by a small but vocal group of extremist parents and policymakers. As one rural high school teacher in Wisconsin explained, when educators don’t have the flexibility to adapt or deviate from a strict curriculum, “we have to follow it even if the kids don’t care at all. That’s why it’s more difficult to take advantage of students’ interest.”
Carla*, who has twice been honored as Teacher of the Year in her Florida region during her 32-year career, expressed similar sentiments: “Everything has to be examined,” she told us, as fatigue set in as she reflected on the changes in the situation of your state. policies in the last six years. “The fact that I have to think about what I can and can’t discuss. . .I have to abstain. . . “I can’t share.” And he highlighted the erroneous rationale behind growing censorship policies and practices: “Because we don’t indoctrinate. All we want to do is teach.”
Carla’s frustration is shared by many teachers, who told us how restrictions seemingly intended to prevent “indoctrination” actually prevent accurate and inclusive instruction. In many of the schools where the educators we spoke to teach, a wide variety of topics have been considered “controversial” or “divisive,” including, as one North Carolina teacher explained, “that racism exists. . . (and) it is a problem.” A Wisconsin special education teacher told us how one of her colleagues, an eighth-grade American history teacher, has to be “very careful when talking about civil rights issues or women’s rights issues” and avoid answering questions that might “go too deep into some of the topics that are part of . . . our history.” And one teacher in Florida lamented that topics from slavery to LGBTQIA+ identity are essentially off-limits, “so our kids have a one-sided view of things because we’re not allowed to expand on what they’re already seeing.” in their environments. “We can’t open their minds to things because we’re not allowed to.”
In short, teachers conveyed that the result of extremist restrictions is a climate of fear, censorship, and exclusion—a climate that alienates LGBTQIA+ students and students of color, deprives children of genuine and inclusive learning opportunities, and makes it difficult for teachers can learn. stay in the jobs they love. Allowing politicians, rather than professional educators, to dictate classroom instruction creates an environment in which, in the words of one elementary school teacher in Florida, “everyone says the same thing: ‘I don’t know how much longer I can do this. . . like this.’ . . . We all love what we do, but in the current climate and the way it’s going. . . and tying the teachers’ hands, no one wants to be in a job where they feel like they have no freedom. “Nobody wants to feel like that.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We know that the restrictions that are silencing our teachers are driven by attempts to organize a small, unrepresentative and extremist group of parents in ways that have undermined trust and collaboration between educators and parents generally and obscured their common interests. The truth is that most parents oppose book bans and support teaching about the history of slavery, segregation and racism in public schools, and oppose state legislators restricting the topics that Teachers and students discuss in the classroom.
And when policymakers and administrators listen to teachers and trust their experience, “there can be happy, very happy stories,” as Allison, who has had a 30-year teaching career in North Carolina, shared. “We started thinking about institutional racism in our school, (and) one of my students says, ‘Why am I the only black kid in AP chemistry?’ And we thought, ‘Good question!’ And then we went back and looked.” Allison explained how, by addressing implicit bias in ways that don’t result in defensiveness, listening to children’s experiences, and recruiting students themselves to help change the school’s culture and its assumptions based on race, a department of Equity Issues in its The county led to the transformation of AP courses from a “class for white kids” to a more diverse group. “So all of these things that are problematic can be changed if someone in senior management says, ‘This matters to us,’ and then there’s support to move forward.”
Allison’s story, and many other stories we hear, make clear that when we respect teachers, when we respect their expertise and their integral role in our communities, we all benefit. As one Florida teacher concluded: “If (children’s) teachers feel safe, their teachers feel valued, their teachers feel motivated, then that will carry over into the classroom because they will feel more confident that they can teach what they want to teach, that they can teach however they want and that will provide a better quality education for their children.” At NWLC, we are inspired by teachers’ dedication to children and an honest, inclusive education. And we are committed to working with them, along with parents and community members, to build schools where every child is free to read and learn, and every teacher is free to tell the truth; schools where both students and teachers feel safe, valued and welcome to share their experiences and identities, without fear.
To hear more from teachers, we hope you’ll read our report, “I Don’t Know How Much Longer I Can Do This: Teachers’ Experiences Amid Attacks on Public Education.”
*Teacher names have been changed to protect their privacy.
