Educators Are Still Caught in the Culture War Crossfire
"The narrative of education right now has been hijacked by one side of the story"
Warning Bell is a new newsletter focused on the incredible stress being put on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves. My name is Stephen Noonoo—I’m a longtime education journalist and editor for Edutopia, EdSurge, THE Journal and elsewhere.
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Amanda Jones was an unwitting participant in the education culture wars.
Named School Library Journal’s 2021 School Librarian of the Year, Jones spoke up at a board meeting last year in her Louisiana parish decrying censorship and book bans. Soon after, she became the target of a harassment campaign from conservative groups who trolled her online and in person, calling her unspeakable names.
“For 22 years, I've been an educator at the same middle school that I attended as a child. I live in a very small town, two red lights, everyone knows everyone,” Jones said at an Education Writers Association panel on the chilling effects of the culture wars that I attended earlier this month.
After that board meeting, though, everything changed.
“Just for being a librarian, I’ve been called a pedophile and a groomer. I haven’t done anything differently in 22 years… From speaking with librarians across the country, there’s just this hatred and this idea that every school librarian out there is somehow pedaling porn to children.”
The attacks, she added, were motivated by a desire to silence her voice, and discourage others from speaking out. The harassment escalated and Jones said she was called a pervert at her daughter’s school play. So she decided to take legal action and sue her attackers. She’s lost some initial rulings but litigation is ongoing.
Jones had no interest in centering herself in the culture wars embroiling schools through book bans, identity politics, and attacks on trans students. As with many other educators, it found her anyway.
At this point, it’s hard to imagine anyone on earth more sick of the culture wars than teachers. Forget the ones who have already been fired or resigned due to the never ending headaches that come with hanging inclusive flags or reading books on race or equity—thanks to cautionary tales like Jones’, educators are now afraid to engage with parents and school boards about topics that weren’t particularly controversial a few years ago.
Of course, that was before a cynical right-wing outrage machine began latching on to teachers and curriculum as easy targets in a quest to score political points by weaponizing children.
“The narrative of education right now has been hijacked by one side of the story,” said another panelist, Michelle Cottrell-Williams, an equity specialist for Fairfax Public Schools and the 2018 Virginia Teacher of the Year.
To be fair, teachers have lost their jobs over sharing any number of opinions across the political spectrum. A Washington Post analysis found just as many teachers had been fired for sharing conservative views as those with liberal or progressive ones. In general, any kind of political speech by public servants is frowned upon and educators get no special pass. (Of course, several speakers and journalists at the EWA panel noted that recognizing students’ identities or telling them that those identities matter is not political speech so much as affirming their basic human rights.)
Another panelist, Heather Harding, jumped in to the culture war fray more willingly. Harding is a former educator who’s now the executive director for the Campaign for Our Shared Future, an advocacy nonprofit that fights culture war attacks in schools through community building.
“This is not about teaching and learning or educating young people,” Harding said about attacks on schools. “This is about motivating and scaring families that their educators are not on their side.”
She also pointed out something that teachers (and the rest of us) likely know, but which is all too easy to forget: All this tedious drama is fabricated by a small, vocal minority. In fact, most parents actually like what schools are doing. Last year, an American Federation of Teachers survey found 74 percent of parents thought teachers were generally doing a good job sticking to an appropriate curriculum- and skills-based education. Just 21 percent thought teachers were pushing a “woke” agenda.
Of course, no culture war panel would be complete without hearing from the other side—that is people who benefit from or at least tolerate this kind of extreme and divisive rhetoric. That thankless job was rather ably taken up by Robert Pondiscio a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—which the New York Times has described as a “center-right think tank,” whatever that means. Pondiscio, to his credit, has a background in both K-12 education and journalism and was smart enough to equivocate whenever possible to keep the conversation moving and sound somewhat reasonable given the background and experiences of his co-panelists.
What did that look like? Well, when it came to book bans, he mentioned there’s technically no such thing as a “banned book,” since kids and parents can get them elsewhere even when they’re taken off school library shelves. Many banned books are sold at Barnes & Noble, and if the books were really banned booksellers would go to jail, he said. Though there was no mention or followup on Florida school book bans that threaten felony convictions and $5,000 fines for teachers displaying books that don’t meet the state’s rather ambiguous guidelines. (To be fair, I didn’t catch it in the moment either.)
I don’t particularly want to pick on Pondiscio, because there was plenty of lively real-time pushback by the educators and advocates in the room, and I’d rather let them do the talking. But I suppose people like him get paid the big bucks to sit on panels and say things like well, actually there’s no such thing as a banned book, and the following, which came in response to a question from moderator Nicole Carr of ProPublica about the idea of politicizing public education. I want to quote it in full because I think it’s a good insight into how “center-right” pundits and intellectuals rationalize and downplay the ugliness of the culture wars.
The idea that somehow the culture war has found schools is remarkable to me. This is what schools do. This is what schools have always done. They are literally institutions that we have built for cultural transmission, which is arguing over it. And it’s fine. I mean, we should be arguing about this. We should do it civilly, obviously, and no one should feel unsafe. But the idea that somehow there should be this kind of culture war free zone called the school just betrays the whole purpose of the institution.
The bar is low but you’ll notice he stops short of saying culture war attacks on teachers are a good thing; yet he also argues that politicized discussions of what they do in the classroom are healthy for schools because that’s what schools are for. They’re places to…talk about things. (Again, technically true, but if everyone was calmly sitting around discussing it like a segment on Meet the Press I doubt there’d be much of an issue.)
Instead of talking about a right-wing hijacking of the school narrative as some panelists did, Pondiscio added that the explosive growth of such discussions today are a natural result of parents peering into the “black box” of classroom life during pandemic remote learning. It’s at this point that Amanda Jones cut in to talk about her experiences being called a pervert and groomer for the first time in her life. As if to say, sure, tensions are running high after the pandemic, but c’mon.
Heather Harding, who I should add was also trained as a journalist, had a response as well, and it sums up a general sentiment I’ve seen in education these days. It’s certainly worth reading and reflecting on, considering this is unlikely to be the last time we hear about educators being vilified for simply doing their jobs.
Educators are public servants. And the part of this that’s important is that public education is a political act, and we will have to manage culture. But if we allow a political strategy to undermine that trust over and over and over again, none of us will be better for it.
This, I think, is really animated by Amanda’s…story. She’s telling a story about how she has approached opening young people up to great literature for the last 22 years. People trusted her in her small town. And now that is not possible. It is not the pandemic.
Yes, people are disgruntled because they may have seen things that they didn’t know about in a Zoom classroom, but this is an orchestrated attempt to scare people into thinking that teachers and educators mean them harm. I think we really need to understand what’s happening there, because what we need to get back to is the place where you bring your child to the kindergarten reading room and they sit down. It might be one of their first opportunities to meet someone of difference.
The relationships that have meant the most for me and my children have been [where I was] working side by side with an educator, working through disagreements around that conflict, collaborating. Not yelling at them, threatening them. I mean, there’s something different happening here. And I think that it’s really, really important to uncover.
Show & Tell
Interesting discussion on how those in education see the difference between the terms teacher and educator, for all who’ve wondered. (Twitter)
Independent Reading
How a Scratch-Off Lottery Ticket Helped Me Become a Homeowner at 22. Something told me she was going to be a teacher before I even clicked the link. She was an elementary paraprofessional, actually, earning $9/hour while studying for a bachelor’s degree—a job she had to quit for a better-paying gig at a call center to even qualify for a mortgage after winning a $50k jackpot. Now she earns a living from making viral TikToks. This is the new American dream. (New York Times)
How a New Jersey school board meeting devolved into attacks and misinformation after right-wing activists showed up to protest climate change being taught in schools. Before speaking, one teacher was “so nervous she visibly shook.” (Mother Jones)
A Dallas-area district, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, has seen a 40 percent increase in teacher resignations fueled by burnout, low pay and culture war attacks. One award-winning teacher who identifies as queer left the district after a brouhaha that started when she gave a student a book featuring a cross-dressing character. Almost a quarter of the district’s teachers have complained about the school board. (NBC News)
Nearly one-fourth of SFUSD teachers not fully credentialed, grand jury finds (SF Chronicle)