Teaching on Eggshells
A report recently released by the RAND Corporation based on a Spring 2022 American Instructional Resources Survey, documents how the rightwing Republican war against history is impacting on teachers. Under pressure from state legislatures, school and district leaders, parents and community members, teachers are self-censoring and abandoning topics that can vaguely be perceived of as controversial in anyway. Everyone feels they can tell them what to teach, what not to teach, and can limit what children are allowed to learn.
The war against teaching has escalated as Republican politicians are using opposition to teaching about racism in American society, gender biases, and family and identity differences, to rally conservative white voters into a culture war against liberals and liberal ideas like teaching the truth, tolerance, and respect for diversity.
In Spring 2022, one in every three public school teachers in the United States, more than 1 million teachers, were working in states where there are restrictions on how teachers can address race or gender in the classroom. In interviews and on questionnaires, teachers reported that it is increasingly difficult to engage students in learning, support students’ critical thinking skills, and develop students’ ability to engage in perspective taking and empathy building. One-fourth of teachers report not even knowing if they were subject to restrictions on how they can address topics related to race or gender and one-fourth reported that limitations in place placed have influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices. PEN America found that state legislators were accelerating the introduction of restrictions and that bills were increasingly punitive and cast a wider net.
Some of the worst states are Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. The Florida state Board of Education prohibits schools from teaching about critical race theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project and the legislature passed a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that prohibits instruction about “sexual orientation or gender identity” in grades K–3 and to students in grades 4–12 in a manner that is “not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” A Kentucky law requires that instruction be consistent with the notion that “defining racial disparities solely on the legacy of [slavery] is destructive to the unification of our nation” and that “any instruction . . . on current, controversial topics related to public policy or social affairs” be “relevant, objective, nondiscriminatory, and respectful to the differing perspectives of students. ” Mississippi “bars public K–12 schools and colleges from compelling students to affirm or adopt certain ideas related to race, sex, or other characteristics. ” Tennessee prohibits public schools from promoting certain concepts, such as the notion that the United States is “fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist,” or ideas about privilege and unconscious bias. Texas “prohibits compelling a teacher . . . to discuss a widely debated and controversial issue of public policy or social affairs but requires a teacher who chooses to do so to explore the issue objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”
According to one middle school teacher, “We were told not to teach critical race theory — no one was. The past two years have made me nervous about teaching Frederick Douglass because I don’t think the people in my community know the difference between teaching [Black] history and teaching critical race theory.” A special teacher reported, “I am extremely cautious. Not because of my school district but because of the parents and their social media reactions. They can ruin a teacher’s reputation in a single post.” A high school science teacher told interviewers, “We work in an atmosphere of fear and paranoia to even teach the content contained in our standards.” A math teacher explained that there were “constant reminders at department and staff meetings about the vicious social media posts on a community Facebook page and how it could affect our school’s public image and ultimately our employment.”
The Washington Post interviewed teachers about some of the topics they felt intimidated into dropping from the curriculum. Greg Wickenkamp, an eighth-grade social studies in Iowa, sought clarification from the School District about what he could say in class, after a local politician accused him of teaching children critical race theory. In a Zoom meeting, Wickenkamp asked the District Superintendent if it was okay to say in class that “slavery was wrong,” since that could be construed as his opinion rather than a fact. The superintendent refused to take a position, insisting “I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say.”
A veteran North Carolina social studies teacher had shown students excerpts from Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident for fourteen years. In his journal, Columbus discussed enslaving the indigenous people of the New World. Recently a white parent complained that reading this material made her son feel guilty and it should be dropped from the coursework. The teacher felt they with the material expunged, students “missed the truth about exploration; they missed the whole lesson on colonization.”
A Virginia statistic teacher had her students analyze a data set exploring the racial breakdown of people stopped, frisked, and arrested under New York City’s stop-and-frisk program. The next summer at a staff development session, the teacher and her colleagues were told that they were “under a microscope” and needed to be careful about what they taught. When the teacher spoke with district officials, she was told, “she should stop teaching her lesson on the police use of force.” The teacher has stopped using a statistical study that found higher callback rates for job applicants with traditionally White, as opposed to Black, names.
An Arkansas high school English teacher was told by her supervisor to stop using excerpts from an essay by Mary Wollstonecraft because the author criticized the way men at the end of the 18th century dismissed the ability of women. The same school district also dropped The Diary of a Young Girl, the story of Anne Frank, from its reading list because it was considered “overly dark and heavy.” In a Missouri school district, white parents complained that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men should be dropped from the reading list because they made white people look bad.
With the escalating rightwing culture war on teaching the truth about the American past, teachers are teaching on eggshells.
