Laws prohibiting the teaching of CRT are an overreaction, but that is what we have been pushed to. Parents will not allow their children to be taught divisive and corrosive Marxist theory. If they have to use a hammer to resolve the problem, they will.
When 10 Black shoppers were killed at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, allegedly by a white 18-year-old with a history of racist writings, history teacher Mary McIntosh didn’t know how to talk about it with her high schoolers in Memphis, Tenn.
Tennessee is one of 19 states with laws or rules designed to regulate how racism and issues of race are discussed in the classroom. The Buffalo shooting was a stark example of a national news event that McIntosh says she struggled to address with students, even while teaching to a predominantly Black and brown student body.
Current events are frequently discussed in history classes. I’d be curious how this teacher would have discussed this tragedy if the anti-CRT were not passed and how the teacher did discuss it. I’m not certain why the teacher would choose to discuss this isolated crime as opposed to broader trends in crime. Young Black men are shot by young Black men much more frequently than they are shot by the police or racist young White men. That would be a valuable discussion.
“The Tennessee law does indeed have a big impact on how I can plan to teach with honesty and integrity,” she says.
The law, passed in May 2021, says it permits “impartial” discussions of the “controversial aspects of history” and “the historical oppression of a particular group of people.” But, teachers may not teach “resentment” of “a class of people” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.” Students, parents, or employees of a school can file complaints about teachers who violate the law. Schools found to have violated the law stand to lose 2% of their state funds or $1 million, whichever is less, for each violation.
It isn’t clear how a teacher could be confused by the clear instruction to not teach racism or racial resentment. Implicit racism and microaggressions usually sound like a person can’t find any actual racism, so has to go to the sub-text. It’s heresy to suggest that teachers could be presenting implicitly racist lessons to students, but that seems to be what the teachers are afraid they are doing.
In states from Colorado to Iowa, some bills required teachers to post their syllabi and all of their class readings online—opening them to challenges from parents, or activists who might agree with their decisions.
There is plenty of evidence that some teachers view parents as un-evolved genetic throwbacks who don’t know what’s best for their children. To school administrators, it is not controversial to suggest that a child’s gender identity should be embraced and is information that should be withheld from parents. When educators withhold information from parents, my default position is that the administrators are the bad guys.
My first year teaching, a student’s parent challenged my approach to teaching Physics. He taught Physics in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and had a list of questions. We went head-to-head on each issue. He was a reasonable guy and, by the end of the meeting, offered to share his worksheets, labs and lab equipment with me. None of it was very good, but I appreciated the gesture. I went into the meeting thinking I was doing things properly, but open to any suggestions.
One Florida bill even proposed installing video cameras in classrooms.
This proposal is fraught with issues, but isn’t necessarily bad for teachers. When police officers got body-cams, they were initially against the idea, but found that police brutality complaints dropped by 90%. Student privacy is a concern. Also, the purpose of the cameras would need to be well established. A classroom camera would not be effective for distance learning. If the teacher had unlimited access to the video, it could be useful for test security or for disciplinary purposes.
Since Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act, which aims to regulate how schools talk about race, in April, Matthew Bunch, who teaches advanced placement U.S. government in Miami Dade County, says he’s “dreading” teaching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” next year because it addresses citizens’ right to challenge the government if they feel like their rights are being violated. “I don’t know how, without trampling on one of those landmines, we can actually talk about the document and what it means and what it influences.”
Mr. Bunch has to put some thought into his racial biases and examine his own heart for implicit racism. That’s the hard thing. Most teachers are regular people who aren’t particularly political. Now that everything is political, that is changing. It was no secret that I declined to join the union. For one thing, I didn’t attend union meetings. I was invited to, but didn’t feel it was appropriate. The local union leadership was generally very good to me. My feelings were known, but I didn’t challenge or threaten them.
At North Royalton, about 10% of the teachers were big Trump supporters and another 30% were generally conservative, however, they were all cautious about revealing that. Since I was demonstrably conservative, they would talk to me. About 5% were Leftist of the Woke variety, 20% were intelligent, classic Liberals, with the rest of the staff voted Democrat because they didn’t think about i
Mr. Bunch was not expecting any push-back from his reflexive Leftism. I can see where that would not be comfortable. When Liberals talk about change being good and inevitable, they don’t mean for themselves.
