Teachers and students under assault.
Black students targeted for being "disorderly."
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The Department of Justice is acting to investigate right-wing and racist threats - often violent - against teachers and boards of education.
The excuse for the attacks on educators is the issue of mask mandates and what the wing-nuts have imagined Critical Race Theory to be.
Some white parents who have never stepped foot in a classroom let alone made inquiry into what the curriculum looks like, have been ginned up by fascist organizers, often demanding the banning of history instruction that isn’t even taking place.
A resolution banning Critical Race Theory instruction in grades K-12 passed the Alabama State School Board on a 7 to 2 vote.
Nothing like Critical Race Theory exists in Alabama schools.
Spencer Miller representing Urban Conservatives of America spoke in favor of the resolution.
“I approve of your resolution, and I hope that you will push it through,” Miller said. “I know what they are pushing in public schools; and they want to push it into every state in this country – the Critical Race Theory that evolved from the teaching of Karl Marx dividing people into oppressed and oppressors.”
Right-wing attacks on teachers is nothing new.
I was once the target of a right-wing group, funded by the DeVos family, for nothing more than being an activist local union president. All my work emails and personnel file were subject to FOIA demands.
Of course nothing came of it. My work emails consisted primarily of supply orders and my work performance reviews and evaluations were all excellent.
Support is broad for the DOJ investigation of threats against educators for mask mandates and for teaching about racial justice.
Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association support it as do civil rights organizations like the NACCP.
The Justice Department’s Oct. 4 announcement of its plans came a few days after the National School Boards Association asked the feds to take action to protect its members from intimidation, harassment and violent threats.
The Association compared the attacks to domestic terrorism.
Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley pushed back on the the DOJ announcement In a Senate hearing, Hawley told Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco that the president was “weaponizing the federal bureaucracy” and compared the situation to the “Red Scare” under Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
This is the extremist Hawley using the Big Lie to turn history on its head. No wonder he doesn’t want Critical Race Theory taught in schools.
Fact mean nothing to the Missouri senator. His view of teaching history is for it to hide more than it reveals.
It was during the McCarthy era that many progressive and communist teachers were fired for their Left political associations and for their refusal to sign so-called loyalty oaths.
While the Department of Justice is right to go after violent opponents of mask mandates and threats by opponents of teaching the history of U.S. racial injustice (and let’s hope they really do go after them), there is something else that has been going on in many schools.
It has not received the attention it deserves.
Around the country, students and political activists have been in a battle against school administrators who are criminalizing common school behaviors and using rules against “defiance” to make those alleged misbehavior law enforcement issues.
Now a federal judge has sided with South Carolina students who argued that broadly written state laws against “disorderly conduct” and “disturbing schools” allowed police to arrest and cite students for routine misbehaviors.
The case was first brought by Niya Kenny, a South Carolina student who was arrested under the state’s broad “disturbing schools” law in 2015 after she recorded her classmate’s violent arrest during math class at Spring Valley High School in Richland County, S.C.
A school-based sheriff’s deputy dragged her classmate from her desk after he was called to the classroom when she refused to surrender her cell phone to a teacher, and Kenny loudly told him to stop. Students’ cell phone video of the incident spread quickly online, kicking off a conversation about overly punitive school discipline.
“I was the only one who was really vocal about the situation, the only one,” Kenny told Education Week in a 2017 interview. “Two other grown men were in the class, and I was the only one who was vocal, protesting the situation.”
The fight to decriminalize student misbehaviors is making gains nationally. It may prevent many students from having a criminal record for what once was a trip to the principal’s office.
In 2013, Texas legislators amended state law to prohibit school-based student citations for things like chewing gum and talking back to teachers.
Of course, a majority of students who have been victims of this criminalizing practice in the past were Black and Brown.
The fact that this was common practice means that their lives were forever changed, impacting future education opportunities and work.
No judge can undo the effect of what has already taken place.