Schools are not a site of resistance

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Children Live in Red States Too

This post probably comes across sounding like I’m opposed to teachers caring for their students, supporting students in the face of injustice, or the need for a more egalitarian society. It’s not. This post is about schools as government institutions the perpetuate the state’s power, teach the state’s knowledge, and inculcate the state’s values. I think it’s important to recognize this because people always seem surprised that teachers cannot in fact run their classrooms as they see fit from a social justice perspective. As an educator in public schools, everything you do in the classroom is a state sanctioned action and when the state’s prerogative changes, your actions either change or you lose your job. Yes, strong union protections can keep you from facing the strongest disciplinary consequences, but they’re not absolute and in many places strong union protections do not exist.

I think one reason we often think that teachers have a lot of leeway to support various political positions is because three large left-leaning states have strong teacher unions. California, Illinois, and New York. These states have a lot of kids in schools and are economically and culturally important to the rest of the United States so it’s not surprising that teachers in these states assume the expressive freedoms they have in their classrooms are similar everywhere. Social and informational bubbles are hard to escape.

Look at the bottom of the list. There are plenty of states with large populations and weak unions. States like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina educate millions of American kids and employ millions of teachers. Those teachers cannot go on strike or collectively bargain. They don’t have union reps who will support them against school or district administrations. In some of these states, doing any labor organizing is illegal. Schools in red states can discipline you for something as innocuous as a sign saying “everyone is welcome here” and showing hands of varying skin tones. Teachers work in red states too, and those states have a very different relationship to their teachers’ politics.

Who Has Freeze Peach?

As much as you might want to stand up in front of your class and say, “Fuck ICE” that’s not protected speech. Even if all your kids are in agreement and cheer for you, you might still face penalties. In fact, if you can’t justify it as part of your pedagogical work, the supreme court has said it’s not protected by the first amendment. The NEA, you know, a teacher union, puts it this way:

On the job, teachers do not have absolute freedom of speech because they are agents of the state charged with the care and education of children. While I’m sure many schools and districts don’t come down harshly on their teachers for their expression, we should not mistake that as anything other than a norm. It’s not law and there is no principle that protects you if your speech acts in a classroom are outside the bounds of pedagogical necessity.

What’s more, teachers do not have unlimited free speech off the job. That’s right, even when you go home and post on social media or attend a protest, that speech is not protected. It may not be illegal in the sense that you could be jailed, but you may face disciplinary action from your employer, the public school. The most famous example of this is a teacher being fired for posting photos of herself at a brewery to Facebook. That district had a morality clause and for whatever reason they decided to enforce it. She was, in their view, promoting alcohol consumption and therefore in violation of her duty to set a good example for her students. Is that total bullshit? Sure. But it’s also reality.

Why am I Saying All This?

Following the armed occupation of an American city by masked goons, goons who murdered two Americans and have terrorized countless others, tensions are running high nationwide. In Minneapolis, students of color are staying home because your government is rounding them up on the way to and from school. ICE is kidnapping children in order to get at the rest of their family. This kind of thing has happened in Raleigh, North Carolina and Los Angeles and will continue happening unless the Trump administration is curbed by congress or by voters.

This often manifests as calls for more teachers to speak out against ICE and to do so in their classrooms in order to help their students feel safer, included, and seen. Beyond that, sometimes teachers who don’t speak out are cast as implicitly supporting ICE or as trying to adhere to some kind of false sense of political neutrality. Teachers are very good at identifying structural inequality, discrimination, and even violence when it happens to their students, but they do not always see it when it happens to them. Our laws about teaching and educational institutions are set up to discourage and punish dissent.

When we call for teachers to vocally oppose what the government is doing in their capacity as educators, we need to realistically understand that we are also calling for those teachers to face reprisals, discipline, and firing. This is especially in true where teachers don’t have strong labor protections and where they are already under fire from politicians and the public for being left leaning, “woke,” or even pedophiles. If teachers are going to more broadly take a stand against ICE and immigration policy, then someone needs to support them when they get fired. Who will help those teachers make rent, put food on the table, or pay for their healthcare? Someone is going to have to protect them from harassment and hate. What mutual aid is available to teachers and who doesn’t get it if teachers do? And, I think most importantly, we have to ask who will replace them? If that caring, supportive, justice-oriented teacher is gone, who walks in? What are their values? Do they align with the regime? Or, more likely, what if nobody walks in? What happens to the kids, to their future? These aren’t easy problems to address and they’re completely glossed by simplistic calls for teachers to “speak up or quit.”

Schools Will Help The State

Because schools are pitted against ICE, there’s often this perception that schools are places of resistance by default. We are told that teachers and administrators can deny ICE entry to schools and can escort children on and off busses. This is not the case. ICE can come into schools and educators cannot legally interfere. This is one reason schools in MN have shifted to hybrid and remote learning options. Remote learning lets kids hide at home, at least until the knock comes at the door and everyone sees that kid dragged away live on Zoom. We can’t keep trusting that norms will protect communities and schools, nor should we expect schools to be places that continue to try and thwart federally sanctioned terrorism. We should expect schools to be enlisted in state and federal efforts to deport immigrants and asylum seekers because there is no true difference between schools and the government they’re now resisting.

We’ve also seen again and again that the supreme court is beginning to empower parents as individuals when in conflict with the school system. The Mahmoud decision last year and potentially the Mirabelli decision this year are creating a situation in which schools have to exempt kids from anything that parents don’t like, are legally required to report things that students say at school about their gender or sexuality, and where teachers have to self-censor details of their personal lives just in case parents find it offensive. Rather than seeing parents as a class of people or positioning our society as having an interest in broadly educating kids, the conservatives on the supreme court are following the lead of other conservative legal scholars and placing parents, not the government, as the primary party with an interest in a child’s education. Whenever a school comes into conflict with a parent, the regime and the courts are united in placing the parent’s concerns first. What this means in the context of teachers speaking out is that parents who disagree with teachers’ politically now have more opportunities to interfere with that teacher’s job.

You may remember the book bans that were all the rage a few years ago. It turns out that in many cases books were being pulled off shelves for review by just a handful of politically committed idealogues who sometimes didn’t even have kids in school. In one case, the majority of books pulled for review in a Florida county were flagged by a single person. Apply that system to teachers now. A single parent (or maybe even not a parent!) could flag something a teacher said or did and the school district would have to investigate that teacher, interview students, review her curriculum, pull her from the classroom until they issued findings, and potentially subject her to disciplinary action. All of her students are hit by her absence because one parent objected. Why? Because she used a student’s preferred pronouns? Because she put up a sign to be inclusive of her diverse students? Because she spoke out about ICE on TikTok?

Schools are going to be enlisted in support of the administration’s crackdown in one way or another. They are going to be enlisted to stifle student and teacher speech. That’s because schools serve the interests of the state. But hey, let’s blame the teachers for not speaking out enough. That’ll make all the difference.

Thanks for reading.