Thoughts on Education and Politics. I'm getting back in the groove.

While I'm not up to blogging again regularly and semi-regularly, I do feel like the pace at which events are happening is pushing me toward more frequent posts.

I want to draw your attention to something my friend Jason has written about the the difference between teachers and college professors when it comes to discussing their own political beliefs. It originates with a tweet that's been getting attention from the right and left.

High school teachers: I'm not going to share my political beliefs, it's unprofessional
College Profs: what is the square root of fuck trump

— ↟ jessi ↟ (@queentrash__) January 26, 2017

I think Jason's discussion is more illuminating than what is bouncing around on Facebook and twitter. Most importantly he notes that in the age of Trump, fake news, and alternative facts:

The very act of education, which is predicated on the belief that things can be known is no longer a value neutral thing.  Asserting objective reality is a political action.

Jason glosses one major and very important detail affecting teachers like him. He does not have a constitutional protection to freedom of speech. That may shock some of you, especially those reading in firmly unionized and liberal states with strong employment security. In the state of Georgia teachers are employed at-will. They do not earn tenure and are able to be fired at the discretion of the school or district level administrators. Because the Supreme Court has ruled in several cases (modern ones include Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier and Bethel School District v. Fraser) that schools are not protected public spaces akin to parks, teachers do not have the right to freedom of speech when operating in a school related capacity. Information from teachers has to serve a valid instructional purpose or it is not protected speech. Teachers can not be fired for teaching evolution. However, they can be fired for teaching students that evolution is the only acceptable form of understanding the origins of species and life on earth. Why? Evolution is a necessary instructional component of further biological education. The belief in evolution or anything else, however, is not necessary. In other words, kids only have to understand it, they do not have to agree with it and the teacher should not be pushing an agenda to change their beliefs.

Like it or not, that is how the court has ruled. To bring this back to Georgia, if a teacher like Jason took it upon himself to teach, say, current events, and he decided to spend time debunking the Trump administrations frequent lies and dissemblance, the district could (and probably would if a parent or coworker complained) fire him. Despite the broad number of topics which can at times enter into the English/Language Arts classroom, and the number ways to teach things like fact vs opinion, rhetoric, source evaluation, or any possible connection a teacher like Jason might invent to justify teaching about the Trump administration, it would be easy for the district to paint his choices as politically motivated and an attempt at indoctrination. He could have spent his time evaluating MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail, for instance. In the eyes of the district, Jason is a liberal bent on teaching his children to be liberal. It's not protected speech and not necessary for instruction so he's out. He's lost his job.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this is not the same fight which sometimes takes place related to censoring books like Harry Potter, Slaughterhouse Five, or Black Boy. Courts often defer to a teacher's professional judgement in those cases when instructional value can be justified. In Jason's hypothetical anti-Trump lesson plans, it is not the content of the lessons that is objected to as it would be in a censorship case. It is instead a question of the instruction itself and whether it could be achieved effectively by another means. In this case the answer is yes. You can teach kids to be critical observers of the world around them and texts, in particular, without using current events or mentioning current political controversy.

And let's not even get into the legal morass that surrounds "professional conduct" and other ways that states require their teachers to meet a vague and subjective ethical standards. Remember the Georgia teacher fired for posting a Facebook picture of herself touring the Guinness Brewery? The protections for teachers in the state of Georgia are very thin. So, when there is an apparent disconnect between the valiant efforts of college professors standing up to Trump and the cowardly silence of educators, maybe the problem does not fall with the educators but with the society that fails to ensure they have adequate protections.