Nationwide, teachers are leaving the classroom and school board members are resigning over threats, lawsuits, and other pressure from parents, rightwing groups, politicians, and outright thugs. If they’re not all hair-on-fire over the undefined boogeyman CRT, the goobers don’t want their child finding out in a book about white people doing bad things to non-white people, or that non-straight people even exist.
Here in Arizona, the combination of low pay and shitty new sharia laws prescribing what can and can’t be taught, or what pronoun a teacher can use, has resulted in a statewide shortage of nearly 3,000 teachers, and of the ones who are in the classroom, about 5,000 lack credentials.
It’s a shit-show, with Arizona’s public school system ranked dead last, and it’s not going to improve with Tom Horne as the new Superintendent of Public Instruction. He’s made it clear there will be no teaching of race, gender, diversity, or other “social and emotional” topics in Arizona’s classrooms. If parents think their child might’ve been exposed in History class to a lesson on Reconstruction’s failures, or maybe the student saw a footnote in an English textbook saying Oscar Wilde, married with children, was a homosexual, well Tom Horne has set up a hotline for anyone to rat out guilty teachers:
People who want to report lessons that allegedly use critical race theory or emotional support curriculum rejected by Arizona’s new superintendent can now do so through a hotline launched this week.
Horne was on Fox again yesterday, stirring up their viewers, complaining about an elementary school district in Phoenix that ended its teacher internship ties with Arizona Christian University because of ACU’s strident anti-LGBTQ policy. Horne said it was “religious prejudice” to end the contract, where ACU provided the school district student teachers, a common arrangement.
What Horne didn’t say is that every student enrolled at ACU must agree to the school’s policy: “We believe the term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture.” If ACU students want to follow that pledge, fine, have a good life, but to call it “religious prejudice” for the school district to not welcome and extend ACU’s homophobia elsewhere, especially in a diverse community where it is not valued at all, is beyond hypocritical. Said one board member,
“We cannot continue to align ourselves with organizations that starkly contrast our values and say that we legitimately care about diversity, equity and inclusion and that we legitimately care about all of our families...”
There’s more on ACU’s website and in their handbook that would make the average school board member ask, “Is this the university we want sending us student teachers?” The board at Washington Elementary School District, the largest in the state with more than 25,000 students in 33 schools, decided the Arizona Christian University is not the institution they want providing teachers, and so they unanimously voted to end the 11-year agreement.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, assholes are threatening board members and calling for their resignation—saying their actions amount to discrimination and religious persecution. A conservative group filed a lawsuit, suing the district and board members, claiming they ended the partnership “solely because of their religious status and belief.” Bull. They say the board violated “the university’s right of free exercise of religion” because the school district chose to end its relationship with a university whose values they abhor. Your “exercise of religion” ends when hate shows up at our doorstep. The school district had every right to end the contract.
We’re seeing more of this. The Republican Legislature and Congressional bozos yammer about CRT, drag shows, Hunter Biden, and other conspiratorial shit only MAGA nitwits and QAnon boobs give a crap about, and when they do talk policy, it’s always about taking away a right or benefit. Meanwhile, on the ground people are rejecting the nutters and haters (look at Arizona’s midterm election!), and they actually wanna get shit done, like teach a child about the world. What a privilege! Education truly is the canary in the coal mine. If we can’t manage even that as a public … wtf can we do?