Sarah Bonner taught middle school students in Heyworth, Illinois for 20 years.
Like any good teacher, she encouraged her students to read. She celebrated books, and held “Reading Mondays” in her classroom.
But when she held up a popular book titled “This Book Is Gay” (read details about it here), a parent filed a police report, and the district put her on administrative leave. She decided to chuck teaching, and resigned. (Read story here.)
America is facing a teacher revolt. Nationally, more than 300,000 teachers left the profession between February 2020 and May 2022. There were other reasons, of course, the pandemic being a major one. But it’s clear that teachers don’t like the intrusion of politics into their classrooms. And they really don’t like being threatened with being fired, and even prosecuted, if some parent doesn’t like their teaching.
So teachers, in droves, are chucking the classroom. There are other, less stressful, ways to make a living (although nursing isn’t one of them; burned-out nurses are quitting in droves, too, in part because politics has intruded into health care.)
In Florida, GOP Gov. DeSantis is trying to deal with a shortage of more than 5,000 teachers by putting non-teachers in classrooms. Those aren’t schools I’d want my children attending. He’s also trying to run professors deemed “liberal” out of Florida public colleges; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is doing the same thing in his state.
In the educational system that DeSantis envisions, slavery can’t be mentioned. Neither can racial discrimination. I’m finding it hard not to view this as racists trying to silence criticism of racism, and I don’t think racists should be running America’s schools.
Rightwing extremists are now targeting school boards, and where they get elected, they’re firing good principals and running off good teachers. That means school board elections have become very important, voters need to turn out and vote in them, and they need to research the candidates and know who (and what) they’re voting for. The video below illustrates why (for more details about the “American Birthright” social studies standards mentioned in the video, go here).
It’s a shame that schools are turning into battlegrounds, but that’s the reality of today’s “culture war” politics. It’s a fight for our kids, and one they can’t afford for us to lose.