Students across the country are settling into the new school year, connecting with friends and developing new knowledge and skills. Teachers are also hard at work, but in many places, their lesson plans will be far more complicated than they were last year.
An alarming number of states have passed laws forcing educators to navigate terrifying legal and professional minefields – laws that restrict forthright lessons about history and current events, policies that make it illegal to discuss identity in our schools, and bans on books written by or about people from diverse backgrounds. More than 30 states have passed or introduced more than 100 anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bills, and 20 states have passed bills banning the discussion of race and gender in the classroom. In these polarizing times, many teachers are racked with anxiety about whether teaching in ways they know to be appropriate could subject them to discipline, harassment or even termination.
Access to strong, supported public schools is one of the key pathways to the American dream. By attempting to shape public education to reflect their worldview and punishing educators for teaching a diverse and inclusive curriculum, reactionary legislators are looking to impose their specific ideologies over educational institutions that serve a broad public.
And they disregard the value of free speech that anchors our democracy. The first amendment is often viewed as an individual right, namely the ability to say and think what you want without government interference. But our nation’s founders understood that the primacy of the amendment stems from the collective nature of the right: it is our ability as a people to speak and think freely that ensures we remain a free people.
No group of people better illustrates how the first amendment functions to protect us all as a society than public school teachers. Our teachers bear the tremendous responsibility of shaping our future leaders. They are charged with educating our children about the importance of our nation’s complex history, engaging in civil discourse with people with whom they disagree and thinking clearly and independently about the world they inhabit.
To do so is a monumental job, and teachers necessarily surrender some of their first amendment rights when they agree to take on these responsibilities. They must defer to the state curriculum. Their job is to educate, not indoctrinate. But teachers do not surrender all of their first amendment rights upon entering the profession. They could not serve our children otherwise.
Guidance to teachers must be clear and unambiguous, especially if their jobs are on the line. Bans on the teaching of our nation’s complex history – and its complicated present – degrade the ability of teachers to do their jobs. These vague bans are unconstitutional, unnavigable and undermining to our core narrative as Americans. The government should support teachers to carry out their vital role, not create a chilling effect on speech and force people to guess at what is permissible to teach.
Bans on entire subject areas are so broad that they impede the ability of teachers to perform their most essential duty. Educators must be permitted to teach the required curriculum – including all the subjects our children need to compete in a global economy and to acquire the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life.
Cynical, narrow-minded schemes to censor and skew what is taught and learned in our nation’s classrooms hurt our efforts to help all children get the best education possible. In a pluralistic society such as the United States, that includes helping students to bridge differences with people with different beliefs and backgrounds. There is no better place to do that than in our public schools.
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Stacey Abrams is the founder of American Pride Rises and former minority leader of the Georgia house of representatives
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Randi Weingarten is president of the 1.8 million-member AFT, which represents people who work in education, healthcare and public services
