Then They Came for the Teachers
You’re a middle or high school teacher and a student comes to you and tells you that she’s pregnant. What do you do? What do you say?
Most of us who have taught middle or high school have probably rehearsed this scenario in our heads. Many of us have had to one or more conversations with students who came to us when they didn’t know who else to go to.
In Texas, that conversation is about to become much more risky and fraught.
Now, under Texas’ new 6-week abortion law, anyone who aids a woman who is past 6 weeks into preganancy can be sued — not by a state but by a fellow citizen who would like to make $10,000 for the “service” of reporting the “crime.” So now the teachers who students confide in about a pregnancy can be reported and prosecuted in court. They can be reported by anyone — the girl herself (teens who are afraid often turn on people if they think it will keep them out of trouble), the girl’s friends, her parents, her boyfriend, fellow teachers. . .
The Texas abortion citizen vigilante law also leaves teachers vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits based on misinformation, hearsay, or even as a malicious attack. If anyone makes any kind of accusation that a teacher provided any information about abortion — even if it is false — that teacher could face a lengthy trial, or even have to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer, with no opportunity to get reimbursed for expenses and fees even if they win the case in court. If the teacher doesn’t win, they could have to pay up to $10,000 to the opportunist who filed the complaint. Each time.
This is what teaching looks like under fascism. Here in the U.S., it is already happening. The Texas law is just the continuation of 20–30 years of alternately regulating and scapegoating teachers. We have already seen NCLB, the ESSA, continuous testing of students that affects teachers but not students or their parents, teacher evaluations that emphasize superficial and ever-changing criteria, scripted curricula and being evaluated on our “fidelity” to following the script, the endless news blitzes about how “teachers aren’t doing their jobs,” and so on.
Then this summer, Fox News created its own controversy from thin air around “critical race theory.” Never mind that it was an obscure theory taught in a few college classes. Never mind that it already was NOT being taught in K-12 schools. They fabricated a problem where there wasn’t one and got their viewers so riled up that they stormed school board meetings and made threats. Their brainwashed viewers demanded that teachers be recorded while teaching their (probably already scripted) lessons and surveilled for any indications of “indoctrinating” students. In addition to getting threatened by parents for following school policy and requiring masks, teachers could now also get threatened by any vigilante parent — who may or may not be concealed carrying — for teaching anything the parent disagreed with. Even if that wasn’t even what the teacher had taught. So now history teachers can be persecuted for teaching history. English teachers can be persecuted for discussing Jim Crow laws while teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Teachers who attempt to follow social justice movements’ calls to increase the diversity and representation in their curricula can now get attacked by other parents when they do that. Teaching in fascist 21st-Century America is increasingly looking like an unwinnable endeavor.
As Umair Haque has pointed out, this is the template for totalitarian America. Deputizing citizens to surveil and police their fellow citizens. Enabling brownshirts to threaten anyone who doesn’t follow the party line. Sowing so much misinformation that no one knows what is true anymore, so that even the concept of “truth” has gotten buried in “two sides” fallacies and whataboutism, and so that many citizens are too afraid or confused to even ask what the truth is. Sowing fear and distrust, by turning neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, parents against teachers, and students and teachers against each other. This is how you silence a population and get them to relinquish all control to an oligarchic, corporate, authoritarian state. Sow enough confusion, fear, and distrust so that people are too confused and cowed to ask questions, share information, or speak out against anything to anyone. Then people will accept whatever peanuts you throw their way without resistance or complaint.
Teachers who have studied history are not surprised. The Nazis under Hitler purged their schools of all “liberal” and “undesirable” teachers (such as Jewish people), burned all books that didn’t align with their ideals, and imposed a strict curriculum that propagated their views on race, military might, and authoritarian government. The Chinese Maoists also expelled their teachers, but went a step further by humiliating them by tying placards around their necks and parading them through the streets in front of jeering crowds. The Stalinists ripped all inconvenient truths from their history books — and the Trump Administration has already followed suit. We know the playbook the modern far right fascists are following as they attack our school system: underfund public schools to run them into the ground, create “competition” through funding privatized educational systems through charter schools and vouchers, humiliate teachers in the media, control the curriculum, threaten and weed out those who refuse to spread your propaganda, and then deputize everyone to be the “thought police” to ensure that no one steps out of line.
This is why the Texas Abortion Law — combined with the laws passed on the same day that allow almost all Texans to conceal carry without a permit, combined with its laws to suppress voting — is inevitably going to catch teachers in its dragnet. That’s the point. Policing. Deputizing citizens to create an army of brownshirts. Reporting on every little perceived “violation.” Scripting and controlling curriculum. Driving out the “radicals,” “leftists,” and “undesirables.” The constant implied threats of violence toward anyone who doesn’t toe the line. The crosshairs were always placed squarely on teachers’ backs. The far right has already made our classrooms into battlegrounds, and the Texas law is going to both continue and amplify that effort.
