Another day, another example of teachers exceeding their remit, indulging their priors, and then bragging about it on social media. The controversial “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account posted a short video of a high school English teacher describing how public education “upholds problematic systems like white supremacy, misogyny, and colonization.” She announced her intention to “undermine that BS in my classroom as much as I possibly can.”
At first glance, it’s just another teacher drunk on “woke” ideology. What she’s really drunk on is power—albeit a power she does not have. Stated bluntly, she’s a teacher refusing to teach. There’s almost no conceivable permission structure that allows a public school teacher—a government employee—to say, in effect, “I’m going to ignore the state standards I was hired and paid to teach. In fact, I’m going to subvert them.” It’s unethical conduct at the very least; it also likely falls outside of any contractually protected teacher discretion.
My AEI colleague Yuval Levin has famously posited that institutions have shifted from molds of character and conduct to platforms for individual performance. Mostly this applies to institutions like the news media and Congress. But the same phenomenon is happening in our schools and classrooms, writ small. When it surfaces, it is reasonable, even essential, for parents and other education stakeholders to ask, “What authority allows you to indulge your ideological views and to impose them on a captive audience of children?” None exists.
As often happens, this teacher, who goes by the handle @shafferlovestoread on Tik Tok, has locked her account in the face of widespread and warranted criticism. So, it could not be immediately determined where she teaches. But it is unlikely any state’s English Language Arts standards align with her view that stating a thesis and supporting it with evidence are “made-up rules created by Westerners” that a teacher is free to disregard. Nor is it likely that any state’s standards could be reasonably interpreted to encourage instruction based on “honoring how we talk rather than teaching students how to write properly.” Particularly if you have been hired to teach students how to write properly.
In New York state, for example, the literal “Standard 1” in grades 6–12 is “writing arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.” @shafferlovestoread, however, explicitly rejects this view of her subject.
That a teacher would feel secure enough in her authority not only to make such decisions but to announce it on social media says something troubling about the culture of teaching, and hints at a fundamental misunderstanding about the role and structure of public education. The concept of “academic freedom,” common to higher education, simply doesn’t apply to K–12 public education. A number of court decisions have affirmed that teachers are not free agents or independent professionals with unlimited free speech; they are “hired speech.” In other words, teachers are generally considered to speak for the school district when at work in a public school classroom—a crucial point seldom made in teacher preparation programs.
We would not countenance a city bus driver who decided to alter his assigned route to satisfy views about equity, or a DMV employee to refuse issuing drivers’ licenses based on his personal perception of what social justice demands, however earnestly those views are held. Teachers are a different manner of public employee, obviously. But they are public employees. Something has gone very awry when even a small number of them see no limiting principle preventing them from flouting the conditions of their employment.
As a pedagogical matter, it’s bizarre to think you’re advancing the cause of “equity” by withholding from students the “language of power” rather than teaching them to use or navigate it. If we take seriously this teacher’s concern that she’s “constantly worried that she’s part of the problem” by teaching her subject, she has made a poor career choice. That does not give her permission to hijack her classroom, estrange public education from its stakeholders, or to place at risk the trust and goodwill central to its legitimacy.
The post How to Respond When Teachers Refuse to Teach appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.