Longer thread here on this case. Some of the examples we are seeing fit with a pattern of red scare McCarthyism. Someone alleges CRT and that person loses their job without presentation of evidence.
The anti-CRT laws were built on pretty thin evidence but have real consequences for school officials. Stopping their spread means tallying up those consequences and presenting them in an accessible way to the public. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/making-publi…
The other way this ends is if the courts say that prohibitions of speech violate the first amendment. They should, but it’s hard to see the current SCOTUS doing so. npr.org/2021/10/20/104…
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As a Packers fan, Rodgers telling Bears fans that he owned them was funny. Bears fans calling it disrespectful is not "woke culture."
Mostly what this shows is the success in rebranding "woke" to mean "anyone disagreeing with me" thepostmillennial.com/aaron-rodgers-…
Its worth looking at the origins of the term "woke" - from Black culture, specifically about social justice - to fully appreciate how successful that negative rebranding has been. theconversation.com/where-woke-cam…
This rebranding didn't happen organically - conservative intellectuals reframed a perspective coming from Black culture as dangerous - a "woke mob" threatening you - and civilization! donmoynihan.substack.com/p/bullshit-bra…
The attack on school officials is very much a partisan effort by the Republican Party to energeize their base nytimes.com/2021/10/21/us/…
The WI GOP candidate for Governor is directing money to school board recall elections to help her chances, and recall candidates are getting coaching from a familiar set of GOP-aligned organizations
Two other recurring patterns:
*person really mad about public school has her kid in private schools
*was drawn into school politics by COVID politics
Not that or probably made much of a difference but shout out to the folks who made the case for work requirements and the places that platformed these claims based on the thinnest evidence. Gotta hear both sides, right?
The important thing to understand is this not a case of Senator holding out to protect his state’s interests. The expanded CTC helps everywhere but esp in Manchin’s own West Virginia donmoynihan.substack.com/p/save-the-chi…
Apart from local coverage, and specialist higher ed outlets, I've only seen one national story about the politicization of tenure in Georgia. Hard not to conclude that the discourse doesn't really care about structural protections of academic freedom. nytimes.com/2021/10/13/us/…
Please correct me if I've missed major stories about GA tenure. And I'm not saying that what happened in Yale was ok, or shouldn't be covered. I just think one of these things is a much bigger deal than the other, and its not the thing getting attention.
Putting educators in the absurd position where they are wondering about both siding the Holocaust is the predictable outcome of not just anti-CRT laws, but a political environment of constant surveillance and punishment.
New from me, please share. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-lessons-…
The Southlake story may be an outlier, but it's instructive in a number of respects. First, it shows the value of sustained investigative journalism in a community about the effects of an attack on educational institutions.
Hat tip to @Mike_Hixenbaugh and @ahylton26
As a public management professor, I can point to research about how school leadership offers a buffer to the political environmental to provide stability for teachers. These actions improve school performance, but seem less possible in a hostile political environment.
Given the story about teachers in Texas being told to remove books about the Holocaust if they can't find pro-Holocaust texts, re-upping this overview about how the anti-CRT moral panic is making teaching an impossible job. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/making-publi…
Southlake already stood out. After a viral video of students laughing while shouting the N word at a party, students pushed for diversity training. The backlash was so strong that the school board was voted out.
(200K was spent by their opponents). nbcnews.com/news/us-news/b…
A teacher at Southlake was reprimanded after she gave an anti-racist book to a student. The school district cleared her of wrongdoing, but the school board punished her anyway. The parents who made the complaint had donated to school board members.