In the fourth episode of our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we’re taking a look at autonomy. How much autonomy do K-12 teachers really have, how is teacher autonomy being reduced… and what’s being lost as a consequence? We share a profile of David Graf, a veteran educator from Woodland Park, Colorado. And, our host Justin Reich is joined by law professor Derek Black and education professor Sarah Kaka. Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
In the fourth episode of our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we’re taking a look at autonomy. How much autonomy do K-12 teachers really have, how is teacher autonomy being reduced… and what’s being lost as a consequence? We share a profile of David Graf, a veteran educator from Woodland Park, Colorado. And, our host Justin Reich is joined by law professor Derek Black and education professor Sarah Kaka.
Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Resources and Links
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Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/teacher-speech-e4/transcript
Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
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Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
David Graf: So I commute from Colorado Springs up to Woodland Park and it's this beautiful commute because the sun is rising and like Pike's Peak is right there and Garden of the Gods and you see these really gorgeous reds and purples as the sun rises on the rocks and the mountains. I used to always love that commute going up and it would get my mind right for the day. But the commute had gotten to a point where I was feeling a ton of anxiety driving up to work at Woodland Park School District and sadness.
Justin Reich: From the MIT studios of the Teaching Systems Lab. I'm Justin Reich, and this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching.
This is the fourth episode in our series on Teacher Speech and the New Divide. If you haven't listened to our first three episodes in this series, I'd encourage you to go back and take a listen. Episode one introduces us to Dakota Morrison, a Social Studies teacher in Ohio who gets into hot water for teaching a lesson on Stonewall despite its appearance in the Ohio model curriculum. Episode two is a history and legal framework of Teacher Speech looking at some 20th century court cases from the Supreme Court and Lower Court that shape our understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Teacher Speech. And then episode three looks at some more recent cases that re-shifting some of that ground. For instance, looking at the recent Kennedy case, which was about a football coach preying on the 50 yard line. Today, we're going to take a look at how divisive concept laws impact teachers' sense of autonomy. To start, we talked to Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina School of Law about the chilling effect of divisive concept laws.
Derek Black: I think the substance is less concerning than the noise. I mean, it's the noise that is most important because that noise has a much larger chilling effect than the law itself. Now, we could sit back and say, was the point of the law, to begin with, to create noise and to scare teachers out of conversations. But I do think that that's the big problem, that some of these laws are narrower, some of them are broader, but regardless of whether any individual anti CRT or whatever phrase you want to put on it, law is narrow or not, it scares people away from conversations that they're fully entitled to have even under the law itself, and so, it's that chilling effect. And look, I teach constitutional law and I have a ton of privileges, a tenured law professor, I've been doing this for a while.
But, as this stuff started happening, you step into the classroom and I found myself, I wouldn't say self-censoring, it wasn't anything that I didn't talk about that I normally talked about, but I talked slower. Talked slower than I normally do, I was more careful in my choice of words, not because anything had changed in my mind, but I didn't want somebody running up to the dean's office, not the dean would do anything to me, but I didn't want someone to run up the dean say, Hey, professor Black's down there teaching Critical Race Theory. Why is that?
Well, because the word Critical Race Theory came out of his mouth. Oh okay, that means he's teaching Critical Race Theory, whatever. And so, this is the constitutional law professor expressing his low level anxieties about the noise or the effort to avoid the noise. Put myself in the position of a new teacher with no protections and no privilege in a school and that's got to be a frightening situation in the way you deal with that. Well, some people confront head on, God bless them, but a lot of the people just say, no, no, no, no. I got bills to pay, I got my own kids at home, let me just exit stage to the right or left or whichever side it is you're supposed to exit.
Justin Reich: These chilling effects are disturbing because great teachers are responsive. They respond to student questions, they respond to current events, they respond to students' interests. To have that level of improvisation and personalization, teachers have to have a certain degree of autonomy and divisive concept laws can really undermine that autonomy. But to help us understand this better, we ask Derrick more about how much autonomy a K-12 teacher actually has when it comes to the curriculum they teach.
Derek Black: The way I've described this even before this current hysteria is that, so there's different rules in higher education, there are in K through 12, and so let's start there. The reason why is that, to put it more bluntly than maybe necessary, the state does own the curriculum in K through 12, and by own I means they can dictate it, they can set it. If the State says we're doing away with Social Studies and we're going to teach basket weaving, eight years and we're going to have standardized tests on it. If the State wants to do that, they can do that. In the higher education context, there is inherently tremendous amount of freedom, the State does not own our curriculum, and of course we have private institutions as well.
It operates more like a market in a higher education context. So that's number one. The State has the capacity to control and set the curriculum. There's limits on that and we'll get to that in a moment. Now, what has changed is that historically the State had no interest in owning the curriculum. So, whatever wanted to be taught anywhere, that was fine. The most the State ever did when I was a young person was to say, okay, you need to get X number of credits in these subjects if you want to go to the university of whatever, State University.
Justin Reich: And then some local school district says, okay, we're going to make a class called US History, and that's going to count for four credits. But exactly what is actually in that US History class, who knows? It can be radical leftist history, it can be the Lost Cause, and either way it's four credits.
Derek Black: That's right. But what then happened with No Child Left... Not just no Child Left Behind, but a good chunk of what happens during that era of No Child Left Behind. Well, we should also say that era of standardized curriculum, Standards Based Education coming out of the Nation at Risk Report in the eighties was that we need to focus on some basic concepts and outcomes. And so, the State begins to own more of the curriculum across time, I think is the easiest. They fill in more gaps and go, okay, here's the list of 121 things that need to be taught in seventh grade science or seventh grade history. And so, more and more you see the State fill in the gaps. Whatever the State doesn't fill the gaps up with, as you say, Justin, the local school district or the board, they fill in more gaps.
And so they can go, okay, well here's the additional 50 things you need taught. So it's almost like a Russian nesting doll, right? It's like the State has this sort of big global power, but maybe it doesn't fill it all up. And then you have another doll that comes under that fills up some of it and so on and so forth. And the way that you understand teachers' academic freedom in K through 12 are the way that I understand it is what's left over at the bottom of that Russian nesting doll. If there's a big hole or big set of gaps, then teachers are free to fill those as they deem appropriate. But if the State wants to fill it up so that there are no gaps to be filled, well then the State can do that too.
So, the answer to the question of how much academic freedom a teacher has is really based upon the State and district in which they teach, so how much has been left over? And there used to be lots of, not lots, but a fair amount of litigation around this because, a teacher would pick a book to teach and then someone would hear about it on the school board and go, oh, they shouldn't be teaching this. And so they'd try to can the teacher, you shouldn't have taught To Kill a Mockingbird or whatever, and the teacher would bring a lawsuit and they'd bring out the facts and they'd go, well, did the district have an approved list of books for 10th grade English?
They'd say no. They'd go, well, then fine, the teacher can teach To Kill a Mockingbird. But guess what they would do that summer? The district would adopt a list of approved books, and if To Kill A Mockingbird wasn't on it that summer, that means the next year the teacher can't teach that anymore. And so this again is the Russian nesting doll idea. So, that's part of it. And then of course, you can have opinions about things, but in terms of what is to be taught, that is how that aspect of it plays out.
Justin Reich: Yeah, I think that is sort of the key tension that exists in these conversations in these systems, is that, there's an argument that educators are professionals, that there's new literature emerging all the time, that the people who are in the best position to choose the literature, the supplemental readings, what kids engage with are professional educators. And then those professional educators have some degree of oversight from local school board members in all cases, in some cases from State officials in those States where they play a stronger role in these things, and the municipality has some responsibility for overseeing the decisions that teachers make. So, that there should be some amount of give and take there, but it seems to be a moment in which the scrutiny of teacher decision is at a all time high.
Okay, TeachLab listeners, a quick word here from our partners. I'm so excited to tell you about our latest course Youth in Front, which you can find at youthinfront.org. Young people have always been at the forefront of movements for justice in the United States, and we want teachers to be able to support them. Maybe not in their specific advocacy, but in being powerful advocates for whatever they believe in. So here at the Teaching Systems Lab, we teamed up with Learning for Justice and the Justice in Schools Team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to produce a course that helps teachers support student activism as part of civic education. You'll learn the history of student led activism in our first self-paced course and how to support student activists. You'll get 15 professional development hours and a certificate. The online course has three powerful interactive units that each take about a week or two to complete.
Lots of tools, actionable strategies, and it's all available to you free of charge. You can get started today by visiting youthinfront.org. Let's get back to the show. So now we're going to meet David Graf, who until recently was a 15-year veteran teacher in Woodland Park, Colorado. David worked as an English and Social Studies teacher. He coached basketball, ran the yearbook, he loved his job. Woodland Park is a conservative town, and up until 2021 educators described it as a collaborative and positive school climate where the relationships between teachers, parents and the school board were all collegial. The arc of David's career shows us what's possible when teachers have the freedom and autonomy to partner with colleagues, parents and their community, to design schools that really meet student needs. And his career also shows us the consequences of taking that autonomy away.
David Graf: I am David Graf. I was a teacher in the Woodland Park School District for almost 15 years. My school district is in a small town in Colorado, just a little west of Pikes Peak. I commute from Colorado Springs up to Woodland Park, and it's this beautiful commute because the sun is rising and Pikes Peak is right there in Garden of the Gods, and you see these really gorgeous reds and purples as the sun rises on the rocks in the mountains. I used to always love that commute going up and it would get my mind right for the day.
But the commute had gotten to a point where I was feeling a ton of anxiety driving up to work at Woodland Park School District and sadness. And I was sharing this story with my fellow educator, and he was, you know what it feels like to me, it feels like grief. We built something that was really working and helping our students in this community, and it's just been taken away from us. And I found that to be a very profound concept. That may be what I was feeling, and probably still am, is grief. Generally, there's a feeling of despair amongst teachers. What do we do next? Woodland Park is my home. My parents are still a giant part of that community, my in-laws still live in Woodland Park. I wanted to go back to Woodland Park to teach because I grew up there and I'd gone to those schools and I'd had teachers across all levels who had opened my eyes to things that I'd never considered.
And I felt that that was my calling, was to go back and teach students in my community things that I had learned that I had never really considered having grown up there and to do so in a matter where everyone had say and input. I worked in an environment for a long time in Woodland Park where there was a lot of autonomy and trust for teachers to do what they felt was best when it came to educating our students and we all had the same goals, at least at Woodland Park High School, and that was to provide the best education we could for our community. It's a small community, it was at one point rather tight-knit, though those knits are coming undone.
Justin Reich: So one thing that education policymakers have asked educators to do in earnest for a couple of decades now is to look at test scores, standardized test scores, other kind of outcomes, and then say, what do those outcomes tell us about our instruction and how we might go about improving that instruction? And so in 2015, David and his colleagues embark on an enterprise to identify one of their shortcomings as a department and to see how they could do that better.
David Graf: So, in the summer of 2015, we had examined our SAT scores from our juniors quite thoroughly, and we were doing some good things as far as the English department was concerned, but where we were lacking, I suppose, or where our students did not perform well specifically was analysis and critical thought when it came to nonfiction texts. And so, we decided to scrap the old school, freshman English, sophomore English, American Lit Junior year, and British Lit Senior year, and instead create these 10 singletons or semester long electives that would hopefully gain more interest from upperclassmen in taking English classes, but also, to start to target that issue we had with nonfiction texts.
One of the classes we created was a class called Civil Disobedience. So that summer, there was a lot of social justice movements taking place. In the summer, 2015 Ferguson's, the first thing that pops into my mind, but growing up in Woodland Park, I wanted to think of a way that I could teach my students at the high school I graduated from, why a movement like that was taking place. And I thought it'd be a really cool idea to look at the history of democracy and law making, and read a bunch of nonfiction from enlightenment thinkers for about a quarter, and then compare that to some of the civil unrest that was taking place in current events around that time. And so, we incorporated throughout the semester a bunch of nonfiction texts, both modern and historical, and at the end we finished with a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates called Between the World and Me.
Justin Reich: Between The World and Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates is a letter from Coats to his young son about growing up black in America. It raises serious questions about the limits of racial reconciliation in the United States, about the legacy of white supremacy, and it has been banned or removed from curricula or otherwise challenged in a number of school systems around the United States. Of course, the Coats reading was part of a much longer syllabus for civil disobedience. David incorporated John Locke to encourage students to examine the roots of contemporary law and democracy. And of course, he included Henry David Thoreau's famous essay, Civil Disobedience to facilitate an exploration of the fundamental principles behind protest movements. And Between the World and Me was initially included to foster discussions on 21st Century social movements, until its relevance was questioned.
David Graf: A big part of teaching Social Studies and a big part of my civil disobedience class was open dialogue, was discussion, was hearing both sides. We would start each semester with a giant circle just airing things out and being like, hey, in order for this class to work, we all have to listen to one another and listen with intent and understanding and not necessarily looking to agree with each other because that's not what's going to happen, but listen to one another for understanding from where that person is coming from. Because we talked about what people would consider controversial topics, but I've found that the students handle that much better than adults are handling it right now.
Justin Reich: I love stories of educational improvement like this one. David and his colleagues look at the curriculum. They decide there's some pieces there that are getting a bit stale. They design some new classes that draw on their own talents that connect with student interests. And when David and his colleagues, the school, the districts look at the results over the next couple of years, they see some real improvements.
David Graf: We challenged our students at the secondary level, and we'd seen growth in test scores over the past five or six years. We were the only district, I shouldn't say the only, but one of just a couple districts in the State of Colorado, that during the pandemic, our students actually, their academic achievement actually grew instead of regressed. We'd just done a lot of things to help our students out and to make them better students and to prepare them for their future. And that took a lot of work, it was not easy. We all had to learn new ways of teaching, we had to challenge ourselves in the classroom to be better teachers, we had to commit to it. I taught civil disobedience, I taught that class for eight years and never had a parent complaint, not one. But the new school board came in, and now it's no longer a class.
Justin Reich: To get some more context on what was happening in Woodland Park, we talked again with Sarah Kaka, associate Professor of Education at Ohio Wesleyan University, and a former teacher in Woodland Park herself.
Sara Kaka: The City of Woodland Park allowed a bible college to come in, and there was huge tax incentives to build this private Bible college in Woodland Park, and the demographics of the population then shifted completely. It was always a conservative district, even when I was teaching there, but the parents were really supportive of what we were doing. And so it didn't ever really feel like there was a significant divide between parents and just because of the conservative nature of the district.
But as this Bible college moved in, the population changed dramatically. And they hired a new superintendent. This superintendent happened to be the person who actually was recalled in a different district, but they hired him anyway. And he has been very forthright and very explicit in how he wants to shift Woodland Park. So essentially he wants to take, what was once this shining beacon of public education in the mountains and shifted away to something that's essentially privatized and broken down, and they want to control all the curriculum.
David Graf: The climate at my school district became hostile towards teachers and other members of the district as well, but teachers seem to be the main target. After our new school board was elected in the fall of 2021, this class was immediately under the spotlight, I suppose, when the new school board was elected, because I had an email exchange that was CORAed so, Open Records Act in Colorado. It was CORAed by a community member. I had an email exchange with my vice principal at the time about, she had asked our Social Studies department if we knew anything about teaching CRT or the 1619 project. And in my response, I said, I don't know much about CRT, but I have used an essay from the 1619 project in my civil disobedience class. So that CORA came out publicly. I was attacked publicly by a community member.
They created a video accusing me of being a Marxist and a Socialist and trying to indoctrinate our students. And so, the school board latched onto that, and they did a very thorough review of the civil disobedience class. I had to submit my entire curriculum to them, which they have access to anyway, but I had to submit all of that to them. We had to go over all of the resources and materials I use in the class, and it was up for, this was in the spring of 2022, it was up for an action item at a school board meeting. At the beginning of that school board meeting, after public comment, the school board decided to take it off the agenda as an action item, and the school board president at that time said, "Wow, this is a class I would've loved to have taken in high school."
Fast-forward nine months, and in January of this past year under a new superintendent, they decided to ban the book Between the World and Me from my class. And then they decided to scrap my class as an option, and when I say my class, I mean civil disobedience, I'm sorry it's kind of a personal thing for me, but they just decided to scrap civil disobedience from our course description guide for our students, which was very disheartening. But once they decided that I could no longer teach that book and then made an executive decision without my input, both on that book and getting rid of the class, I was like, I don't know if I can, it was getting rough, and then they introduced the American Birthright Standards shortly thereafter, and it all added up.
Sara Kaka: One of the things that they've done recently was to put in place the American Birthright Standards. So, this is a group of standards. It's US History Standards, it's K through 12, not just US History, but it's all Social Studies standards, K through 12 put out by the Civics Alliance, which is an organization run by the National Association of Scholars. In the State of Colorado, the State Board of Education controls what's happening. Interestingly, in Colorado, it's a five member board, they're all elected, and they voted this down. They said, we're not going to put this curriculum in place.
It's not good, it's not accurate, it's devoid of skills, this is not what we want our Colorado students to learn. Well, Woodland Park Colorado said well, fine, you're not going to do this at the State level. We have local control, we'll put it in place at our local level. And so, as a result of that, it's the culture of Woodland Park has shifted so drastically with the hiring the superintendent, bringing these standards that there's just been this awful mass exodus now of teachers leaving the district, David being one of them. Other really strong teachers who had been there for as long as I was that are also, they're either retiring early or they're leaving. Students are ultimately the ones that are suffering though.
David Graf: And there was a lot that happened in a year and a half. But the breaking point for me was the introduction of the American Birthright Standards for Social Studies. I'm a Social Studies teacher, and at that point, my educational values no longer aligned. Well, they hadn't for a while, but that was the last point where they no longer aligned with the values of our district, and I couldn't work there anymore.
Sara Kaka: Honestly, it's heartbreaking. He was a fantastic teacher and his students loved him. And I see that as being... It's a huge blow. It's a blow to the students, to the community, it's a blow to the profession because, when you have really effective teachers like that engage their students, that push their students, he designed a class that was really designed to support students' critical thinking skills and to make them them better students, to make them stronger learners.
He took the time to do all of that, not because it was in his best interest, but because he knew that's what they needed. He wanted to see his students come out and be successful in the world. And so, anytime we lose a teacher like that, it's a blow to the profession, because that means that students aren't getting what they need in many cases. Because if he'd been there, he'd been teaching for 15 years, and so even if they were able to hire a brand new, let's say, a first year teacher, then we know that there's research that shows that teacher quality has a huge impact on student academic achievement. And a first year teacher is not going to be as high quality as someone like David Graf.
David Graf: I'm an optimist, I'm a hopeful person, and so, what caused me to leave was the attack on my profession. People forget that in this... Well, at least in the State of Colorado, we are professionals, we have to renew our license every five years, we have to have continuing education, we have to accumulate hours of that education, we have to show that we're still engaged in being a part of our profession. And when you put a lot of work into that and then see it stripped from you, naturally, it causes you to ask some questions about your career. Most teachers are highly educated. The majority of teachers I taught with had a master's degree, and we were not paid really, really well. The pay has increased over the past 10 years or so but, Woodland Park School District is still one of the lower paying districts in the State of Colorado, which is one of the lowest paying States in our nation when it comes to teacher pay.
So, when you're not making a ton of money and you're not being treated as a professional, and you lose that autonomy in the classroom, you really start to question your career path. I have a family, I've got three kids, I've got a lot to consider in my life, and that sounds selfish, but it's true. Overall, I'm hopeful, I think things come in waves, and I'm hopeful that this is just a tiny little wave in public education and that the right people will stand up and fight against it, and that policies will be made at State and Federal levels to resist what is happening in some of these places across the country.
I'm hopeful about that, and I still see value in being a teacher, it's to me, the greatest profession someone can do, you are a civil servant in my mind when you teach and you are trying to educate the next generation of our country and to continue to make this country as awesome as it's been so, I am hopeful, but there is a fight ahead of us. I believe there's a national narrative, a political national narrative, an intentional one, that is trying to lead communities, it's trying to split communities on public education. So, I still have faith in what parents across the nation believe in, but I do think that there's a very intentional divisive... We're intentionally being divided over public education on a political level.
Justin Reich: Maybe Woodland Park will stay on its current course. But what happens a lot in these kinds of communities that have big ideological shifts is that the community wakes up and they decide that they're losing something important in embracing wildly new directions. In any future, there's a pretty incredible History and English teacher out there looking for new opportunities, and that is a terrible loss for Woodland Park students. David argued that the changes in Woodland Park were driven in part by national groups that are trying to divide communities on public education. We asked law Professor Derek Black to talk about shifts in the national political landscape that connect to these local stories. He told us about those changes and what a bipartisan effort to fight back against them can look like.
Derek Black: Yeah, I wrote an op-ed right before the Biden, Trump election that said, this was the first time in history that we'd ever had a nominee of a major political party, attain the nomination of a major political party on a platform that was anti-public education. Public education as a concept and commitment is a bipartisan concept, and it has been since the nation's founding. Has race and other things caused racial issues and divisions between parties? Absolutely. But there's never been anyone that's taken the position that somehow or other, we need to scuttle the public education project, not at that level. But we had that this year, or we had that with Trump, Biden and President Trump at the time, taking the position that he wanted to guarantee private school choice to every student in the country. And of course, he had his patriotic education stuff as well.
That was astounding to me, and that was just another example of the thesis of my book, Schoolhouse Burning, which is that public education itself as a concept is under assault and that we all should be very worried about it to the extent that we understand it's part of a democratic society. Teachers are the most cohesive, easily identifiable people to stand up for public education. Teachers unions have been integral in terms of school funding and other things for decades. But in this current moment, I think all of our education organizations, the teacher organizations, the superintendent associations, the school board associations, all of these need to be rising up and again in a bipartisan way to defend the concept of public education. Now the CRT stuff gets a little bit trickier so let me pause here, because there's enough differences of opinion and enough noise there that it gets hard to find your bipartisan way, and people get confused.
But I think the Indiana teachers pushed back on the CRT Bill there shows you again, the foundational bipartisan concept. So there was a CRT Bill which had sailed through the House. It was sailing through the Senate, it was ready to... There was no political opposition. There was no way that this Bill was going to be defeated. All they'd do was call the vote it was going through. But the teacher said, and I'm summarizing here, we don't know about all that Critical Race Theory stuff you're talking about, but what we do know is that you've hired us to teach reading and writing to your children and arithmetic. And if you think we're going to be able to do that bipartisan job while also posting our lesson plans daily, responding to emails hourly and setting up meetings with parents who are concerned about our curriculum for the day, then you're crazy.
So ultimately this intervention into teachers' daily lives makes it impossible for them to do the very thing that at least 90% of the public thinks that they need to do. And that Bill died in Indiana. So, this is another example, which I just keep using over and over again, that not that I want to leave cont... I should say leave the most controversial aspects of this sometimes, to the lawyers and the whoever, but there are certain bedrock principles of education that are put at risk each time these issues come up. And I think what teachers can best do is, yell from the rooftops. You're putting the bedrock of education at stake here, and regardless of what your position is on CRT, you're hurting every kid's education in the State of South Carolina or North Dakota or wherever you're at and you need to find a different way to come at this problem if you think it actually is a problem.
Justin Reich: The effects of that kind of precarity on teacher morale are serious, and they probably are not urgently, immediately felt on any particular day, but they accumulate over time. And in an era in which teacher turnover is finally after the pandemic, beginning to show signs of real growth, and as labor markets are quite strong outside of education, I think there are a lot of school systems that may find that in enabling this kind of precarity and this kind of reduced morale really costs them over time.
Derek Black: Yeah, let me jump in there because this goes back to some work I did on school discipline and standardized tests, and now we sort of lump CRT on top of it. One of the most important factors that I have seen in terms of student achievement is the relationship between teacher and student. Those are trust relationship, which can be broken by either side of that equation, and that's because effective schools are about communities and relationships. And so, if teachers are in a bad place personally, that makes those relationships more difficult to manage.
Now we're in a world of accountability, accountability, transparency, transparency. But I think in the public education, and I'm not trying to sweep anything under the rug, but this hyper-focus and hyper-attention on teachers and individual, it's eroded over the course of 20 or 30 years, eroded, I think the room and space to build the relationships that are necessary to support children as children, children as individuals. And I don't have any good answers to how we reclaim that, but anyone that thinks we're going to standardize our way or legislate our way out of our education challenges without supporting humane environments, they're just crazy.
Justin Reich: We asked Sarah and David to weigh in.
Sara Kaka: No teachers that I have talked to, or that my colleagues have talked to, and I have a relatively large network of teacher educators who have lots of colleagues around different States. There's not a single teacher that any of us have talked to that have said, oh yeah, I'm indoctrinating my students. I'm telling them that it's bad to be white or that it's bad to be male. No one is doing that. We're taking primary sources and from a variety of different perspectives and Social Studies, and we're providing opportunities for students to create their own opinions because that's what good teaching is, and that's what we're teaching in teacher preparation programs today. And I think the fact that politicians are telling us how to do our jobs, they're telling teachers what they can and can't do, it's incredibly problematic.
And I think it's driving a really unfortunate narrative. And so I think, when we look at the issues that exist when it comes to the retention of teachers, when it comes to recruiting new teachers. Even our pre-service teachers are going into schools and they're having to be significantly more cautious than they would have been otherwise. I've been in teacher education now for 10 years, and when I go to observe teaching what I teach in my methods courses, it's shifted dramatically over the past 10 years from what I used to teach to what I focus now on in terms of advocacy and controversial issues and things like that. And it's a direct result of what's happening with legislation like this.
David Graf: I think what you're seeing nationwide, and I think Woodland Park is a microcosm of it, is it's a cultural shift. If you ask the members of our school district community, so parents who actually send their kids to our schools, overwhelmingly, and I believe this to be the case across the country, overwhelmingly, I would say the majority of parents support public education, support teachers and want what's best for their children in the classroom. Maybe they're not all engaged all the time, maybe they want more input in curriculum design and stuff like that, and that's fine, and there's means for that, for parents to do it. But I would say overwhelmingly, we still have support from the parents in our districts across the country.
Justin Reich: I think there's a lot of evidence that David is exactly right and there is widespread public support and parental support for local public schools. But support alone doesn't win school board elections, support alone doesn't shape school policy. Support matters most when supporters of public schools show up for public schools.
For I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. Special thanks to our guest, Derek Black, Sarah Kaka, and David Graf. We've got a few more episodes teed up for our Teacher Speech and the New Divide series, but first, we're going to take a quick July break. Our good friends at Upper Middlebrow, Jesse Dukes and Chris Bag have an episode on summer reading for teens. Recommendations that we're going to share. And then, in late July, we'll be back with more Teacher Speech and the New Divide. In the meantime, we've got some great resources out and forthcoming for Educators everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. If you pre-order the book, you send along your order number, a little bit of information, I'll send you a signed bookplate that you can put in your book, and you can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools.
That's all at iteratebook.com. We've got another course that's running right now with our partners at Learning for Justice called Youth in Front, about supporting student activism. You can visit youthinfront.org to learn more and check that out. And then you can see our documentary film. We have to do something different. Teachers on the Journey towards more equitable schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes. And if you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe. Until next time.