The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of broadening the conversation about how public policy affects the daily lives of people across our state. Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas.
As Kansas schools, from kindergarten to graduate school, return to classes this month, our political culture has invented new ways to torture teachers and other educators.
Education reporter Suzanne Perez of KMUW has chronicled the construction of this torture device by state lawmakers, parents and boards of education.
In Derby, the board of education opposed the adoption of a strategic plan that promoted diversity and mental health as personnel and education objectives. From an unidentified board member: “Schools are not in the mental health business.”
IN Wichita, board member Kathy Bond gave Perez’s Twitter feed a series of proposals. Bond asked to be more involved in the projects and administrative matters — a proposal that a fellow board member said was not the board’s responsibility. Continuing her bemused surveillanceBond also requested that the board have “employee-level access to the district’s website.”
Bond asked for a policy change that would allow parents protect their students from movies in the classroom produced by Disney or hosted by Disney+, a move that brought derision from my family dinner table. Given Bond’s conservative stance (which also included a dig at student dress codes), we can assume that she resents Disney for its resistance to “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. in Florida this year.
Perez also wrote about a Destiny Library management system — located in the Shawnee Mission, Goddard, Topeka and Wichita school districts — that allows parents to monitor their students’ access to books.
Goddard, after removing 29 books from library circulation last year, “Families were emailed step-by-step instructions on how to view their child’s library history, going back up to 500 titles,” Perez wrote this week.
Implicit message: Don’t trust the school librarian to provide safe reading materials.
From our legislators in Topeka, educators have another annoyance. A law passed in May forces teachers and administrators to second-guess their use of surveys. statute, HB 2567provides confusing and vague language that could be read as limiting almost all surveys without prior parental consent.
Confusion from teachers flooded my inbox this month. As the director of a nonprofit organization that supports high school journalism, I heard from teachers who were concerned that their student reporters could not survey other students under the new legislation. They worried that polls for yearbooks and school news websites would be hampered by asking such good questions as, “What was your favorite rally of the people this year?”
Confusion from teachers flooded my inbox this month. As the director of a nonprofit organization that supports high school journalism, I heard from teachers who were concerned that their student reporters could not survey other students under the new legislation.
Fortunately for student journalists, “the amended statute would only apply to staff, not students,” according to Harrison Rosenthal from Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
But what about the staff and teachers?
The legislation still prohibits “any survey administered during the school day that contains questions about the personal and private attitudes, values, beliefs, or practices of the student or any of the student’s family, friends, or peers.”
The statute requires specific written parental consent for any proposed survey, and even then “the law requires that a student be informed that the student has the right to refuse to take such a survey.”
School districts, which have far more vital goals after more than two years of difficult education, were confused by the creation of legal training and guidelines. Unfortunately, most teachers said the advice was confusing about how they could or could not use surveys.
All this signals a crisis of confidence in our teachers. Even if the school administration trusts a survey, even if the teacher trusts the survey, the parent or student can opt out – just because.
This particular form of torture, with dozens of overt and veiled attacks on educators coming from every direction, reminds me of the infamous Iron Maiden: a human-shaped box in which a person can be imprisoned with hundreds of spikes confining the victim. Imagine the pain and anguish when you are constrained from moving in any direction without being hit and punished. Class has become vindictively restrictive.
Even outside of schools, this suspicious attitude toward teachers colors the way the public thinks about the profession. This week in the faculty lounge here at KU, one of my colleagues mentioned that she had an undergraduate student interested in becoming a high school journalism teacher. She was excited for me to meet the student and encourage that career path.
Another colleague leaned back in their chair and said, “What journalism teacher do you know who is least happy after leaving the profession?” The message was clear: teaching is brutal these days.
All of this is happening as school districts struggle to attract and retain teachers. Topeka Public Schools announced a plan this month to reward staff (including substitute teachers) with up to $8,000 in bonus pay. In my decades in education, I have yet to see a wave of pay bonuses like these.
These twin, dissonant messages—valuing teachers financially while publicly distrusting them—emerge from the abyss of our pandemic-era schools. We are literally paying for the distrust we expressed to our teachers. In return for teachers asking our children to wear masks and social distance, we served them constant contempt.
Teachers leaving the profession forces us to lure them back now.
It seems that Iron Maiden exists much more in our historical imagination than in actual history. However, the limitations we are placing on our teachers are real: cages of rules, insults, and suspicions that threaten to undermine all of our schools.
The beginning of the school year is also a time when schools ask for help from parents. We can signal to teachers our value to them in small ways, whether by providing gifts for the teachers’ lounge or volunteering at a school event.
Essentially, however, our support for them must be an attitude. A stance that refuses to elect school board members in hopes of eroding teachers’ liberties. An attitude that calls out the people in your life who scoff at teachers and question their expertise.
An attitude that builds teachers up when they need it most.
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