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Shari Conditt
Should teachers be apolitical?
When even facts are politicized, guidance that teachers steer clear of
politics in the classroom is all but impossible to navigate
By Charlotte West
February 2, 2021
Samantha Palu, a high school government teacher in South Dakota, came
to school on Jan. 7, 2021, armed with a plan to talk to all of her
classes about the attack on the U.S. Capitol the previous day. When she
started at the school in August, she was told not to say anything
“political” in class — a difficult mandate for an educator whose job it
is to teach about politics.
But for Palu, not addressing the Capitol violence would have been a
dereliction of her duty as an educator. “I just knew that I couldn’t
stay silent, because that would just add to the problem,” she said.
“This stopped being Republicans versus Democrats. These were domestic
terrorists that did this and that’s what I told my students.”
During the discussion, a student walked out of her class. The school’s
administration later received a phone call from the student’s family
expressing concern that Palu was advancing a “political agenda,” she
said. Palu’s principal backed her up, but she worries about backlash
when she tackles controversial topics in the future.
Across the country, teachers like Palu have grappled with how — and
whether — to discuss the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and other
seismic events with their students. While some districts instructed
teachers to address the insurrection in class, others did not provide
any guidance at all or asked that their educators remain silent on the
issue, teachers said.
There is a longstanding principle that public school teachers, as
representatives of the state, must not attempt to influence their
students’ political beliefs, according to Wayne Journell, an education
professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While that
basic stance is relatively uncontroversial, he said, it has gradually
morphed into a belief that teachers should be apolitical and refrain
from sharing their personal views with students.
This has contributed to school and district policies requiring teachers
to remain politically neutral in the classroom. Educators often hear
cautionary tales in the media of colleagues who were disciplined for
being “too political.” Parents, meanwhile, are increasingly pushing
back when they hear of teachers discussing current events with students.
As a result, teachers are sometimes reluctant to discuss any
controversial topics at all — especially in the current climate when
the legitimacy of science and facts has been called into question.
Political neutrality “is really difficult to navigate, because it seems
like as a country, we can’t even agree on some of the basic facts,”
said Isabel Morales, a high school social studies teacher in Los
Angeles. “One of my colleagues said, ‘I never thought that saying that
we have to count the votes would be considered partisan or that I’m
indoctrinating students.’”
Yet experts say that it’s impossible to remove politics from the
classroom because teaching itself is a political act. “Education itself
is political — who chooses the textbooks, who funds schools, how
schools are funded,” said Alyssa Dunn, an education professor at
Michigan State University. “So to say that curriculum has to be
apolitical is a misunderstanding of the fact that education is a
political space to begin with.”
“It’s no secret that I dislike Trump. But I don’t place my dislike at
the forefront of my discussion of the events of the day. The kids also
know that I’m going to be fair about the information that I share with
them and that I’m very particular about my facts.”
In his research, Journell found that students don’t care where their
teachers stand politically as long as they feel like they aren’t being
pressured to think a certain way. “They actually like knowing where
their teachers stand,” he said. “It’s the district administrators and
parents who cause the problems.”
In fact, teachers disclosing their beliefs can help students learn to
think critically, Journell said. Being introduced early on to the idea
that adults have individual viewpoints helps young people understand
the concept of bias and better distinguish between fact and opinion, he
said. But while teachers should share their own views, they should
never tell students how they or their family members should vote.
“Teachers should help students understand what they believe and why
they believe it,” he said.
Yet many teachers say they feel uncomfortable simply discussing topics
that might be perceived as political. In a recent EdWeek Research
Center survey, 86 percent of teachers reported that they did not talk
about former President Trump’s claims of voter fraud with students.
Most said they didn’t because it was outside their discipline, but 18
percent said that the topic could lead to parent complaints and 14
percent said that they feared being accused of indoctrinating students.
In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey, 86 percent of teachers said
they did not talk about former President Trump’s claims about voter
fraud with students. Most said they didn’t because it was outside their
discipline, but 18 percent said that the topic could lead to parent
complaints and 14 percent said that they feared being accused of
indoctrinating students.
While there hasn’t been any systematic study of how many teachers have
lost their jobs because they expressed their political opinions in the
classroom, educators sometimes have an outsized view of how often such
discipline occurs because of the incidents that garner public
attention, said Dunn. “All we see are the major stories that make the
news, not the many hundreds of thousands of teachers who engage in
issues of justice in their classrooms every day,” she said.
Last fall, for example, an English teacher in Texas made headlines
after being placed on paid leave because she had Black Lives Matter and
LGBTQ+ posters on the walls of her virtual classroom. The teacher was
reinstated but then declined to return to her classroom and instead
called for the introduction of explicit anti-racist policies in the
district.
Teachers who do not feel they have the support of their administration,
or hold political beliefs at odds with the prevailing views in their
community, tend to feel less inclined to talk frankly with students
about current events and other issues, say teachers and experts.
Educators teaching remotely during the pandemic may also be more
reluctant to engage in controversial topics because parents are often
present for virtual instruction.
Teachers in schools with a progressive curriculum backed up by state
standards about what students should learn, and those with the support
of a strong teachers’ union, are often more comfortable having these
conversations, according to educators and experts.
Mark Gomez, a history and social studies curriculum specialist for the
Salinas Union High School District, works in Monterey, a predominantly
blue county in California. He said that liberal and conservative
educators alike feel they are silenced by notions of political
neutrality. “I’ve had teachers express how they feel like they’ve been
targeted and called out for having unpopular conservative views in our
school spaces,” he said.
“I’ve had teachers express how they feel like they’ve been targeted and
called out for having unpopular conservative views in our school
spaces.”
Mark Gomez, a history and social studies curriculum specialist for the Salinas Union High School District
His district, which is majority Latino, has adopted a social studies
curriculum that includes ethnic studies and critical race theory. But
even though talking about race is built into the curriculum, teachers
still sometimes get mixed messages from school leaders about what they
can and cannot say on that and other issues, he said.
Other teachers say they’ve found ways to navigate potentially explosive
conversations — with a lot of practice. Duane Moore, a 20-year veteran
in the classroom, teaches U.S. government and African American history
in right-leaning Hamilton, Ohio. He says he’s not shy about letting
students know his political views because he builds a strong foundation
based on facts and mutual trust. “It’s no secret that I dislike Trump,”
he said. “But I don’t place my dislike at the forefront of my
discussion of the events of the day. The kids also know that I’m going
to be fair about the information that I share with them and that I’m
very particular about my facts.”
When Terrance Lewis, a social studies teacher in Columbus, Georgia,
first started teaching four years ago, he invited representatives of
the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit providing legal
representation to wrongly convicted individuals, to come to his ninth
grade government class to discuss racial disparities in sentencing. The
topic is outlined in Georgia’s state social studies standards.
Soon after the classroom visit, a parent complained about it on a
community Facebook page, arguing that talking about race is divisive
and it’s time to move on, Lewis recalled. Some parents defended Lewis,
he said, but most “were calling for my job.”
Lewis’s principal supported him, though, and emailed the parent who
made the original Facebook post, which was eventually removed.
Now, before any discussions that could be considered controversial,
Lewis emails parents and describes how the topics fit into state social
studies standards. “I think a lot of times parents think you force
their children to think one way or the other,” said Lewis. “And I just
do that just to be proactive and to ensure that parents are [informed].”
“The heart of the work I do is based on inquiry. So I’m really more focused on question-asking than I am on answer-giving.”
Shari Conditt, a government teacher in Vancouver, Washington
Some educators, though, say that sharing their thoughts on an issue can
impede students’ ability to form their own opinions. “The heart of the
work I do is based on inquiry,” said Shari Conditt, a government
teacher in Vancouver, Washington. “So I’m really more focused on
question-asking than I am on answer-giving.”
“I can’t divorce who I am and how I think about the world all the time
from how I teach,” Conditt acknowledged. “The best I can do is try to
cover it up as much as possible.” She does that by paying attention to
her words.
When a video of former President Donald Trump making vulgar remarks
about women was released just weeks before the 2016 election, Conditt
said she “talked around it,” rather than directly criticizing Trump’s
conduct. She told her students that one of the candidates had made a
comment that angered people. And she focused the conversation on one
question.
“This is how I put it: ‘You have to ask yourself, are you comfortable
with how the candidate has spoken about women?’ ” she said. “The minute
I use the word ‘misogynistic’ in my classroom, I know that I’m going to
be hearing from my conservative parents.”
The social studies teachers at Morales’ school in Los Angeles have
focused on media literacy in the aftermath of the Capitol attacks. She
showed a clip from PBS stating that pro-Trump supporters had stormed
the Capitol, and also noted claims that the rioters were antifa, a
far-left activist group. Morales then discussed how to think critically
about those statements and discern which was accurate.
“This is something we’re seeing in our society that we cannot agree
on,” she told her students. “And so the skill that we need to build as
a classroom is really knowing what the truth is. And so if we are
hearing people say different things, how can we find out the truth?”
Going forward, said Gomez, the educator in Monterey County, California,
schools ought to be encouraging students to have more conversations
about politics and other controversial topics — not less. That’s how
youth will encounter different perspectives, and help refine their own.
“These are young people who are still formulating their own civic
identities, so to deprive them of that, I think that’s a disservice,”
he said.
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