Can I Interest You in Some More Troubling Education Data?
Thanks to everyone who tolerated me hijacking this newsletter to promote my new album last week (out now via Bandcamp, and coming soon to online retailers/ streaming).
Now back, as promised, to grim education data!
First, the latest South Carolina CERRA (Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention & Advancement) numbers are very not-good. For the fifth straight year, South Carolina, like most US states, is seeing an increasing (and record-breaking) number of educator vacancies. The number supplied by SC school districts to CERRA is 1,613 vacancies (which includes classroom teachers and librarians). I’ll probably get more into the potential limitations of this (still very useful) statistic in a future piece, but suffice to say: it’s obviously very bad.
Those 1,613 vacancies represent a 9% increase in overall vacancies from the previous, record-breaking year, making it the highest number of recorded educator vacancies in state history. (To put these numbers in some perspective, there were 53,748 teachers in SC the last time the state Department of Education publicly updated its numbers. Even assuming significant growth since that time, that means about 3% of all teaching positions in South Carolina are currently vacant.) Of particular concern: school librarian vacancies increased 77% over the previous year. That kind of increase is catastrophic for the future of literacy efforts and access to library services for many children in our state. (Consider that many schools, if they are lucky, have a single librarian, and school librarians and their assistants— if they have any— are often holding together the whole school media center. A vacancy in that case means that the school does not have a functioning library/ computer lab/ etc.)
Of course, it’s not hard to see why people don’t want many of these jobs. South Carolina’s political leaders spent nearly all of their education-related energy last session trying to ban books, successfully passing school voucher legislation, and either actively spreading or passively accepting destructive propaganda about teachers and librarians “indoctrinating” students and/ or providing them with “pornography”.
Once the session was over, newly-elected Superintendent Ellen Weaver spent her time spreading propaganda about the “woke left” and its campaign for students souls at the Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warriors” conference, noisily (and without warning) breaking up with the local librarian organization, and introducing a sweeping book censorship bill that surpasses many of the worst examples of similar legislation in other states.
That’s probably old news to most people reading this, but for those of us who are concerned about the erosion of intellectual freedom and the representation of diverse perspectives, groups, and experiences, it can be difficult to explain the scale of the problem, both locally and nationally, to people who don’t follow the nuts and bolts of education policy.
The “Censorship/ Educator Harassment” spreadsheet (click here) contains examples of censorship efforts against schools and libraries, as well as harassment of librarians, teachers, school board members, and others involved in the public school system. There is a page of national examples, a South Carolina-specific page, and a map showing the clear overlap of book challenges and concentrations of power of the state Freedom Caucus and Moms for Liberty. (That much of this power is concentrated in the Upstate, Superintendent Weaver’s home turf and the location of her alma mater, Bob Jones University1, is probably not surprising to many South Carolinians.)
Of course, this spreadsheet is non-exhaustive, because book banning became one of the core energy generators in rightwing politics this year, drawing in disparate groups including legitimately anxious parents (often driven by propaganda and confusion about existing school policies); far-right political actors looking to make a buck or gain political power by scaring the crap out of said anxious parents; white nationalist groups using harassment of school boards and librarians as an attention-getting political strategy; and, to be honest, some fringe weirdos without much at stake in public schools, who seem to just want to have something to do once a month and have formed new identities and friend groups around reading “pornographic” passages at local board meetings and yelling at everyone for “censoring” them if they aren’t allowed to do so.
While you are free to do whatever you like with this information, hopefully it helps to illustrate how similar most of these harassment and censorship incidents are, both in South Carolina and across the nation. The similarity seems most easily explained by the fact that there is a coordinated and politicized national effort to smear educators and school systems as “woke indoctrinators” (or whatever the term du jour might be) in order to push other, tangentially-related political agendas (like school vouchers) while consolidating political power and satisfying the demands of national groups like the State Freedom Caucus Network, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.
If you’re in South Carolina, I encourage you to contact and get to know your local representative on the State Board of Education, a usually-quiet bureaucratic body that mostly helps oversee textbook adoption and hears challenges brought by districts against educator certificates, and which has now been dragged by Superintendent Weaver into the middle of a campaign to wrest control over what kids read from kids, their parents, trained educators, and local elected officials, and hand it to the board where she sits as secretary, and the department she heads. You know, like a “conservative” would.
My belief is that most State Board members (give or take a couple of Moms for Liberty representatives), who are mostly experienced current and former district superintendents, principals, and teachers, have no interest in becoming what an author of the regulations described as a kind of “appeals court” for book banning. And they will likely understand concerns about how this will harm students, families, teachers, and librarians, and create bureaucratic nightmares for both local boards and the State Board itself, as they are forced to hear unlimited book challenges from any “taxpayer” who wants to bring them, and must respond within 30-60 days, no matter how many books are challenged at once. The spreadsheet hopefully helps to connect the dots between our out-of-control and growing shortage of willing, qualified educators, and the kind of scary rhetoric that makes people believe those same people we are trying to recruit and retain are somehow villainous brainwashers out to steal your kids’ souls.
If you’re not in South Carolina, unfortunately, your state is probably fighting the same dumb fight, as examples from nearly every state (included on the spreadsheet) show.
I think advocates for education in many states, including South Carolina, made the early mistake of watching states like Florida and sighing in relief because it couldn’t happen here. Unfortunately, Florida’s early example merely provided a template for crazier and crazier (and craftier and craftier) bills and regulations and district rules that make it easier to ban books and harder to challenge those bans.
If your state isn’t already in the midst of this kind of attack on intellectual freedom and democratic values, that’s great! I suggest you make sure your elected officials know that you support librarians, teachers, and families who want their kids to read books, now, rather than waiting to have to respond to the Moms for Liberty narrative later.
And if you feel there are examples that help illustrate these trends, but aren’t on the spreadsheet yet, please let me know!
South Carolinians can also follow the efforts of SCEA, ProTruth SC, Freedom to Read, and SC ACLU.
Columbia University professor Olatunde Johnson’s article, “The Story of Bob Jones University v. United States: Race, Religion, and Congress' Extraordinary Acquiescence” (2010) is long but worth reading. It provides a history of Bob Jones University’s continued resistance to racial integration in the context of changes in the IRS rules granting tax-exempt status to private schools. (In short, the IRS and courts came to interpret a tax-exempt educational organization as being one that did not violate “clearly established public policy,” such as federal anti-segregation laws. Bob Jones University, which was founded with an explicit policy of excluding black students, continued at least some of its racial segregation policies, such as a prohibition against interracial marriage or dating on campus, until the year 2000— which was, incidentally, during Superintendent Weaver’s time there as a student.) While the Reagan administration attempted to overturn the IRS rule, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld it, finding that the IRS could deny tax exemptions to private organizations that racially discriminated.
The context of the article raises compelling parallels to our own time, in which segregation academies and other private institutions supporting racial segregation use rhetoric about “declining morality” in the public sphere as a justification for creating alternative education programs for white, evangelical Christian students. That Weaver has made a career out of supporting school vouchers, and has focused, to a significant degree, on “woke indoctrination” and the idea that there is “pornography” in public schools, does not seem like a coincidence. The arguments of those who opposed the Court’s ruling should also sound familiar: many maintained that taking away a private organization’s tax-exempt status was a violation of religious freedom.