Guest: With teachers' hands tied, racism flourishes in the classroom
My daughter reports that there’s a small but growing group of students who start snickering in her high school classroom whenever their teacher mentions a Black person in a lesson — any Black person; even sometimes just the word “black.” This crowd will routinely wield racial slurs in the hallways during passing period against their peers and teachers.
Schoolchildren have a civil right to be educated in an environment free of offensive bigotry. The school has a responsibility under the law to discipline these students to put an end to this behavior. If I were principal, I would — on second thought, first I would call a meeting to solicit advice from the Black faculty and staff. But, off the top of my head, it seems like you should hold an assembly as soon as possible to introduce a zero-tolerance policy for the use of slurs at school. You’d invite some Black elders to talk to the students about how hurtful that behavior is; you’d assign your best history teacher to lecture about Title VI, the federal education law that forbids discrimination, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 more generally; then wrap it up with a quick lesson about the importance of treating other human beings with respect. From then on, aggressively enforce the zero-tolerance policy with progressive discipline until the problem subsides.
Yet, this overtly racist classroom behavior has escalated for weeks without so much as a “racial slurs are bad, m’kay?” over the intercom from the counselor. I grow angrier every time my daughter mentions it until the truth finally hits me: In Oklahoma, most of the education described in the previous paragraph violates House Bill 1775, Oklahoma’s fascist anti-racial education law. A lecture about why racist behavior is hurtful to both other students and the school might make a student feel sad about their own race, which is plainly against Oklahoma law. Similarly, any attempt to teach the children to be kinder to their peers could be construed as social-emotional learning: far too “woke” to teach in an Oklahoma public school.
The children reveling in their racist behavior know this, too. Were any teacher to challenge their awful behavior, these kids would gleefully report the attempt to their Fox News-addled parents; soon local news reporters will descend on the school and the teacher’s home, while the Oklahoma State Department of Education prepares to go after yet another teaching license.
Now that the meek acceptance of state-ordered censorship of basic educational ideas is part of the Oklahoma public school teacher’s everyday job description, is it any wonder that our best teachers are leaving the state in droves? To a public schoolteacher who has dedicated their career to educating children, the thought of standing in front of a classroom forbidden to teach the truth is abhorrent, and to participate in such a system is an immoral endorsement of our dystopian present.
Hundreds of Oklahoma’s most-thoughtful public school teachers have been exiled — just as those who want to privatize the nearly $3 billion annual education budget have intended all along.
Nick Brooke is the principal data scientist of Brooke Insights, a mathematics consultancy in Oklahoma City.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Teaching schoolchildren to be kind might be considered 'too woke'
