by

Liz Moore

PCDP Communications Committee Chair

Three School Board members in San Francisco have been recalled by voters. A Republican District Supervisor was recalled because he wasn’t far enough to the Right. A local high school district in Placer County has defied Governor Newsom’s mask mandate.

A November, 2021, NPR story by Deepa Shivaram reminds us that “Book burning was a practice perpetuated in Nazi Germany”. Kristallnacht – the ‘night of broken glass’ and burned books signaled to the world the horrors that were to come in World War II. Our moment of Kristallnacht could be the increasingly strident fight over JEDI – the teaching of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) concepts to all children and Critical Race Theory.

Editor of the Cook Political Report, Amy Walter, has warned Democrats “are not listening” to the Republican message. She states their message is gathering new voters to the Republican Party, especially minority populations who are always fearful of how their children are treated in schools. She added they “feel the continued masking (of children) means we’re still not safe and they’re turning to the Republican message”.

Zack Beauchamp reported on VOX “The fight over books in schools is part of a much bigger struggle, revealing where conservatism is today.” He stated “…the removal of the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from a Tennessee school district’s eighth-grade curriculum..” is one of “330 book challenges in the fall of 2021…a pace not seen in decades” according to the New York Times. He quotes Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Acadia University who tracks free speech in education, and concludes “You’re seeing really powerful movements under way to constrain expression. It’s not about discussing ideas objectively. It’s about not discussing them at all.” Sachs adds the American Right is “A conservative movement that once claimed to stand for limited government and (sic) is increasingly embracing the coercive use of law to commandeer a culture it fears it has lost.” He notes that a handful of districts, primarily in larger cities have made more challenges to books this year than in the past two decades combined.

The National Association of School Psychologists has weighed in on the ways this contributes to the “pushback” to Critical Race Theory (CRT). A resource paper (www.nasponline.org) sums up the primary points of misinformation about CRT, including:

CRT does not suggest all White individuals are racist and all racially minoritized individuals are oppressed
CRT is not a way to enact racism and discrimination against White individuals
CRT is not an attempt to make people feel bad about their race
CRT is not the same as teaching the good and bad parts of U.S. history.
CRT is not The 1619 Project, which is a Pulitzer Prize winning long-form journalism project.

For Democrats, an article by Milwaukee-based journalist specializing in education Barbara Miner and published in The Progressive (www.progressive.org), states the issue more politically. She states “the attack by (Grover) Norquist and his ilk is nothing less than a highly partisan attempt to undermine teacher unions and the Democratic Party, destroying our American tradition of public education in the process.” They want the private educational sector to get their hands on the multibillion education market and their funding; private education is inherently superior to public education; privatization undermines teacher unions, a key base of the Democratic Party, and the rhetoric can be used to woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party.

We need to hear several messages – this is not a good plan for our children, it is not a good option for schools and cities, it is not a good plan for our country but a winning plan for the Republicans. We can’t let them win!!