During the pandemic, harsh tensions arose between school teachers and parents concerning school lockdowns. Parents were stressed about their school age children being home all day, and having to use a remote learning system that clearly wasn't the same as a classroom. Teachers were stressed about a reopening of schools exposing them and their families to covid. It was a difficult situation in which there were no easy answers, and it lead to school board meetings that turned into shouting matches.
Not surprisingly, even with the pandemic mostly over, teachers still feel undervalued, underpaid and overworked, and many of them have responded by leaving the profession, making those who choose to remain work even harder to cover for those missing positions. Currently, polls show that over half of teachers are considering quitting. You would think that this situation would result in a reevaluation of how our country treats the teaching profession, with higher salaries provided for their essential work. Instead what we have mostly seen is right wing politicians sensing a weakness in public education and pouncing.
Since 2020, Republican politicians have seized on the issue of so called "Critical Race Theory", implying that "woke" public school teachers are teaching white students how to hate themselves when they teach American history. Ignoring the fact that there was no such specific curriculum in out public schools, the right wing media whipped up fear of white children being "brainwashed". Then, quickly moving onto another school issue, conservatives dusted off the old chestnut of children being exposed to "pornographic" books, and started pushing for concerned parents to start searching and purging school libraries. As with the whole CRT controversy, this was all absurdly overblown, with one conservative politician running an ad in which her young son appeared and said he once got nightmares from a book he read in school, without mentioning that he read that book when he was 17 and in an AP literature class, and that the book in question was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Things got even worse earlier this year when Florida Governor RonDe Santis passed the so called "Don't say Gay" bill that limited what teachers and students could talk about in classrooms concerning sexual orientation. After passing the bill, he claimed that anyone opposing it supported sexually grooming children, which now has become another conservative talking point. As the New York Times pointed out, in the last two years a dozen states have passed laws limiting what teachers can teach, and even say, in their classrooms.
Personally, I do't think that any of those attacks on public schools would have happened if the pandemic hadn't primed already angry parents to vent at school board meetings. With teachers already pushed to the breaking point, the time was ripe for conservatives to strike. Conservatives have been angry at public schools for decades; part of it is from the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party, that miss the days when creationism was taught as fact. Another part is the fact that public school teachers are one of the few remaining union jobs in the country, and unions have favored Democrats ever since President Ronald Reagan fired members of the Air Traffic Control union way back in 1981.
And there's an even deeper movement at play here: the conservative school voucher movement, which has been used already in some states, and which would allow parents to take the government funds that were to be used on their children's schooling and use them to pay for tuition to private schools. Conservatives know that the more public schools are thrown in disarray, the more popular the school voucher movement becomes. And the real danger of the voucher movement is that it provides an end around over that pesky separation between church and state. Putting it bluntly, if conservatives have their way, government tax dollars could be used to pay for children to attend schools that teach them dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark! For conservatives, this is a no brainer, as it's a simultaneous attack on unions and a way to try and turn our nation's children into good little right wing voters.
Sadly, the days of school vouchers could become a reality soon (I can't imagine that the current Supreme Court would oppose them). The only recourse we have for now is Americans to start appreciating the difficult job that our public school teachers have and support them as much as we can.
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