Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Does NCC DE Moms for Liberty support rifling through teachers' desks to find material to report them?


A really intriguing follow-up to my earlier post on Duval County Florida Public Schools pulling the biographies of Rosa Parks, Hank Aaron, and Sonia Sotomayor off school library shelves:

A reader responded by sharing this post on the Moms for Liberty Duval County Facebook page (I put in a link but unless you can convince them to let you join it's "private"):



This raises some really important questions:

  • Is Moms for Liberty in Duval County (and elsewhere) sending substitute teachers or parent volunteers into the schools with the specific mission of spying on, and reporting teachers?
  • Is a substitute teacher supposed to be rifling through the real teacher's papers on their desk to look for "incriminating" evidence? 
  • If that substitute was really concerned, wouldn't that person have more correctly brought it to the attention of the building principal rather than seek the right-wing glory of a "gotcha" moment?
  • And -- most important for local readers -- is this the kind of tactic that the New Castle County Chapter of Moms for Liberty supports? This page has been in existence for 30 weeks and so far only attracted 83 members with this lovely header:



We should probably also ask NCC M4L if they support categorizing the magazine and organization Learning for Justice (which has been a respected provider of lesson material about people of color since 1992) as a "leftist groomer magazine."

Here, by the way, is the article that substitute teacher was apparently more interested in than managing her assigned classroom:


There is a critically important legal point to be made here: Learning for Justice is a magazine for teachers, a resource to be used in planning, and the article itself was meant to educate teachers nationwide who might be considering such a lesson. Neither the magazine nor the article is published to be shared directly with elementary school students.

Even under the existing authoritarian Florida law, teacher reading material that is not intended to be passed out to students is NOT illegal. It doesn't violate any law or policy in Florida ... unless Governor DeSantis intends to police adult reading material (which, now that he is in a "damn, I can go lower" pissing contest with Donald Trump for the GOP nomination, might be coming soon).

If you'd personally like to ask that questions of the NCC Moms for Liberty leadership, here's how: they put links to their email right on their website (so nobody can get mad at me for pointing that out).

Finally, I do owe one debt of gratitude to Moms for Liberty: I had never seen Learning for Justice before.

It's a great resource for teachers concerned with their students learning in an inclusive environment (at least until the Thought Police arrive). It's free, and I paged through about a dozen top-flight articles.

To reiterate, here's where you find Learning for Justice. Go give them some love.


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