Michigan education leaders lament politicization of teaching

Teachers and their allies across the country have been the focus of attacks from Republicans, something that has affected Michigan educators.

But the targeting is not just at the national level, and it’s not just superficial. For years now, state and local politicians have attacked teachers for doing their jobs and passed laws and rules restricting what they can teach. The attacks have gotten so bad that some told the Michigan Independent that the hostile environment is discouraging people from entering the teaching profession.

“Morale is very low, and for us, it has to do with a school board that they really, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Toni Coral, president of the Hamtramck Federation of Teachers. “So we’ve had massive turnover of teachers.”

In a recent example, a clip resurfaced in August of vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance criticizing American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten for not having children.

“Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone,” Vance said, according to reporting from The Guardian.

Republican governors have also scapegoated educators. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, the architect of the “Don’t Say Gay” policies that have spread across the country, made comments in 2022 claiming teachers aren’t really teaching.

“Our school system should be about educating kids, not indoctrinating kids. And that means we have gone on the offensive against toxic ideologies,” DeSantis said after announcing his ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign.

DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law forbids discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K-12 classrooms. A Florida court largely rolled back the law earlier this year, but not before the law spawned copycats in other states.

At the local level, districts in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have banned books; recently, parents in a Milwaukee-area school district complained that they believed a book that was part of their child’s pre-K curriculum was “grooming” children. The parents got their school district to remove it over the objections of their school’s principal.

There have been plenty of incidents closer to home, too. In 2022, protesters shut down a Dearborn Public Schools board meeting to express anger over books with LGBTQ+ themes in local school libraries, which the protesters claimed were inappropriate.

This past April, “inappropriate, angry, and threatening phone calls, emails and social media messages” drove DeWitt Public Schools, outside of Lansing, to cancel a voluntary mini-lesson on gender identity and pronouns. 

“The goal of the voluntary mini-lesson was to help promote Dewitt Public Schools’ vision of a safe, nurturing, and supportive learning environment where all learners can succeed,” Superintendent Shanna Spickard said at the time, according to NBC News. “Unfortunately, it has become a major disruption and distraction to that vision in which our staff, administrators, and students feel unsafe.”

This sort of anti-educator attitude has seeped into all sorts of interactions, Coral says.

“There’s the daily kind of disrespect you get from, you know, a variety of students, or sometimes parents, or just in general. It’s out there,” she said. “There’s just this negative energy towards teachers, and people can only take so much.”

Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said the feeling is one that is common to teachers in her district as well.

“We feel as if every day there is a new threat or attack on public education,” she said. “And so now it has gotten to the place where our curriculum is being threatened, what we teach, what we can say. These things have never before been in question, what is being taught in the classroom. Now it looks as if there is a certain party that would like to restrict what our young people learn in school, and it feels like to educators, a strategy to dumb down America and not teach the truth.”

Wilson-Lumpkins said she wishes politicians would stop using education to create division. Project 2025 makes clear that if former President Donald Trump wins the White House again, Republicans will defund education and purge ideological dissent. The plan calls for dissolving the federal Department of Education.

“There’s no reason to politicize education,” she said. “Children need to know everything. It’s our duty. It’s our job to make sure that they are prepared, because they are the next generation, and who would dare try to cripple them with hiding or pretending as if certain circumstances or certain events did not occur?”