A Teacher’s-Eye View of The Radical Right’s Crusade to Take Down Public Education
Public education in America is under assault from the far right: White supremacists opposed to a curriculum that teaches the enduring effects of anti-Black racism. Profiteers eager to divert taxpayer dollars into private schools. It’s all part of a well-funded, well-connected far-right campaign to destroy public education.
Now, for the first time, K-12 educators from states as far-flung as Florida, Texas, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington are telling their harrowing, painfully personal stories. In Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education – and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, 14 public school teachers describe being threatened, ostracized, smeared as “pedophiles” and “Marxists,” placed on leave, and fired for teaching the historical truth of the struggle for racial justice, offering books by and about LGBTQ+ people, and, in one case, for wearing "insufficiently" feminine attire.
“It’s a phenomenal, unprecedented moment that we’re in,” says a librarian, recently retired from her Texas school. “It’s surprising how many people don’t know what’s going on. I talk to reporters who have no idea. And they’re reporters.”
100% of the profits from this book go to the teachers whose testimonies made Trouble in Censorville possible. Purchasing the book directly from the press, via Michigan Publishing, affords them a higher percentage of the profits.
Edited by Nadine M. Kalin and Rebekah Modrak
Foreword by Jonathan Friedman, Director of Free Expression and Education Programs, PEN America
Published by Disobedience Press
ISBN: 978-1-964098-00-5
Pages: 296
Contributors: Ellen Barnes, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., Monica Coles, Gavin Downing, Carolyn Foote,
Matthew D. Hawn, Martha Hickson, Jill James,
Mark Johnson, Misty L.C., Elissa Malespina, Sally Middleton, Julie Miller, and Melissa Grandi Statz.
In one wealthy Texas public school district, the PTO hands out envelopes of money to teachers – tacit bribes to ensure that teachers are answerable to parents. In a Seattle suburb, a middle school principal with her hand in the sand tells the librarian, Gavin Downing, that books should reference “handholding” and nothing else. After Julie Miller, a high school librarian, protects All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir by George M. Johnson, who is Black, queer, and nonbinary, from a book challenge, her colleague chides her for not being a Christian “gatekeeper.” In Wisconsin, community members threaten Melissa Grandi Statz, a fourth-grade teacher, because she discussed the Black Lives Matter protests with her students; when they brandish their guns in Facebook posts about her, Ms. Grandi Statz moves her son from his ground-floor bedroom to a second-floor room where he wouldn’t be as vulnerable to a drive-by shooting.
Yet teachers are fighting back. They’re mobilizing colleagues, parents, and community members who share their faith in the freedom to read, the freedom to think critically, the freedom to challenge small-minded provincialism. Their stories of frontline resistance, collected here, provide a battle plan for confronting censorship, rallying support, and mobilizing a grassroots defense of public schools.
Trouble in Censorville teachers’ gripping stories are enhanced by a timeline that situates today’s far-right war on public education in the context of American history, moving briskly from Reconstruction to the anti-left and anti-gay fearmongering of the McCarthy era to the Black Lives Matter movement to the Trump presidency.
Terrifying, infuriating, and inspiring, Trouble in Censorville sounds the alarm for a democracy on fire.