Valuing Teachers’ Voices on World Teachers’ Day—and Every Day
Our guest author is Julie Vogtman, Senior Director of Job Quality, National Women’s Law Center.
Did you know that Saturday, October 5th was World Teachers’ Day? According to Unesco, one of the day’s convenors, this year’s theme is “Valuing teacher voices: towards a new social contract for education,” which is meant to “underscor[e] the urgency of calling for and attending to teachers’ voices to address their challenges” and “most importantly, to acknowledge and benefit from the expert knowledge and input that they bring to education.”
This is a vital mission—one that merits far more than a day to honor. And it’s particularly important in this moment, when teachers in many U.S. school districts feel that the “expert knowledge and input that they bring to education” is being disregarded more than ever. When at least 18 states have enacted laws restricting K-12 public school teachers' instruction on topics related to race, gender, sexuality, and other so-called “divisive concepts”—and PEN America has documented more than 10,000 instances of book bans in the 2023-24 school year alone—many teachers across the country lack the autonomy and respect for their profession that they want and deserve.
At the National Women’s Law Center, we wanted to know more about what teachers are experiencing in states where these restrictions and book bans are in effect—so we asked them. In recent interviews led by Topos Partnership with 25 teachers based in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and several other states, teachers described a loss of agency as their expertise is disregarded in favor of “canned curricula” and “scripts”—their voices being drowned out by a small but vocal group of extremist parents and policymakers. As one teacher in a rural middle school in Wisconsin explained, when educators have no flexibility to adapt or depart from a strict curriculum, “[w]e have to follow it even if the kids don't care about it at all. So it's harder to tap into student interest.”
Carla,* who has been honored twice as her Florida region’s Teacher of the Year during her 32-year career, expressed similar sentiments: “Everything has to be vetted,” she told us, weariness surfacing as she reflected on the changes in her state’s policies over the past six years. “The fact that I have to think about what I can and cannot discuss. . .I have to refrain. . . I cannot share.” And she called out the erroneous rationale behind increasing censorship policies and practices: “Because we don't indoctrinate. All we wanna do is teach.”
Carla’s frustration is shared by many teachers, who told us how restrictions ostensibly intended to prevent “indoctrination” in fact prevent accurate and inclusive instruction. In many of the schools where the educators we spoke with teach, a sweeping range of topics have been deemed “controversial” or “divisive”—including, as one North Carolina teacher explained, “that racism exists. . . [and] is a problem.” A special education teacher in Wisconsin told us how one of her colleagues, an eighth grade U.S. history teacher, has to be “very careful how he talks about civil rights issues or women's rights issues” and avoid answering questions that might “get too deep into some of the issues that are a part of . . . our history.” And a teacher in Florida lamented that subjects from slavery to LGBTQIA+ identity are essentially off limits, “[s]o our kids are sort of getting a one-sided view of things because we're not allowed to expand upon what they already are seeing in their environments. We can't open their minds to things because we're not allowed to.”
In short, the teachers conveyed that the result of extremist restrictions is a climate of fear, censorship, and exclusion—a climate that alienates LGBTQIA+ students and students of color, deprives children of genuine and inclusive learning opportunities, and makes it hard for teachers to stay in jobs they love. Allowing politicians, rather than professional educators, to dictate classroom instruction creates an environment in which—in the words of an elementary school teacher in Florida—“everyone’s saying the same thing: ‘I don't know how much longer I can do this. . . like this.’ . . . We all love what we do, but in the current climate and the way that it's going. . . and the tying of teacher's hands, no one wants to be in a job where they feel like they have no freedom. No one wants to feel that way.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We know the restrictions that are silencing our teachers are driven by attempts to organize a small, nonrepresentative, extremist group of parents in ways that have undermined trust and collaboration between educators and parents more broadly and obscured their common interests. The truth is that most parents oppose book bans and support teaching about the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in public schools—and oppose state lawmakers restricting what subjects teachers and students discuss in the classroom.
And when policymakers and administrators listen to teachers and trust their expertise, “there can be happy, happy stories,” as Allison, who has had a 30-year teaching career in North Carolina, shared. “We started thinking about institutional racism in our school, [and] one of my students says, ‘Why is it that I'm the only Black kid in AP chem?’ And we're like, ‘Good question!’ And so we went back and looked.” Allison explained how—by tackling implicit bias in ways that didn’t end in defensiveness, listening to kids’ experiences, and enlisting the students themselves to contribute to changing the school’s culture and its race-based assumptions—a Department of Equity Affairs in her county led to the transformation of AP courses from a “white kid class” to a more diverse group. “So all these things that are problematic, they can be changed if somebody in the upper administration says, ‘This matters to us’, and then there's support for follow through.”
Allison’s story, and so many other stories we heard, make clear that when we respect teachers—when we respect their expertise and their integral role in our communities—we all benefit. As one Florida teacher concluded, “If [children’s] teachers feel safe, their teachers feel valued, their teachers feel motivated, then that's gonna carry over into the classroom because they'll feel safer that they can teach what they want to teach, that they can teach how they wanna teach it, and that will provide a better quality education for their kids.” At NWLC, we are inspired by teachers’ dedication to children and to honest, inclusive education. And we are committed to working with them, alongside parents and community members, to build schools where every child is free to read and learn, and every teacher is free to tell the truth; schools where both students and teachers feel safe, valued, and welcome to share their experiences and their identities—without fear.
To hear more from teachers, we hope you’ll read our report, “I Don’t Know How Much Longer I Can Do This: Teachers’ Experiences Amid Attacks on Public Education.”
*Teachers’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.