Editor’s note: As America observes Teacher Appreciation Week, May 5-9, one of our longtime editors offers his thoughts on new threats facing educators today.
All districts — It was just a little note written next to my grade on an English paper, but I have never forgotten it: “One day I’ll be able to say, ‘I knew him when.’”
The note was from Winnifred Daignault, my English teacher at Williamston High School. In her classes I read Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hardy, Hawthorne and other great writers in what was then the traditional canon. I also wrote essays, one of which elicited her comment envisioning my future potential as a writer. It has stayed with me ever since, expanding as it did my sense of possibility as to what I could accomplish out there in the world. That simple sentence played no small part in what became my lifelong vocation as a journalist.
Mrs. Daignault takes pride of place when I think back to the many great teachers who influenced the course of my learning and life. They go all the way back to Dorothy Cryder, my kindergarten teacher at Ottawa Hills Elementary School. I recalled her “kind and comforting presence” in a column about the devotion of teachers at the outset of the pandemic, when many were sending remote love letters to their students during lockdown.
These life-influencing teachers come to mind as America observes Teacher Appreciation Week, May 5-9, when countless students will shower their teachers with thank-you cards and shiny red apples will fly off grocery shelves. The National PTA provides an online tool kit of ways to celebrate teachers, from certificates of appreciation to coloring pages and acrostic poems. No doubt many Kent County families will do their part.
Yet in this tumultuous season it feels like teachers are not so much appreciated as attacked. They’re under assault from the Trump administration for allegedly teaching “woke” books, making white children feel bad about America’s legacy of racism and showing supposedly illegal preference to students of color.
In Trump’s inaugural address this past January he charged, “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them.” This followed predictably his 2017 inaugural condemnation of “an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.”
But this time around, Trump and Linda McMahon, his wrestling-executive-turned-secretary-of-education, have followed his strong words with stronger action.
The U.S. Department of Education has demanded K-12 schools stop promoting diversity, education and inclusion programs or face a loss of funding including Title I funds for our most economically disadvantaged students. The U.S. DOE — whose very existence the administration wants to shut down — charges DEI programs, and any race-based preference in treatment of students and hiring of staff, violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The department made its threat clear in a Feb. 14 “dear colleague” letter to educators, followed by an April 3 demand to certify compliance or else.
Thankfully, these decrees have gotten forceful pushback in the courts, including a recent lawsuit by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and 18 other states, asserting they already comply with Title VI. The American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and NAACP also sued, alleging the federal guidance is too vague and could threaten core instruction and programs for teachers. Three federal judges issued injunctions blocking the DEI ultimatum from taking effect, at least for now.
Local educators are also pushing back. They include Wyoming Public Schools Superintendent Craig Hoekstra, who sent a letter to his staff and community defending the value of DEI when it is properly understood.
“It is difficult to understand how anyone could view embracing diversity, promoting fairness and justice, and including every human being as negative,” Hoekstra told School News Network. “The very foundation of who we are as a district is rooted in these values.”
Amen to that. “DEI” is being wielded as a catch-all shorthand for indoctrinating kids’ minds with a radical-woke agenda. That’s not what I’ve seen in the classrooms of the teachers we cover in our local school districts.
There, I have found teachers creatively cultivating the value of what each and every child has to offer, regardless of their race, gender, disability or home situation. I have marveled at the energy and stamina teachers bring to these students, knocking themselves out each class period to engage young minds and enliven their sense of life’s possibilities for them.
I fear that the anti-DEI assault, coupled with draconian cuts to funding research on teaching and slashing staff at the Education Department, will chase some of our best teachers from classrooms and discourage others from entering them. It will stifle teachers’ freedom to teach as they see fit without fear of legal consequences. No wonder the NEA is using Teacher Appreciation Week as a call to action to protect federal funding for schools.
The federal government should be supporting teachers, not threatening them. It should be strengthening our public schools, not undermining them with ideology-driven ultimatums. It should be helping countless teachers to inspire their students the way Mrs. Daignault inspired me.
