Teachers have been under attack from the right wing of our country for several years now. Those attacks have only intensified since the start of the pandemic.

To understand who is attacking teachers and why, we need to explore the three main factions that make up today’s Republican party: the money people (Conspiracy Theory “B” still hard at work!), Evangelical Christians, and White Supremacists. These groups often have overlapping membership, and they use the same methods, but their motivations vary.

The billionaire shareholder class sees education funding as another source of profits. They want to establish for-profit charter schools and run them the same way they run retail stores - hire cheap labor, spend as little as possible on materials, and call any unspent money “profits.” To accomplish this, they are determined to deregulate education, removing as many guardrails as they can in the name of “innovation.”

Standing in their way are two of the most powerful special interest groups in the country, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association - the teachers unions. AFT and NEA rival the National Rifle Association in their political clout, and in their ability to mobilize large numbers of people for phone-banking, demonstrations, etc. The teachers unions fight back against deregulation, maintaining union protection for their workers but also keeping money for students out of corporate pockets.

While the super-wealthy have suffocated private sector employees with wage suppression and ever-dwindling benefits, the teachers unions and other public sector unions have maintained decent wages and good benefits programs, including pensions, which have all but vanished from the private sector. Efforts to bust these unions (see my blog on the Janus Decision as an example https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...) have failed. In fact, the public sector unions are a shining example to those trying to unionize Amazon, Walmart and other employee groups. The wealthy respond by bashing teachers via right wing media, calling them communists.

Evangelicals want charter schools, too, but for a different reason. This group wants to send their children to publicly funded religious schools. They want to do away with the Constitution’s division between church and state and establish their brand of Christianity as our nation’s religion. Teachers unions fight back against this by teaching everybody’s kids and protecting the secular focus of our public schools.

Teachers stand for science, for critical thinking, and during the pandemic, they have been big advocates for vaccines. They offend Evangelicals by teaching evolution and by creating safe spaces within schools for LGBTQ students. Evangelicals leverage right-wing media to lambast teachers for their support of school closures during the height of the pandemic. They accuse teachers of recruiting children to become homosexuals or transexuals, clinging to their outmoded beliefs that this is a choice rather than something inherent.

White Supremacists blend in with Evangelicals in an attempt at legitimacy and acceptance. Their main goal is to create white enclaves to stop people of different backgrounds from mingling. They don’t want “their tax dollars going to those kids.” One way to do this is to move their kids out of their local public school and into a semi-private charter school. If they create a school with a mandatory requirement for parents to donate either money or time, they naturally exclude low income families, creating de-facto segregation at their schools. Teachers unions fight against these types of charter schools which strips both attendance dollars and donation money from neighborhood public schools.

In recent months, the Right have focused their efforts in a new way: banning books. White Supremacists focus on books that treat the African-American experience with honor and respect. Evangelicals attack any book that normalizes the LGBTQ experience. A school district in Pennsylvania recently banned the Girls Who Code books, because you wouldn’t want girls to have career aspirations!

Just like in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade, this is an attempt by an active minority in this country to dictate to the majority. The battleground is not only the House and the Senate. School boards all over the country are in play, and anti-teacher extremists are signing up to run. Some of these campaigns are even funded by billionaire money.

You can’t take this election off. Pay attention to who is running for school board. Read through the candidate statements and look for rhetoric that is extreme and polarizing. Vote for someone else.

And, stick up for your local teachers. They are out there every day teaching, mentoring and guiding every student in their class. Diversity-Equity-Inclusion is not a catchphrase for teachers. It’s a way of life.