A Teacher’s-Eye View of The Radical Right’s Crusade to Take Down Public Education

Across the country, right-wing moral panic (or ideological opposition to diversity and changing social mores masquerading as moral panic) has resulted in book bans and, in Republican-controlled statehouses, the passing of an unprecedented number of laws that invoke the “divisive concept” premise to legitimate discrimination. Since 2020, legislation spearheaded by conservative politicians have affected over one million educators and over 22 million students throughout the States. From Florida, whose “Don’t Say Gay” law prohibits K-12 instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation, to Texas, which is shuttering libraries in schools, America is in the middle of a far-right war on public education.

For the first time, K-12 educators who have been threatened, ostracized, smeared as “pedophiles” and “Marxists,” placed on leave, and fired for teaching the historical truth of the struggle for racial justice, or for offering books by and about LGBTQ+ people are telling their harrowing, powerfully personal stories. In the book Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education – and the Teachers Who are Fighting Back, 14 public school teachers bring readers face-to-face with first-hand accounts of what it means to be living and working under these realities. In the video testimonies on Censorville.com, 13 educators tell earlier, less-detailed versions of these stories.

Educators predict the future of a generation of students who are told to walk out of the room in the face of discomfort and who no longer have access to books or critical thinking about American society. They describe the social isolation of being the only teacher in their school to fight back against far-right agitators and extremist trolls. They talk, with unvarnished honesty, of their pent-up anger over institutional betrayal, and of the terrible toll the radical right’s culture war on public education has taken on their mental and physical health, from panic attacks to insomnia to high blood pressure.

Yet, these 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.

Terrifying, infuriating, and inspiring, Trouble in Censorville sounds the alarm for a democracy on fire.