All right, hello everybody. Kelly Boos, the director of AFT to share my lesson. I'm so excited to be here to join Mike Hicksenbaugh and Randi Weingarten for our book club in June. We were just having kind of a fan fest with Mike talking about his book and his podcast and all that stuff. So we'll get to all that good stuff shortly. But before I turn this over to Randi, I'm going to show a quick housekeeping video for those of you who are returning to us. This is a A1 minute and 32nd time where you can go get your water refilled and we will be right back with you. Welcome to Share my lesson webinars. Thank you for joining us. Before we begin, let's go over a few housekeeping tips. We'd love to create an interactive and engaging space. Please open the group chat widget. Tell us where you're from and why you chose this webinar today. This is also your place to interact with other participants and our presenters. Express your thoughts. Using the Reactions widget, you can provide feedback about the presentation. Your feedback is invaluable to us and our presenting team. If you have questions for the presenters, use the queue and a widget to ask them for Technical Support during a live session. We've got you covered. You can ask tech questions in the same widget. If your screen freezes or you lose audio, please refresh your browser. If you're in search of resources for this session, you can find them listed in the Resource List widget. When the webinar concludes, please take a moment to rate and review this session. This helps share my lesson users find the best content and influences future webinars. You may be here for professional development credit. To qualify, watch for at least 35 minutes of the presentation and answer at least 2 poll questions. These will appear under the Slide widget at the end of the session. Click on the certificate icon to download your certificate from all of us on the AFT Share My Lesson team. Thank you for joining us and enjoy the webinar. OK, so we are, I'm going to turn this over to our president of the AFT, Randy Weingarten, who is leading our book club effort with the with the AFT and the AL Schenker Institute and share my lesson. And while I'm doing this, I will let you know that we'll have poll questions that are going to pop up on your screen throughout the webinar today. So for those educators who are here who need that recertification points and professional development credit, you know, take advantage of that. I will I'm not going to announce when they come up. So just pay attention to your screen when they pop up because the most important part is this conversation that we're going to about to have right now. So, Randy, thank you so much for joining us. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. And I am turning it over to you. Thank you, Kelly and thank you Mike. This is our last book club of this of this school year, not the calendar year, but this one is a really special for those of you who have heard Mike on MSNBC and other places, this is a really special gem that we haven't we we have been like counting the hours to this book club tonight to be able to to have this conversation with you, Mike, but but because so many of our members are actually living this right now. And so you know, when somebody you know who's you know, the Co creator of the pee by the award-winning and Pulitzer Prize finalists South Lake podcast being an NBC investigative reporter, I must confess I don't know which podcast I run to first. I've listened to yours. I've listened to Ultra, but you know, they have basically and, and by the way, Rachel's Ultra, there's new episodes this week or starting I guess Monday. But you know, what happens is that if this has been your lived experience or my members lived experience for the last year or so, or two years or three years, the fact that you have done this deep dive, look at what happened at South Lake is, you know, it's it's it's essentially what happens is that people then say, Oh my God, maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe there's other places. Maybe there is something about this that is bigger than what is happening in my life. And, and I think that by you telling the story of South Lake and the name of the book, I mean, the double entendre with the name is so special. They came for the schools. I mean, a lot of people moved to places like South Lake for the schools. But then if you remember, I mean you, you, but I'm talking to our audience here. Remember anything about authoritarian history. They came for this one and then for that one and then for that one. And then when they came from me, there was no one left to defend me. And a great, you know, a prophet said that. And I often, I often think about it all the time. So I just wanted to say thank you before we dive into this. And I want to say, and for those who don't know this book, it is a really urgent, very revealing, very contemporary story of how a school board converted to one that became very Christian, right wing nationalist and using over the course of time, this kind of erosion of the separation of church and state and the quest for privatization seemed to come together to really undermine public education in this place now. So I just, I just can't thank you enough for doing this. And and you know, and so let me just start by saying, I remember hearing, I mean, we, we are the largest union in Texas. So we represent the Texas AF TS our is our member and you know there's been a lot of things that are crazy in Texas for a long time. But I remember focusing on this with when I think everybody else started hearing about it when the whole issue about a Dyer Anne Frank could not be taught or there was a view of teaching two sides of the Holocaust. But in reading the book, you clearly were involved and deeply involved well before that. So for someone who is a senior investigative reporter for NBC, for someone who has been named a finalist for Pulitzer Prize, for your reporting on race and gender and sexuality in schools and for all of the amazing things you've done, the first question is, why this book? Like what? What? What made you write? This book, well, first of all, I love what you just said about how the book will maybe help people realize I'm not crazy what I'm living. I'm just loving seeing in the in the chat. Everyone's dropping in where they're they're watching from. And my goal with writing this was really that what you just said, so that if, if you're sitting in a in your teaching or, or sending a kid to a school in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia or, you know, outside of Atlanta and the northern suburbs there, or, you know, in, in Williamson County, Tennessee, any of these places. And you were seeing these parents showing up at school board meetings and you know, the crackdown on library books that you could read the story of this one town and better understand why that's happening in your community and where it's going. And so to your, to your question of why do this book and why this story? You know, this is I, I'm an like, as you mentioned, a national reporter for NBC News. And I've spent the last 3 1/2 years covering local schools kind of. And, and really what I've been doing is telling a national story by going deep in one place. And that's what I, that's what the book is. It's, it's telling the story that all of your members are experiencing at some, at some level, depending on their community and their school district and putting it into a context of history and of of politics and, and then telling stories of real people, including teachers to show not just, you know, the loud noises at school board meetings that get all the attention, but to to show, let people see and feel what it's like to be a teacher or a librarian at this era, at this moment in our history. And, and yeah, so I came at this not thinking of like, I'm not an education reporter. That's not my background, although I did spend a few months early in my career as the education reporter for Virginia Beach schools at the Virginian Pilot, which I love. But really, I came at this from wanting to write about the divisions, the divisiveness, the, the, the kind of right word creep, the, the move to toward Christian nationalism in our country. And it just so happened that the kind of the most fertile place that that story was playing out was in schools. And, and it, it, you know, that makes sense, I guess, because schools are where there's a lot on the line, there's high stakes. You know, this is where we teach the next generation what's true. We we where we, we don't just teach kids, as some people have suggested, AB CS and and you know, reading, right, writing, arithmetic. We are also, you know, telling teaching kids what's right and wrong, giving kids a sense of how to be kind. And all of that stuff is up for is part is in the mix right now in terms of what's being debated and fought over. I so thank you for that. And I, you know, before we get to issues like censorship and book banning and, you know, LGBT issues and, you know, all the, the, the, the current way in which this gets kind of litigated or discussed. I do want to take a moment to just go back to this notion. And, you know, I hesitate saying this, but I, but you wrote about it so clairvoyantly and clearly. And I, you know, about this very extreme Christian nationalism. This is then and I want to, I want to start by saying for everybody who's listening, we're not talking about people, you know, going to their church or mosque or synagogue over the weekend and being religious and believing in whatever religion they believe in or not believe in. There's, you know, for a long time, like from the First Amendment on in the United States of America, we had two clauses in the First Amendment that says separation of church and state and free exercise of religion. And those two clauses in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights actually made help make America one of the most religious countries in the world. But something has shifted in and Texas is kind of, you know, Exhibit A for it. And I think you make this really clear in the book. And we're actually seeing it even worse now after the last elections, state elections in Texas, a couple of the primary elections a couple of weeks ago. So could you actually talk about it from your perspective, what you see and what you saw? Yeah, I appreciate you making the distinction between Christianity and Christian nationalism. And because the, the, you know, that there's explicit attempt to try to muddy the water on that. The difference is, you know, there's difference between expressing your religion and, and living out your faith, which some of you know, in the book I write about a teacher named Christina McGurk, who is a Christian and, and, and saw teaching as an opportunity to live out her, her faith by, you know, imparting knowledge of being kind to children, that kind of missional occupational. That's not Christian nationalism. That's just, you know, someone living out their faith in their life. What's Christian nationalism is this idea that America was founded explicitly for Christians, by Christians, and that its laws were and should be rooted in the Bible and that our kids should learn that, that the kids that the education system should reflect that. And so that's why we're seeing in places like Texas and Louisiana, in Florida and all across the South and in other red states, bills that, you know, chip away at the the, you know, the tradition of separation of traditional state that you referenced, not just tradition, but the kind of foundational principle. So, you know, the 10 commandments being posted in every classroom in Louisiana pretty soon based on a law that was just passed there, you know, Christian chaplains going and being added to schools, public schools across the country. And then, you know, this, this the, the biggest push of all, which you've just referenced in Texas, but spreading everywhere is the push for universal vouchers that will, you know, there's there is, I want to be clear, a range of groups that are pushing for vouchers, But a, a, a major source pushing for what they call school choice is are groups that want parents to be able to have government funding of private religious education, private Christian education. And one of the things I just want to, you know, hammer on is this is all this that movement, this campaign that Dr. predates the the kind of raging culture wars over public schools that we've seen that exploded beginning in 2020 and 2021. You know, back then, and that's where I start in the book, it's it's it was really about pandemic restrict blowback against pandemic restrictions and backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion during the midst of the, you know, the George Floyd protests. And and that's, that's where, you know, you know, Fox News and other leading leaders in the conservative movement really leaned into those issues, thinking that they they were going to win back suburban voters who don't like Trump by fighting against CRT, critical race theory. That's that that was their play. And what I what I observed along the way is that as that really dominated the political scene in the conservative movement in America, reoriented its platform around waging these fights, they started becoming around library books and LGBTQ inclusion. And what happened as that was getting lots of attention was other elements of the, of the, the Republican of the, the conservative movement in America that have long predated this moment saw an opportunity, right? And so, so this idea that we're going to make America a Christian nation, we're going to, we're going to get prayer back in schools. Groups have been fighting for that for decades. What's happened is they have seen what they think is, you know, genuine parental outrage at schools. And they're trying to leverage that to kind of move to get their their goal across the finish line and to ultimately, you know, overturn the types of rulings that banned mandatory prayer, that banned mandatory Bible readings. That's mainly so that you couldn't do explicit, you know, Christian prayer at graduation. This they see this as an opportunity. And so that's what they're pushing for. Right. So look, I, you know, I, I'm, so I'm very grateful that you explained it because it is, you know, let me do the big reveal here that everybody who's watching this knows already, which is I am the wife of a rabbi. So I am, you know, the lesbian wife of a rabbi. But you know, I, I'm pretty, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm very much of A spiritual Jew myself and someone who's in the pulpit. It's, you know, somebody who's in the pews fairly frequently on a Friday night, but have often had to try to make this distinction in with within the Jewish faith as well as there being a difference between the use of public funding or use or the blurring of the line of what was public and what was church. And yet, you know, being very Jewish in and believing that a lot of my work is because of what I believe in, in terms of justice and those values. And so I'm so glad that you said it as succinctly as you did. But it is, I do think. And then we'll get to the next piece, which is there was this convergence of just a once in a century pandemic combined with a terrible example of racism and you know us. And then you add on top of that the agita and the, Oh my God, what is going to happen to my kids, which was a really legitimate expression of of fear because of the pandemic and not knowing. And you get this unbelievable exploitation of that fear. That then converts into these cultural wars and you see that from pandemic, from the issues around mass and vaccines that then become book banning, that then become CR, you know, anti CRT and censorship and now all the issues around trans kids. And so I do think that Chris Ruffo, who I love that in your like listing of actors in your book, Ruffo is one of the people that you list. But I do think that what Ruffo said at one point or another, I don't have the specific language, but he said at Hillsdale College, which was the bosses, you know, one of the colleges, she has basically funded that to get to universal vouchers. And I am paraphrasing. He's already threatened to sue me once for defamation because I quoted him without putting in the comma in the right place. So I am paraphrasing. But he essentially said to get to universal vouchers, which is privatization, you need to create universal public school distrust, and you have to be ruthless. At another point in his lecture, he said you have to be ruthless and brutal. And it sounds to me, or looks to me, like South Lake was the perfect iteration of this. Am I right or wrong about that? Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the the exact quote that's in my head. It was a he had to operate from a perspective of universal public school distrust. And So what he he quibbles with what, you know, whatever. I had the same kind of back and forth and yeah, what I think 100% that some of the people who got really engaged in South Lake early on were operating from that perspective. Not everybody, but some of the the political actors and I'll I'll one, I'll point out one in particular. So and and just to give like a 32nd over like explanation of the fight in South Lake. What that means is South Lake is this affluent community in North Texas outside of Fort Worth that like a lot of suburban school districts was finally grappling, grappling with kind of the rate, the daily racism that happens in mostly white but diversifying school districts. They released, they created a plan to try to address that. It just so happened that they released it in the midst of the George, the protests for racial justice in 2020 and the backlash against Black Lives Matter. And so conservative activists saw that as part of Black Lives Matter and they kind of painted those two together and went on went to war to kill this diversity plan. And one of the things that happened really early on in 2020 was this this national or the statewide outlet in in Texas called the Texas Scorecard became the first statewide. I don't know what the right word is news site is not the right the first statewide website that started reporting and writing stories about the fight in South Lake. The Texas Scorecard is a website funded by a pair of far right billionaires, oil and gas billionaires in Texas named Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, who have spent years spending 10s of millions of dollars trying to push Texas further right by challenging conservative Republicans and getting even more conservative folks onto into legislature. So they they find this thing called Texas Scorecard and one of their priority objectives is private school vouchers, private like public funding for private Christian schooling. And so the fact that the Texas Scorecard all of a sudden starts writing about this fight in South Lake. And they weren't just reporting on what was happening there. They were in their articles, they would list out all the school names of the school board members who were pushing the diversity plan and, and encourage their readers to e-mail them. And, and to really just kind of making this push that look, this, this community is trying to indoctrinate these kids with these ideas about race and LGBTQ values that we are opposed to. And so the fact I think the fact that the Texas scorecard got involved in a state involved in that struggle signals an interest in elevating those types of stories, those those stories that make people, maybe conservatives uncomfortable, make them think, man, public schools, even in this conservative town like South Lake public schools are teaching white kids to hate themselves and teaching black kids that they're all victims and trying to convince kids to change their genders and telling them that whatever, you know, that those are kind of the caricatures that they put out there. And so, you know, for that, that interest kind of suggests a, a desire to use this framing to push that other goal. And they're not, that's not the only example of that. There are others who who did made similar overtures I guess. So I think that what it would be good to spend a little bit of time going through what happened and in some ways a couple of the heroes of the, of the story, some of the teachers. I just, you know, I, I, I, I in reading, particularly in the middle of the book, you know, thinking about the heroes, not only of the story, but also what all these rural legislators did last year to try to beat back the vouchers in the state was pretty heroic. But why don't, I mean, you know, you, you, you had two or three different teachers and, and parents and who, you know, we're really heroic. And I think if you talked about them a little bit, that would be fantastic. I, I assume you're talking about people. I mean, I loved, I love your discussion about people like, you know, Christina Mccurk and others, the and and and others as well, but and M and others. But I, I want you to tell your story instead of my interpretation of yours. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a few different voices that are, are they're really stand insurance for educators all over the country. And so you mentioned one I, I mentioned earlier, a young teacher named Christina McGurk who thought she landed her dream job by coming to South Lake. She, you know, it's one of these school districts, like it's affluent and exclusionary in terms of who can afford a house in South Lake. There's no apartments there. So it's one of these kind of, you know, wealthy suburban school districts where she wouldn't have all the same challenges that she had teaching at a, you know, poorly funded charter school in a poor black community in Dallas. And but she also liked that South Lake was actually pretty diverse compared to her expectations. And and she just happened to be like a lot of teachers entering education and kind of coming into her, her, you know, early career stage in the midst of the pandemic and this backlash. And so she went from having a dream job to by 2020, fall of 2020 into 2021, having all of these complaints about kids wearing masks, feeling like she was being accused of forcing these kids to wear these masks when she was just trying to follow a policy and trying to keep kids safe. And then, and then she, she and her colleagues in this 4th grade block at in Carroll High School in the Carroll School District in South Lake, we're suddenly getting these attacks over their use of scholastic news. I don't know if you all use scholastic news. It's, you know, this news kids news magazines and parents started getting outraged. Elastic highlights. Well. It's like all of a sudden. Right. Well, and keep in mind, like what they're what they're saying in public in school board meetings was you're trying to teach all white kids to hate themselves and teach all black kids that they're victims. And that's what critical race theory is. But in practice, what they were complaining about to teachers like Christina was Scholastic News had an article that just kind of laid out the debate around Confederate monuments in like painstakingly neutral terms. They were. The article was like, some people say these Confederate statues are a symbol of racism. Others say it's a legacy that we are, you know, symbol of history that we should keep up. And that's it. Parents started coming for teachers over these that that type of content to the point where this district finally said no more scholastic news. And after years of this, after by 2021, Texas had passed their anti CRT law. And Christina McGurk was seeing stuff in her district that made her feel like I can't stay quiet anymore. And the thing that pushed her over the edge was an administrator in an attempt to try to comply with a law that said you must teach all perspectives or both sides of any currently controversial subject, an administrator told her. Christina McGurk and her colleagues at at her school district, you, if you have a book in your classroom library on the Holocaust, just make sure you have one that shows the opposing perspective. Many of you probably saw that story because we reported on it and we had a secret recording of that comment. And we were able to tell that story at NBC News because six teachers in South Lake said this is enough, This has crossed the line. And they took talk to us on background, not to be named, not to not not to be have their identities revealed in the story. And we honored that. And we, we, and then we were interviewed two of those teachers on NBC Nightly News with their faces cloaked and their voices masked. And just to show you how far people were willing to go to go after teachers, within months, somebody had managed to UN unmask the voices in our the audio from that Nightly News interview. They they revealed and figured out that one of them was Christina McGurk. And before she knew it, Christina was being called into the superintendent's office and that audio was being played for her by the Superintendent, basically pressuring her to confess it was her and she was going to lose her job and she ended up resigning. It's just an incredible narrative arc to go from. I want to love kids. I want to serve kids. Was beloved teacher in the district to stepping forward to try to bravely blow the whistle to say like this is what's actually happening in schools now as a result of these policies. And then ultimately one person was punished as a result of saying we should both sides the Holocaust. It was the teacher the teacher who spoke up about it. And that's just, you know, that's the kind of an extreme case example, but I've heard so many stories of teachers feeling like I have to say something or I can't live with myself or saying I can't keep doing this and heading for the exit, thinking about resigning. And that's kind of the the story that I think is happening in a lot of places across the country. We have, you know, there are people in the chat who have already talked about things like, you know, places like Tennessee and others where much of this is happening. Absolutely. Yeah. So you. So I want to before we go to questions, I want to do 2 more questions to three more questions to you. But we in the face of exactly the same things, we don't represent the educators at South Lake. We represent in Houston, we represent in Dallas. But we said in 2021, and it did actually invite then five full days of diatribes from Fox I, we said that we would defend each and every one of our members through our legal defense fund, specifically if they actually taught honest history or they made sure that kids felt that that that they were safe and in an inclusive environment. And it because we, we felt like, how do we as a union do something to make sure that people who we represent felt like if they did what Christina did, their union would back them up legally and otherwise. And we have been in several of these cases, including some individually, but something that was very similar to this, the divisive concepts case in New Hampshire, which we actually just won at a lower court level. Now, the law takes a lot of time to wind its way through courts. But what's interesting is a conservative judge, Republican appointed judge by George Bush, said that that law was void for vagueness and threw it out as unconstitutional. And it was very similar to what South Lake was saying. Essentially, you have to tell both sides of something that doesn't have both sides like you know, and, and, and, and, and. You can't teach concepts that could be perceived as controversial or someone could perceive that they would be hurt by a concept that I'm not sure as a, as an AP Gov teacher, high school social studies teacher, how do you actually teach social studies without teaching divisive concepts? But it is, it's interesting that where there is real representation and density and we are and people are willing to take these cases, you're seeing a difference in terms of book banning. You're seeing a difference in terms of the teaching of honest history, and you're seeing us finally starting to win these cases. Yeah, I think one of the things we talked about before we went live was this idea that the laws are written in a way that are open for. They're vague in in many cases. And it it creates just kind of a culture of self censorship and of fear. Exactly. And so I've seen the same pattern, the the same thing that played what what played out in that Holocaust situation in South Lake was the state passed a law that had that kind of same divisive concept language and talked about teaching all perspectives on controversial subjects. The administrator made that advice of like, well, if you have a book on the Holocaust, have one that shows the other perspective. And then the person, the lawmakers who wrote that law came out and said, whoa, whoa, whoa. We didn't mean that. We didn't mean for you to start doing that. We didn't say you have to do that. And that pattern has repeated over and over and over again because teachers are, are afraid. I think the, the, the, you know, the Rand report survey that came out recently was titled like walking on egg shells. Teachers are afraid that they're going to step in the wrong place and they will be punished. And so you're seeing it in Florida, you're seeing it all over the place is teachers are just throwing their hands up and saying, well, if I'm responsible for this and I might get in trouble for it, I'm not having any books in my classroom library. Like I don't want a library because I don't think I can do that responsibly because this is my, this is my job. I want to do a good job at this, but I also don't want to have my teaching license suspended or to face criminal charges in some cases if, if they have that. And so that's, that's the pattern is, you know, that. And and the other piece that you mentioned is a conservative judge. Some of these, you know, like Ron DeSantis has spent a lot of time, and I document this in the book, talking about how his goal was to remove ideology from schools to kind of create this neutral, we're not going to have ideology of going to get ideology out of our social studies curriculum. But then in practice, what was actually happening was they were banning certain ideologies, in some cases explicitly banning the 1619 project or, you know, banning things they were calling divisive concepts that were or, or saying, you know, you have to teach that slavery was just, you know, a diversion from America's true founding greatness. And they were pushing those things out and replacing it. It, you know, like teachers, social studies teachers in Florida had to go to trainings to learn from Hilliard College. You know, the. Yeah. Hilliard the the the far right kind of. Hillside. Yeah, Hillside. Yeah, sorry, Hillside to learn about, you know, how America was founded as a Christian nation and the Supreme, you know, these just reframing and basically removing one ideology and and and privileging another. And that if you ask folks like, is that a conservative value? That's, you know, it's, it's not really, I mean, true conservatism, you don't ban certain ideas and privilege certain ideas. You know, the like if you, or if you ask a libertarian if that's what, what you believe in, that they're not, if they're honest, no, that's not what they're about. And so that one of the important things that I try to do my reporting in the book is to not just adopt the language of activists and, and partisans, but to actually test and look at what is actually happening. And how do your words match the reality of the policy you're implementing. And a lot of times with this, you know, you know, parents rights, all these things like, you know, it's the parents rights movements seeking to take certain rights away from some parents and to give other parents rights. It's it's you have to really look closely to see if these words match the the reality of the situation. Exactly, which is why you go back to trust, because you know you can. You know when you, you can see that if the if, if there is this disconnect and there's this divisiveness so that the trust between parents and teachers aren't isn't there, then all of this kind of propaganda one way or the other starts becoming the way in which schools. You know, the curriculum of schools and I do think that we are and, you know, not in everywhere. I mean, Tennessee is different, but I can and, but, and, and there are, you know, Iowa, Arkansas, Texas, there's been a lot of very concerning pushes by entities like Prager. And you know what you have, you know what you've talked about, But I'm also starting to see a shift again in a different way. But the worst is what I think you said, which is that teachers are in egg shells and they don't know what they can teach. And what if the effect of this is it's not just an effect on history, it's an effect on critical thinking. It's an effect on how we help kids learn nuance and context and civic engagement and how to actually see each other and frankly, how to overcome conflict of which which is something that they have to work on every single day in their lives. And so, but, but, but it is the, what you, you've done in the book is you've made it clear again, like I said at the beginning, that one is not crazy, that this is just like vagueness is the point. It's not a byproduct. You've made clear that this push has been a political push. And I'm, you know, speaking for 1.75 million members and lots and lots of parents. I'm very appreciative of that. I appreciate, you know, I, I part of the reason I wrote this book was so that, as you mentioned, teachers could see themselves and better understand what is happening to them, why it's happening, and to know that they're not the only ones it's happening to. And, and yeah, talking about like, you know, the, the, the net effect of this in one of the stories we tell in the book is it was Christina McGurk. Her, her team, because of this pressure, made a decision that they, like, look back on with remorse that, you know, they've been facing all these critiques. And it's just, it's exhausting having parents e-mail and administrators coming and the principal's always calling you down to talk about, you know, what lesson you sent out. And so in the midst of that, they had a lesson they were planning to assign during Black History Month a couple years ago on the beginning attempts to incorporate Negro League stats into Major League Baseball. This is just a fact of life. Like this is just a fact like this is happening. Negro Leagues existed because of racism. And now there's an attempt to try to address that. And the teachers were so afraid to put that material out in front of their kids, they just decided to can it. They decided not to, not to share it. And no one told them don't do that. No one said you can't share this lesson. It was just as an act of self preservation. But in the end, like that's a disservice to the kids who maybe don't get to get that full picture of the world, America, its history, why things are the way they are, how they might be better. And that's that's what's at stake with all of this. So I have one more question for you, which is and we we, we started, we talked about it. And I know there's a couple of questions for you from the chat. I'm going to, I'm going to give you this one after I'm going to give you this one before I give you my last question, which is my last question is what gives you hope? So I'm going to give you a minute to think about that. But the question from Sarah Beth Rosenberg who's is a fantastic. Hi, Sarah. First studies teacher in in New York whose class, I mean, whose class I was just in last week and I got to see her kids. But her question for you is what advice do you have for teachers? I don't know if this is your question for you or for me, but I am told it was for you. What advice do you have for teachers navigating these divisive concept laws in the states? And can something be done at a federal level, namely using things like, you know, ESEA and the civil rights laws in that that these Department of Education are supposed to implement and evaluate and enforce? Yeah, I, you know, in terms of advice to teachers, I'm not the right person for that because I'm not in your shoes. And I've seen the consequences for crossing these lines, these vaguely drawn lines. And so I can't sit here and say, hey, you should just, you know, ignore this or, you know, you should be focused on teaching kids truth and don't worry about the law. I will say that I've seen teachers who, in one case, I talked to a teacher in Austin, TX, who, you know, she's in Texas, but also Austin ISD is not South Lake. And so she had, you know, there was a mass shooting that was tied to white supremacy. And she used it as an opportunity to show her kids how the state's laws around divisive concepts were constraining her. And so she explained to them in like, painstaking detail, there's this shooting. It was motivated by great replacement theory or what, you know, this white supremacist idea that, you know, white people are being replaced in America by immigration and other means and under state law that she read the law to them. I'm supposed to tell you that that's just one side of the story and that the shooter, other people believe, like in our government, leaders in the Republican Party also believe in this great replacement theory. And so she found a way within the confines of the law to address the subject was probably still inviting, you know, a crackdown if if the wrong parent caught word of her conversation. But yeah, I don't know. It's, it's tough. It's you might have better advice in terms of the legal side. So this is Sari. This is what I'm going to tell you, which is why it invited, you know, such appropriate from Fox and was part of what got Mike Pompeo to say that I was most dangerous person in the world. Number one, I don't want anybody working and doing this work alone. We this is part of what union strategy is. We have to work together. It's, you know, and we have to be together in coalition, sometimes with others. But whether you go to a school board meeting or whether you do some act of great humanity or some act of great questioning, part of what we need to do is we need to do this together, not alone. That means even if you don't have a union, do not do this work alone. Work with other teachers like in some ways South Lake did the six that you talk to Mike work in other work with other coalitions of parents of which we are now seeing parents together and moms rising and so many others who are and red wine and blue or dotted all across the country. Now work with others who are like minded. That's number one. Number two, do something in a way that makes common sense and in a school board or in now, armed with this new case that we have, we will be able to turn this around in different places if it makes common sense. Like the story Mike just said #3 we have made that commitment, as we made before on a local level as well as the national level to actually say we will protect people individually. So what's happened and, and #4 we are doing the things nationally to actually say it is right winning public opinion that it is right to teach, you know, honest history. If you ask that question to people in general, they will say yes. And then that teacher like you just said, Mike, who said, look, you know, what am I going to do here? It's a real dilemma. We give books out, 10 million of them as others banned books. And we now work with parents all across the United States to say, wait a second, if you're banning this book, that means my parental rights. You're not you're not being affirming of my parental rights in terms of me wanting my kid to have access to this book. So we're fighting these things locally, statewide and nationally. The state of Illinois, the state of New Jersey just did the right to learn laws. So step by step, the one thing which is what I just asked Mike, and as our ending question, I also want to say to all of you is don't lose hope. This is a fight against fear. It's a fight of division versus aspiration. And yes, there will be teachers who read and it's terrible. But if we all do a little bit, not the whole job, but a little bit, but don't do it alone. Do it with common sense and conviction. Have other people around. America doesn't want book banning, and they don't want us not to teach honest history. We're just going to have to fight it out on a local, state and national level. And that's why our union is growing, and that's why we have to represent people in this way. So that's the best answer I have for everyone. And Mike, what gives you hope? What gives me hope is I think everyone keeps asking me that, including that was the question. I think my editor, who I my editor who I see in the attendee list, Hi, Deanne kept hitting me with, OK, this book is heavy. What's the hope we have to give people a sense that there's like, this is not just darkness or division and divisiveness. And the thing that gives me hope is the kids that I talk to. And I'm going to call out one in particular in the book. I tell the story of a student named Mia Mariani. And you meet her in the book. She's, you know, a queer freshman in South Lake High School. And by her sophomore year, she's kind of gotten used to kids making mean comments, anti-gay slurs, those sorts of things. But then in the midst of her Penn remote social studies class, she was bombarded with just vulgar slurs and attacks from a couple classmates who were attacking her over her gender identity. Really ugly, vulgar stuff. And what was incredible this, this is what an example of what happens to kids in school districts all over the country. But you'd expect the school district then to address it. And what happened in this case, is this principal seemingly unaware of gender identity and, and what what her pronouns meant, spent 30 minutes kind of lecturing the student over. Like, it didn't seem like these boys were actually harassing. I think they were just debating politics as they called you four letter words and said that you have a mental illness. And the, the, this conversation with the principal, which I document in the book, left her feeling very small. And when I met Mia, she was a 16 year old and she was kind of timid, but she wanted to tell her story. The school district declined that that she complained. Her parents filed a complaint. The school district said no, we acted appropriately. There was no bullying here. This is just kids debating politics, kids being kids. Flash forward to one month ago. Mia and her parents had filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education about this incident. And after years investigating, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights notified the district that it had found civil rights violations in four cases, including Mia's, about a month ago. And when I talked with Mia about it, this is, it was so great. She was, you know, it's, she's now 19 or 20. And she was speaking. She's now a college student. And she had found her voice through telling this story and sounded so strong. And the thing she said to me was, you know, this, this chain, this investigation from the Office of Civil Rights that might eventually force South Lake schools to implement diversity and inclusion training. That's not going to change my experience. I'm graduated. It's too late for me. But if my complaint leads to change that helps other kids, that that brings healing to me. And it was just this beautiful moment that that gives me hope. The way that these kids have gotten organized and have rallied to defend themselves, to stand up for their own education and to defend their teachers in many cases has been pretty remarkable. Well, that is a really wonderful way to end. And I will also end with a question with a, with a, a comment from the comments. Thank you staff for pulling them together because it's hard to read everything as we're having a conversation, but the comment is no question. But as a politically involved Union Leader and social studies teacher, this book is a great blueprint on how to counter these movements. So for those in Texas, you know this, we don't normally advertise union membership, but there is an associate membership in AF in Texas, AFT for those in Tennessee. I'm going to talk to Justin Jones and I'm going to talk to the Justins over the course of this summer because we are not, we don't, we don't have density as the AFT in in Tennessee. But let me see if the Justins can help us figure something out to actually make sure that you don't feel alone as we go into the next school year. For those people who are my members, remember what I said about the that just like our kids who give me hope to like we will defend teachers who are trying to do the right things. And we will use this new case that has now come out of the First Circuit in terms of helping in this regard to elections really matter. And we need to use our voice in those elections, be it school board or be it other elections, so that there is the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn. And with that, this is our last. As I said at the beginning, we started this in January as a way of as we were giving out books and focusing on literacy throughout our union for our pre-K through 12 students as well as in our college division, we thought let's actually educate ourselves as well. And this is the sixth of our book clubs. We're going to take a break for the summer, even though most of us are not taking a break during the summer from the book club. But we're going to start again in September, I believe. And we will have Heather Cox Richardson, I think in September or October, as you know, as another great observer of what is going on, just like you are, Mike. And we just, I want to end by saying just how grateful we are that you're taking us out of the school year through the summer with this marvelous analysis of what human beings can do to fight stupid and to create a way of seeing a path forward to educate our kids and to make sure that they can be the best that they can be, knowing full well that their teachers are there for them. And frankly, as your story has said and shown, how so many kids are there for their teachers as well as their communities. So thank you. So much thank you for doing this. I've I've really enjoyed it. Fantastic. And to everybody else, please, if I don't talk to you or see you at the convention or other times, have a wonderful, wonderful, peaceful summer where you get to rest and relax and, and, and do the things you want to do. Thanks everybody. _1734845165685
