Free Expression Friday: “Trouble in Censorville” with Rebekah Modrak and Willie Carver, Jr.

Rebekah Modrak is one of the editors of Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right's Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who are Fighting Back; Willie Carver, Jr. is a former Kentucky Teacher of the Year and one of the voices in the book.

I have with me today Rebekah Modrak, one of the editors of Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, also edited by Nadine M. Kalin; and I also have with me Willie Carver, an educator from Kentucky and one of the subjects who were interviewed in the book. Rebekah and Willie, could you just say a little bit about how you each came to this project?

Rebekah: Sure, I'll start. I got in touch with Nadine about a project I had done previously about my community's response to teach public school teachers during COVID. A lot of the parents in my part of the world, which is allegedly Democrat and liberal, responded to teachers suddenly from a very consumer mindset. They would start to talk about public school teachers as public servants, and they would start to say that because they're paying tax dollars, they have the authority over teachers. So there was this kind of consumer, private-school mentality towards public education. I did a project about this and sent it around to a few faculty who are involved in looking at education from neoliberal perspectives. Nadine was one of them, and she reached out to me to tell me that she had a former student, just recently graduated, in their first teaching position — they had trained to be a teacher with Nadine. They were so excited to be offered this new position in a wealthy suburb, and within four days they were put on leave, only because they dressed differently than the other teachers. [They were] wearing a button-up shirt and pants, where the other staff,  who were all female, wore dresses and high heels, and it made the parents uncomfortable. They were put on leave. And we were so disturbed by this story, and this recently laid off teacher was beside herself,  because all her ideas for teaching students were just destroyed, and her trust in a kind of administration. And what she wanted most was to tell her story. And so we met with her and offered her a way to tell her story through this book, and from there we started connecting with other educators like Willie. We were really fascinated to hear a little bit of Willie's story, a 2022 Kentucky teacher [of the year] who decided to leave education and leave teaching. We wanted to hear more about that.

Willie, in your piece you talk about your own experience in schools, not only as an educator, but also your experience growing up in a school. There are so many things about your piece that are so moving. One of them is that you talk about school being both a place of a kind of magic and a place where basic needs are met, like heat and food. So can you talk a little bit about both sides of that and how they influenced your process of becoming an educator?

Willie: Sure, and thank you. I knew early on that school was not just a place where learning happened: school was a place that created the conditions for you to grow, or even sustain yourself as a human being. As a kid, I recognized that. I recognized the severity of our life circumstances. I could see it by comparing my life to my classmates’ lives when I was in first grade, and I could see my teachers responding to it. I could see them making sure I was okay, making sure that we were fed, putting food in our backpacks. And for that reason alone — and I'll never be the sort of person who says K–12 doesn't have problems — but I knew there is something holy about the charge of making sure that kids are safe and communities are strong. I always wanted to be a part of it for that very reason. It led me to teaching before I could even say the word “profession.” I knew what I wanted to be, and that was a teacher who took part in doing this for kids. And I watched myself, as a Queer, Appalachian teacher, get hired and maintain employment, and I saw things get better year after year until around 2016.

And then I saw a dramatic turn for the worse, especially where Black, brown, and Queer students [and teachers] were concerned. I fought quietly and somehow became the teacher of the year for the state of Kentucky. Because of my quiet fighting, I made sure that my students had the tools they needed. My version of putting food in their backpacks was being proudly who I was in front of them and reminding them that their lives were going to be good. That angered a lot of people who did not want Queer kids and Black kids and brown kids to be told that their lives were going to be good and that they mattered. 

I at first saw myself as the teacher of the year who is supposed to be positive and only saying good things about how great people were. And there are great people, and so I was happy to do that celebration, but I had already gone through tremendously negative things and had seen harmful things happening. And so being the teacher of the year created this weird scenario where I was simultaneously being praised for who I was, yet also all but being tortured for it by my district. And when they went after one of the other Queer teachers in my department and suspended her for a non-issue, I kind of snapped. I just had a little moment, and I tweeted, “I'm tired. I'm the 2022 Kentucky teacher of the year, and I'm a proud gay man, and I don't know if I can do this anymore.” And the response to that was overwhelming. It showed that there was a need for someone to start speaking in that space.

Ultimately, the dangerous negative things actually turned into people in my town trying to harm the LGBTQ+ students. They actually doxed these students, shared their names and pictures of them at their after school jobs, and in all of this my legal team — because I had to have a legal team to be a gay teacher — said don't speak, don't speak, don't speak. And then I Basically had to speak. And I think in that speaking, lots of people found out about my story, and I think it was in that way that Rebekah and Nadine reached out to me to talk to them more about what happened specifically in my classroom and how I was responding.

One of the things that strikes me hearing you talk about your role as an educator is that teaching is so clearly for you an act of care. You talk in your essay about this paradox that so many teachers find themselves in, where on one hand they are bound by the law to do their job in the way the state tells them to do it, and on the other hand the law, by any empathetic interpretation, is asking them to do harm to their students. Can you talk a little bit about that paradox and how it impacted you and the other teachers that you worked with?

Willie: Yes, the moment that always stands out for me [is this:]  I had a friend. I watched him become a teacher. That was his big dream. And he came to visit me at my new job because he was basically trying to figure out a way out. He's also gay, and he said, “I have this feeling, this image in my mind, that in 1940 there were some good people who said, I know I'm in the Nazi party, but I can do something good [from within].” He said, “But at a certain point, you have to stop and say, I can't be a good Nazi. There's no such thing.” I'm not suggesting the teachers are Nazis, but I am suggesting there's a point at which anyone inside of an organization that's harming people has to ask themselves, Do I have the ability to undo or undermine the harm that I'm also causing? And the truth is, if you are a K–12 educator in the state of Kentucky, you are harming children. Period. You are, because you're preventing trans students from going to bathrooms. You're preventing trans students from being parts of teams. You are actively pulling Queer representation from your classes in certain counties. So you are complicit. And I don't have an easy answer for when is the right time to stay and when is the right time to leave, because we clearly need good teachers who are willing to stay and fight. And it's complicated, because if I say that I had to leave because of ethical reasons, [it seems to suggest] that someone who is staying is lacking ethics. And I don't think that that's true. I think there's a whole bundle of emotional aspects to this, social aspects to this. I just know that I personally will never tell a trans student what bathroom they can or can't go into, and I will personally never erase anyone from my curriculum based upon their identity. So there's no way that I could ethically be a teacher in the state of Kentucky.

In the last part of your response you touch on some of the ways that this plays out in terms of curriculum and in terms of libraries, and this is where the book ban crisis really becomes an essential part of the story. In your essay, you talk about what struck me as a very elegant policy addition that you recommended to your school at some point. Can you tell us a little bit about that policy recommendation you made, then what that became.

Kentucky had a group called the Site-Based Decision Making Council, and the purpose of that group was to actually empower parents as elected officials along with teachers to decide curriculum in schools. It was created after the Rose decision and the late 1980s in Kentucky, which was meant to create equity and equality in schools. The group was on its last legs when I was in my last moments in the classroom, because conservatives actually passed legislation to eliminate the power of this group, ironically under the guise of parents rights, by taking away the voting power or executive power of elected parents. So we were in situations where we were being asked to provide alternative assignments. And what that looked like would be, 10 years ago, an alternative assignment, “We don't have cuss words in our house.” And so I would be reading As I Lay Dying and I would have to find some alternative, or I would actively edit every curse word out of As I Lay Dying. But increasingly, it became, “Well, we don't read that Black stuff.” And so the teacher would then be charged to create an alternative assignment. What that means, again, is to become complicit, and actively choosing to only read white people. So we had a teacher who found herself having to look through white authors, who was crying afterwards, because she said, “I can't believe I did this. I didn't realize the extent to which I was actively engaged in racism and systemic racism by being a part of this.” 

And so we wrote a policy [saying teachers would not be required to create alternative assignments based on the identity of the author]. The parents were excited about it. We actually had conservative parents in there, too. We talked about, of all people, JD Vance, and how they were some students who refused to read him because he was conservative, and how we didn't want any student to be able to say, “I won't read because of the identity.” And the response on the part of our administration was not to allow the vote, instead to continue a meeting until the entire year ended at which point the group lost the ability to make any roles. But outside of the politics of it, I just think about what sort of people are so invested in taking away the power to say to kids or parents, “You don't have the right to choose what races or religions your students read,” or to say to teachers, “You have to choose based upon race or religion, which books a certain party is reading. I was very proud of my colleagues who all agreed that we would stand together in opposition to this. I think of one of them who said during this meeting, “I'm a Jewish woman and this is the hill I will die on.” I have no news as to what the policy is forcing teachers to do at this point, though.

And a few other Educators come into and out of your stories, Willie. Rebekah, there are so many perspectives from Educators in this book like Willie's, all of them so moving. Can you tell us a little bit about the range of other people who are included in the book?

They include art teachers, social studies teachers, K–12, so fourth grade, high school librarians, there's one principle whose story is represented in the book, teachers from all perspectives.

What impact did doing all these interviews have on you, and what did you learn from doing this project?

Rebekah: That's such a complicated question. I mean there are many themes that ran through the stories that struck me. One of them was the cowardice of administrators. I was stunned by the number of people we spoke with, educators we spoke with, where they were attacked from within, I guess I would say by their own administrator, or undermined, or their authority was questioned by administrators who had hired them and knew their expertise. I was also surprised — and Willie it's interesting to hear that in your case, your colleagues rallied around you, because that's pretty rare in these stories. In most of them the educator becomes a pariah in the school for standing up to protect a book or to protect the curriculum, and people stop talking to their coworkers. Stop talking with them or even worse, they ridiculed them, and they try to put them in situations where they feel like they have to leave the school.

Willie: I will say I'm lucky that I was in an English Department. I cannot say that I had uniform support across the school and frankly many of the teachers were hostile to me for years, but English departments tend to be more protective of books and students frankly.

Rebekah: And that was true for the librarians, also. The librarians we learned were usually the ones who are most willing to speak publicly, and they also are highly networked, so that they are connected with other librarians within their county, within the state, across the country. And so they're prepared for how to respond to that censorship and these attacks, and the other school teachers are much more vulnerable.

Finally another impossible question: if you each had to say one thing that you hope someone reading this book will take away from it, what would you choose?

Willie: I would hope that they can understand that they, as an individual, can provide immense meaningful, tangible support just by speaking, just by sending an email. One of the things that strikes me the most as someone who now does work with the American Federation of Teachers’ LGBTQ task force is that we will find a situation in which there are 12 teachers from various schools in one district contacting us, asking for help because they're afraid of a new policy and they think it's going to harm the students. There was one very specific case in August, I had seven separate teachers, and none of them would speak, not even under anonymity, because this is how frightened they are of their school districts, because the atmosphere is certainly teacher against community against administration against politicians, whereas a single parent of a trans child or a single parent cares about Black, Brown, or LGBTQ+ students sending an email or going to a board meeting and speaking on behalf of a librarian who's being targeted would mean a tremendous amount of help for them.

Rebekah: Again, this is a challenging question because there are so many things that I hope a reader understands. As Willie said,  just as parents have been powerful in targeting teachers and attacking them (though in many cases, we’re finding these are people who are not parents of students in the school, they are outsiders to the community, and they have a lot of influence, an unwarranted amount of influence) — if parents do get together and advocate and protest, they do have a lot of power, and throughout the book educators describe many ways that parents and students can be involved. Educators are often warned, do not tell [your students] about what's happening. And in most instances that were described in the book, it's actually quite helpful to involve the students, if it's possible. The students are rarely the ones who are asking for books to be banned. I mean, I don't think there was one story in the book in which the student was the one who was complaining, and involving the students really can have an impact. 

But I guess also the other thing I hope somebody understands is the toll it takes on educators. I think many of the stories that we hear about in the press, we hear a little bit about the impact of books being removed from the library or libraries being removed from the school, but we infrequently hear about the cost to the teacher in terms of their career, their identity, their relationship with their family, the stress levels that they experience, and so I think the stories in this book really spell out what the personal toll is for educators.

Thank you both so much for your work and for your work on this book. The book again is Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back, edited by Rebekah Modrak and Nadine M. Kalin. Rebekah, Willie, thank you again.