Biden DOJ Thinks Firing Teacher For Reading A Book Is Bad Actually!
The only thing wrong with the book is it might have been too *young* for her fifth graders.
Two weeks ago (news has apparently been a bit slow travelling after the Olympics) the US Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in a federal lawsuit, Rinderle v Cobb County School District. Then, a week ago, a coalition of state attorneys general and the AG for the District of Columbia joined in with their own. This case has been receiving very little attention outside of Wonkette but seems to be heating up as a focal point in the war on trans students and topics in public schools. So gosh, let’s revisit!
How it started
Katie Rinderle, the plaintiff at the heart of the case, was a TAG teacher of fifth grade elementary students in a Cobb County school last year when she read My Shadow is Purple to her class. Not the best children’s book around and destined never to be as popular as Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, it’s still a perfectly age-appropriate book about having diverse interests, likes, and dislikes, and not wanting to stop liking or doing things just because of gender stereotypes … even if read to first graders. And if I remember the lessons from my own stint in first grade, fifth grade is seven whole grades more advanced than that.
IT’S THIS ONE.
While there is no word on how many parents complained that maybe TAG fifth graders should be reading something a little more advanced than My Shadow Is Purple, we do know that two parents of two of Rinderle’s students e-mailed the school to complain because having a shadow the color of a brown grizzly bear apparently runs afoul of Georgia’s law against teaching “divisive” topics in its school. Rinderle was quickly suspended and then fired a few months later, despite 10 years in the district, every single one of which ended in “exceeds expectations” evaluations.
How it’s going
This year Rinderle’s appeal to the district itself failed in February. Immediately after, with the help of her labor union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Rinderle became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit alleging that Georgia’s “Don’t Say Gay”/“divisive concepts” law and the resulting “controversial issues” policy of the CCSD create a hostile environment that violates federal protections against sex discrimination. Many lawsuits are filed every year under Title IX, but because this is one of the clearest and cleanest dealing with topic bans, more and more parties are lining up to have a say. The National Education Association and the Southern Education Association are both already co-counsels, while current CCSD teacher Tonya Grimmke and the Georgia Association of Educators have signed on as co-plaintiffs.
This is shaping up to be the big case of “first impression” on the divisive/controversial topics laws passed in Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee and elsewhere, so it’s not entirely surprising that the DOsJ and other states would want to weigh in on a subject where courts are likely to make new law affecting the entire country. As friends of the court, their aim isn’t so much to pick a side in whether or not Rinderle gets her job back, but rather to pick a side in whether it’s possible for such suits to ever win under any set of facts, and exactly what the rules and standards will be for judging these cases going forward.
At the heart of their lawsuit, plaintiffs are alleging that
CCSD’s vague censorship policies enable arbitrary, discriminatory, and retaliatory enforcement against educators, like Plaintiffs, who support LGBTQ students. Rinderle has been terminated simply for reading an award-winning children’s book, written from the perspective of a student who does not conform to gender stereotypes, to her fifth-grade students.
And that doing so is a violation of Title IX. The As’G and DOJ want censorship policies like those here to be acknowledged as harmful, and for future lawsuits to examine the policy environment and not merely administrative actions when deciding whether or not a school has established a hostile environment on the basis of sex. This isn’t very different, legally speaking, from how “chilling effects” are considered in First Amendment law when a government hasn’t (yet) taken unlawful action against a person, but the existence of a threatening law causes self censorship and ultimately harm.
And make no mistake: These vague “divisive concepts” laws and Don’t Say Gay bills do cause harm. Last year a major study sampling responses from over 25,000 young students found quite a bit of evidence that having supportive teachers matters to the health and education of LGBTQ students. Just a few days ago, the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics published more evidence. It turns out that LGBTQ kids are actually more likely to seek help from a teacher than from a parent when life isn’t going well, perhaps as much as four times more likely. There are a number of possible explanations for this, but taking the top two, kids usually have more teachers to pick from than parents and there’s less at stake if you alienate a teacher than if you alienate someone you have to see every day who pays for your roof and food.
It is absolutely vital that all kids have supportive teachers to turn to. Republicans, unfortunately, are trying to make sure that they don’t. Rinderle will be a major test of whether governments can cull supportive teachers in the name of supporting kids. And it’s a good thing that many states are jumping in on the side of kids’ best teachers, since this case is almost certain to reach the Supreme Court, and SCOTUS isn’t likely to rule in the best interests of children unless they’re forced to.
PREVIOUSLY!
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Memories of my senior year in high school 50+ years ago when the President of the Young Americans For Freedom took Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five out of the school library and burned it in front of the school.
His actions were applauded by a bunch of right wingers.
Fast forward 50 years to the reunion finding out that punk wound up in jail for embezzlement...
When did we give power over our schools to the one person in the HOA that goes around measuring everyone’s grass length and rants about it on Facebook?