February is a short month, so March caught me by surprise. Hence the late Dispatch. But if February had 31 days, it would be like this came out on March 11. Not that bad, right? Anyway, on with the February battles, which are heavy on books, slavery lessons, and…dances.
- Books: February saw three new book challenges: Both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird were removed from required reading lists in Duluth, MN; Stick was removed from all classrooms and libraries below the high school level in Beaverton, OR; and The Hate U Give was pulled as an assignment in Springfield, MO. Three of these books are not newly contested territory in our public schools’ constant values and identity-based battles. Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird have been flashpoints for decades—and the latter, several times in the last few months—while we saw a battle over The Hate U Give in Texas in 2017.
- Slavery illustrations: A teacher in Leander, TX, assigned students to draw pictures of themselves as slaves for homework and to “write one sentence that describes your surroundings using each of the 5 senses.” A New York City teacher made her African-American students lie down on the floor and then she stepped on their backs to try to give them a sense for how slavery felt. Needless to say these things disturbed many parents. But they aren’t the first concerning “immersion” assignments—which seem largely intended to help kids get a better feeling for historical events—we’ve tracked. In just the last few months we’ve also seen two in Georgia and one in Massachusetts.
- Dances: Conflicts over dress codes at school dances are common—the Map has almost 10 such incidents—but in February we saw two dance-related battles that are much less familiar. Unprecedented, at least as far as the Map indicates, was a conflict in Weber, UT, over a policy prohibiting girls from saying “no” to boys who asked them to dance at a Valentine’s Day event. At issue was disempowering girls versus protecting the feelings of potentially rejected boys. The second battle was in Staten Island, New York, where the annual father-daughter dance was cancelled in an effort to end potentially discriminatory “gender-based” activities. There is only one similar dispute I could find on the Map, a 2012 conflict in Cranston, RI.
Of course there were more battles to check out, including over an offensive science project, the National Anthem, and Cool Runnings. Meanwhile, we have continued to post polls on the Battle Map Facebook page, and utterly dwarfed old voting records with a question, in the wake of the horrific Parkland, FL, school shooting, whether teachers should be able to bring guns to work. Around 5,500 people voted, with 85 percent saying “yes” in answer to “Should a teacher’s right to bear arms extend to the classroom?” 15 percent said “no.” Of course this is unscientific, but it certainly suggests that like so many things, non-negligible percentages of the population can have differing, mutually exclusive views on crucial issues. Which is, of course, why school choice is the only system of education consistent with diversity and liberty.
