Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sticking with us on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In March 2020, COVID-19 came to the US, bringing with it fear, death, isolation, and uncertainty. Of course, closing businesses, restaurants, and most critically, schools.

For parents and caretakers of school-aged children, this meant the pandemic ushered in a new job overnight, teaching assistant. As parents and caregivers took on this near-impossible task, it led to a kind of outpouring of genuine collective appreciation for teachers, the kind of collective gratitude that led to this Google Ad campaign.

Participant 1: I thank you so much for what you're doing.

Participant 2: Their investment into our children is beyond what we can even imagine.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To this Jimmy Fallon song.

Jimmy Fallon: Teachers should make a billion dollars.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To this assessment by Ellen DeGeneres.

Ellen DeGeneres: Every parent at home is realizing how lucky they are that they have people like you that want to spend every minute of the day with kids helping them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, as we find ourselves in teacher appreciation week two years later, teachers are feeling, well, not very appreciated. A RAND survey from last June found that teachers are three times more likely to report depression than other adults. In January, a national education association poll found that 90% of teachers said burnout is a serious problem.

55% of teachers say they intend to leave the profession earlier than originally planned. While it's reasonable to attribute some of the challenges facing teachers as directly related to the conditions created by a global pandemic, there is another crisis affecting teachers in the classroom.

Rachel Stonecipher: My name's Rachel Stonecipher. I was the journalism and Pre-AP English 2 teacher at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Two weeks into the 2021 school year, Rachel and some of her colleagues returned from a weekend break and found that LGBTQ safe space stickers had been removed from their doors.

Rachel Stonecipher: Students are noticing the sticker's down, they're getting concerned, scared, because it looks like an act of vandalism of some kind in a lot of places and so the senses, some fear around who could have done this and what their motivations might be, those stickers had been up for about a year and a half prior with no controversy.

Teachers had been offered them by the Gay-Straight Alliance had put them up. If they felt comfortable and competent talking to LGBTQ students about anything related to their identity, figuring that side of themselves out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Mid-morning that day the Irving School District's policy on the sticker was outlined in a daily memo from the school principal.

Rachel Stonecipher: Per Irving ISD policy, all safe space stickers must be taken down, every space in Irving ISD is a safe space.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rachel and four other Gay-Straight Alliance sponsors drafted an email expressing concern about the school's removal of the stickers. The email came from Rachel's account but was signed by a total of seven teachers. A few days later, Rachel was pulled from the classroom and placed on administrative leave. School officials cited unprofessional communication as their justification, but meanwhile, students begin to rally around her.

Rachel Stonecipher: Students protest September 22nd and it gets a lot of attention. The district meanwhile wants me to resign, they keep pressuring me. There's an investigation into my unprofessional communication and I maintained that I did nothing but do my job well as I always had at McArthur. I refused to resign. They ended up giving me a long report of all the things that I did that were bad. It's this what I believe to be as scapegoating of teachers. They handed me a report that showed a bunch of things that teachers do every day.

Melissa Harris-Perry: After the investigation, the district told Rachel that despite her transgressions, they wouldn't report her to the State Board of Education, but that she could be relocated to a different school in the district. Fast forward to April and the Irving School Board voted to terminate Rachel's contract and employment following this school year. The Takeaway reached out to Irving Independent School District for comment. We're going to add their responses online at thetakeaway.org if we hear back from them.

In April, the district declined to comment directly on Rachel's story when NBC News and other outlets reported on it. They did release a statement that reads in part, "Irving Independent School District does not retaliate against employees for expressing their personal viewpoints on matters of public concern."

Now, what happened to Rachel can easily be understood within a state of legislative efforts to restrict what gets taught in the classroom. Whether it's efforts to restrict the teaching of so-called critical race theory or moves to mute classroom conversations about gender identity and sexual orientation. The classroom has increasingly become a battleground of censorship and free speech.

While there's no question that a vast majority of these restrictions are being imposed by conservative lawmakers, there are conservative educators who have also felt restricted in the ways they can express support for their students. The Supreme Court is currently hearing Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. It's a case in which the high school football coach Joseph Kennedy was fired in 2015 for kneeling in prayer after football games at Bremerton High School in Washington state.

Joseph Kennedy: I made a commitment with God that, "Hey, I'm going to give you the glory after every game, win or lose," and just thanking him for the opportunity to be there with the kids and to be able to compete. I just started taking a knee on the 50 the very first game.

From there it just grew a little bit, a couple kids asked me, "What are you doing out there, coach?" I said, "Just giving thanks for what you guys did." There was a couple of Christians that were on the team and they said, "Hey, coach, could we pray with you?" Of course, I said, "It's a free country, you can do whatever you want to do."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now while this case brings up very real considerations at the intersection of free speech and separation of church and state, the nuances in the case, I'm telling you, we could do a whole show on it, but we are left to wonder what it means when teachers across the political spectrum feel they're being unfairly penalized by administrators or even lawmakers?

Just two years after the country discovered a new empathy and appreciation for teachers, are educators now working in environments that make it impossible for them to use their professional judgment? Some of the teachers at our Takeaway community let us know how they're feeling about their jobs right now.

Erin: This is Erin from Fairfield County, Connecticut, and the administration at the schools have been wonderful, most of the parents are awesome but the attempts to pursue vouchers with all of the parents' bill of rights, red herrings are demoralizing and debilitating. We started the pandemic as heroes and now we're suddenly the villains and it's laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

Angela: I'm Angela from Pfeiffer Beach. I have taught for 20 years. I'm definitely not supported in Florida, I'm terrified of teaching in the classroom. I keep saying that if an educated person came to Florida, they would know better than to teach here because the stances and the extreme rules being pushed forth in the classroom are just insane. How are we supposed to be globally competitive while we can't even acknowledge diversity in the classroom? That's just ridiculous.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining me now is Prudence Carter. She's Professor of Sociology at Brown University. Professor Carter, thanks so much for joining us today.

Prudence Carter: Thank you for having me again, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, before we got started, we were reflecting on what it means to be at the end of the semester, our joy in being teachers. How do the current partisan politics affect what teachers, especially K-12 teachers can think about relative to their capacity to plant seeds for their students?

Prudence Carter: Now is certainly a moment of increased anxiety for what's already a very tough profession. These are persons who have been charged with developing our children, nurturing their minds, their hearts, their souls, producing the next democratic citizens, and expanding their thought, their critical thinking, all of those things.

Now with these different kinds of ideological battles and debates, where their certain ideas have been particularly outlawed, teachers are under great stress and duress. As a result, we're seeing many of who are leaving the teaching workforce.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, this isn't absolutely unprecedented. In some ways, the classroom, especially public school classrooms have always been a contested site.

Prudence Carter: Absolutely. We can go back as early as-- let's see, the scopes trial when there was the big debate about evolutionism in our society and a teacher actually being charged for having broken the law. Historians tell us that there are often conflicts about ideas in public education over the 20th century.

What makes this a remarkable moment, in my opinion, is that post 1963 and '64 since the Civil Rights Acts when our society opened up more, when we thought we were in a moment or an era of progression, we're now in a political moment of retrogression, going back to prior periods when groups were excluded.

It's a really phenomenal moment of contradiction in some ways when we think about the current Supreme Court case around prayer in school, when we think about the different states in terms of their anti LGBTQ+ bills and laws on the books. What makes this a tumultuous and hard time is that we were moving in the civil rights movement towards more equality, more justice, more inclusion, that's what those power movement is about. Now it's about silencing, in some ways, the visibility of particular groups.

In the case of the school prayer, we have a moment where, ironically, this was a country built on religious tolerance and freedom. Many Europeans were fleeing bloody Europe because of that. Now we are moving more towards increased hegemony and dominance of Christianity, particularly a certain type of Christianity. It's a really particular political moment but yes, we've always had some kind of debates about ideas mostly around Christian ideology in this country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Walk through that with the coaches praying for a moment because, look, I grew up in the south, in the '70s and '80s, we did a lot of praying.

Prudence Carter: Yes, me too.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Again, even if I can have some very strong intellectual disagreements with it, I don't necessarily see those as intentional harm brought on a student. The goal of the educator in that moment is, at least in their own understanding, to be supportive.

Prudence Carter: I think you make a good point about intentions but there's also the unintended. Let me say I too grew up. I mean, on the fifth grade, my fifth-grade teacher closed the door every day and we had to say the Lord's prayer. What I think about now as I've grown to become someone who's more inclusive in thought, is that we are a country of 330 million-plus people of various faiths. I can't help but think about those school children who are in the classroom and a teacher is praying and they are sitting in the midst of a religious ritual, ideology, prayer praying to a God that is not theirs.

How do you deal with multiculturalism in a democracy? Multiple faiths. This is a country that is built on the idea of religious freedom and so part of it is the unintended consequence of coercion. Even if a teacher thinks or educator thinks that they're doing well by others, you cannot make kids feel compelled or pressured in the classroom, particularly if it's not their faith, and so you're thinking about the other. It's okay I think if it's private and it's voluntary but when there's an element of potential coercion, I think that's where the law comes in, that's where we have to actually adjudicate.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If a teacher has a LGBTQ+ safe space sticker on their door, is that coercive?

Prudence Carter: That's not coercive, that's actually tolerance. That's actually signaling that signaling to someone I can be your ally, I can be your friend. I do that for my college students, particularly for my students who are minoritized and invisibilized.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm interested in our goals of education particularly maybe in the middle school, high school years. So often when I hear these debates, it's as though we believe young people are little vessels and we're just dumping information into them. Certainly, there's some information dumping. I mean, you do have to learn to count and to add and maybe to take a first derivative, that kind of thing, but don't we also want them asking questions about math and thinking about the scientific method and questioning our social scientific assumptions. How can we do that kind of work, the creative investigatory work of, particularly I say, middle school and high school when teachers are so constrained?

Prudence Carter: I think it's important to know that education is a social, political, and cultural institution that encapsulates schooling and schooling is just about reading and math. It's also about the production and the socialization of democratic citizens in the United States, it's all of those things. There's so much going on sociological in terms of socialization, in terms of political or civic engagement, schooling encapsulates all of that. Obviously, educators and experts have been trying to do this in an age-appropriate way, developmental way grade by grade by grade.

The basic core issues are there in terms of math, social studies, science, and in English or literature but here's where the battles play out. Even if it's not just when you're reading we are in a culture war about what you should read when you're trying to teach children to engage in literature, to understand what the pantheon or the canon or what the array, global array of literature is.

At this point, we're banning books of even Nobel laureates like Toni Morrison because of the subject matter. The fear of white children feeling-- we've talked about this in the past, of feeling vulnerable or feeling stigmatized because of things that their ancestors may have done. On the flip side, you have Black, brown, Asian and indigenous children who actually have been asking for families, asking for years of the literature about their political, cultural, and social realities be incorporated in the classroom.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Prudence Carter is Professor of Sociology at Brown University. As always, thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Prudence Carter: Thank you for having me.

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