One time, a while ago, I was refereeing a high-school boys’ summer-league basketball game. My partner that day was Brian Peabody, a local high-school and college coaching legend whose exploits are so numerous and varied that he is high on the list of Greg Hansen’s Top 100 Tucson sports legends of all time. Brian and I were calling the game the way a summer-league game should be called, as though we were those bumper things that they put in the gutters at the bowling alley to help keep little kids’ ball on the lane. During the game, an especially Over-exuberant Parent (if you will pardon the redundancy) was criticizing the calls that we were making and the non-calls that we weren’t making.

As the game progressed through the first half, Obnoxious Parent (he had long since morphed) began chirping more and more, louder and louder. It finally got to the point where Brian went over and asked the guy what his problem was. Ridiculous Parent then launched into a litany of bad and/or missed calls he had witnessed. 

After a brief exchange, Brian handed the guy his whistle and shirt. I thought it was hilarious until I realized that I would have to make virtually every call the rest of the way. And so it went. The guy couldn’t get himself to put the whistle in his mouth, not for sanitary reasons, but for the fact that calling the game for real is exponentially harder than getting everything right from the stands. He didn’t make one call, not even the really obvious ones that happened right in front of him. 

With about 10 seconds left and Parent’s son’s team trailing by one, the son goes hard down the lane and gets absolutely massacred. I was about to call the foul, but I held back, partly because the play was happening right in front of my “partner” and partly because my prayers had been answered. In an instant, Loud Mouth Parent because Frozen Parent. His son’s team lost by one.

I thought about that when I read the latest Screw You To Teachers bills currently moving through the Arizona State Legislature. As part of a frenzied response to the thought that school kids might learn that slavery once existed in the United States, state legislatures all over the country, including ours right here in Arizona, are misusing the frightening term “Critical Race Theory” to help save small white children (and their large white parents) from hearing about the ugly truths that stained our past, currently infect our present, and will continue to shape our future if our chosen “response” is to try to ignore it.

It’s always insulting when lawmakers think that they’re better than teachers…at anything.

The (unfunny) funny thing about it is that probably not one out of 100 screaming Caucasians could come within an intellectual mile of providing an accurate definition of Critical Race Theory. Indeed, 20 years from now, if you google “Critical Race Theory,” the definition will be “an intentionally misleading and often racist rallying cry used in a cynical manner by worshippers of Donald Trump for strictly partisan political purposes.”

One bill, SB 1211, will require teachers to post all of their lesson plans and any materials they might use in instruction online so that parents can look it over and protest its use (utilizing anything up to, and including, legal action). Proponents of this nonsense keep using the phrase “educational transparency.” But this has always existed. For as long as I can remember (and that’s a long time), parents have been able to contact teachers about what’s going on in the classroom. Heck, a parent can go sit in on his/her kid’s classes to check things out. This is probably on the embarrassing side for the student, but it has always been an option. 

When my daughter was in high school, she had an AP History teacher who was assigning homework by the pound. A couple other parents and I went to see him, expressed our time concerns (our kids all had a full load of AP classes, plus sports) and the teacher was really cool about it. He came up with a creative response to our concerns. It’s really not that hard. You just have to find the time to do something other than show up at school board meetings in full venom mode.

Perhaps the nastiest part of this whole thing came when bill sponsor Nancy Barto said that forcing teachers to post all of their lesson plans online in advance would actually be a time-saving measure. Yes, weakness is strength, up is down, and spending more time somehow saves time.    

A 2019 Department of Education study showed that teachers put in almost 13 hours a week on their jobs outside of school, along with nearly 50 hours a week at school. Having been married to a teacher for decades, I can attest to those numbers, although they seem a bit low.

There’s really only one of two ways that this constant assault on teachers by the Arizona Legislature will end. Either positive trends in demographics will result in the election of lawmakers who value education over fearmongering or the final good teacher will quit to take on a job with better pay and more respect. Walmart is always hiring.   

This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2022.

11 replies on “Republicans At The Arizona Legislature Are Finding New Fronts In The War On Teachers”

  1. Horsemanure Danehy,

    Conservatives have no problem with teaching students about slavery. How thousands of slaves mutinied and failing jumped into the ocean to escape by drowning. Conservatives have no problem with teaching about the horrors of reconstruction how massive violence against Blacks resulted in thousands of deaths at the hands of Democrats. How Democrats lynched thousands of Blacks during the Jim Crowe era.

    How Democrats continue to abuse Blacks as a power base for the politics by keeping them addicted to welfare.

    How Democrats destroyed Black culture with welfare programs that have destroyed the ability of Black families to stay together with 74% of Black children being born to unwed mothers.

    But, you’re shilling for Critical Race Theory, a completely toxic idea. The idea that every relationship can be described as an oppressed/oppressor. A Marxian idea that all of history can be described as the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors.

    Get that idea in your mind as a way of approaching life and you are damaged for life. Hate is your motto. Violence is not just acceptable, its a moral imperative.

    Latin America culture completely embraces your oppressed/oppressor model. It’s murder rate is 8 times higher than that of the U.S. Every modestly successful business is labeled an oppressor and attacked with regulations and taxes. As a result, they have no prosperity. Latin American has over 60 million people in multi-dimensional poverty: no running water, no electricity, no car, no shoes, eating rats to survive. This is what you advocate for the U.S. and its putrid.

    That’s what’s at stake here, everything.

  2. Governor Ducey, the self-professed “education governor” strikes again.

    Headline: Arizona ranked worst state in America for teachers, study says

    https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/ariz…

    “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” — Adolf Hitler

  3. Parents whining about too much homework are called obnoxious by every teacher promoting excellence from their students.

    Funny how you elevate yourself above the peons Tom.

    No, it’s not funny, it is so sad. But isn’t that what democrats do to console their guilt?

  4. I agree with Hup and would add:

    If they want to teach about black culture, history and slavery, instead of the made up “Whites are all racists” CRT stuff, I suggest the following reading list: “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”, “Ethnic America”, “Race and Culture”, “Migration and Culture”, “Conquest and Culture”, all by Thomas Sowell (a black man) and all on my bookshelf.

    Maybe they could teach something about the Dred Scott decision. (Even I, a White “racist”, went out of my way to visit the courthouse in St. Louis where the first decision was rendered.) If Arizona students learned something about this, they would be smarter than the just installed black woman Supreme Court Justice, who neither knows what a woman is, or knows anything about the worst Supreme Court decision ever made.

    Then there’s Woodrow Wilson, “liberal” Democrat president, who re-segregated the federal government workforce and the military. Teaching blacks about that would seem pretty “critical” to me, but I’ll bet that’s not in the curriculum. He was a white racist but not one of “those” white racists that we Republicans are supposed to be.

  5. And now we find out that Disney is perverted much like the public school system. Don’t let them near your kids.

  6. “Headline: Arizona ranked worst state in America for teachers, study says”

    https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/ariz…

    More fake news.

    The Metlife insurance company funded a national teacher job satisfaction for four decades.

    Then, in 2012, teacher job satisfaction hit a four decade low: just 39% of teachers saying they were “very satisfied” with their jobs. That was the end of it for Metlife.
    After 40 years of surveying teacher job satisfaction, they quit doing the survey.

    Who knows what the national benchmark is now? That 39% is all we have to compare Arizona.

    However, the Arizona data I’ve seen is all in the 50s or higher.

  7. I talk to teachers and they are up[set with the district and the teachers union. They have been told to go out and demand more money for education and then management blows all the money. It has left the rest of us #deadfored!

    You should have expected that once you turned on the parents. My guess is that they didn’t cover that in your college education.

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