November 8th, 2016 – Your Students are Watching You
I can hardly blame any teachers who hesitate to vote for the Democratic nominee this year. One obvious reason is that many teachers are themselves Republicans and hesitate to vote for any Democratic nominee. Another is that many teachers, with cause, are wary of many Democratic politicians who have embraced the agenda of school privatization with a vigor that was hardly conceivable twenty years ago. In the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, Democrats such as Andrew Cuomo of New York and Rahm Emanuel of Chicago have been passionate architects of school closings, have embraced blame-the-teachers-first evaluation and retention policies, and have promoted school privatization that undermines truly public schools. While I have argued that Secretary Hillary Clinton has signaled willingness to pivot from these policies in her administration, I cannot blame teachers who hesitate in the wake of a pair of two term Presidents, one Republican and one Democratic, both of whom embraced awful education policies.
But I address this blog to teachers who are contemplating what I find unthinkable – casting a ballot for Donald Trump. I call it unthinkable because I am starting from a premise that teachers care about their students and want what is best for them. For every single one of your students, regardless of who they are and who their families are, there is something horrible at the core of what Donald Trump’s continued domination of the national landscape would mean. While I find his policies – such as they are – harmful and nearly farcical, what is even more disturbing to me as an educator would be giving him four years in the most visible and influential office in the nation where he would have a guaranteed national audience for the unending sexism and bigotry that has become the lingua franca of his campaign. As a teacher, you should be able to look all of your students in the eye and say that your vote has helped them. I do not believe you can do that if you vote for Donald Trump.
Half of your students are girls and young women. What could you possibly say to them that justifies a vote for Donald Trump? That it does not matter if the President of the United States of America is a man with a decades long record of belittling women in public mostly because of how they look? That it does not matter if the President of the United States is a man who routinely barged in on partially dressed teen aged beauty pageant contestants? That it does not matter if the President of the United States has a record of making sexually suggestive comments to under-aged women? That it does not matter if the President of the United States is a man who routinely relates to women only in terms of their sexual desirability? That it does not matter if the President of the United States is a man who bragged about his ability to get away with sexual assault and then tried to brush it off as “locker room talk”?
I challenge any teacher looking a classroom full of girls and young women who deserve to be seen as complete human beings and to be evaluated on the basis of their accomplishments – and to explain how the President of the United States can be a man who speaks and acts like this. For that matter, I challenge any teacher to look a the boys and young men in their classrooms who deserve to be November 8th, 2016 – Your Students are Watching You | Daniel Katz, Ph.D.:
