Impact of the Pandemic on Teaching

Teachers went from heroes to villains, thanks to right-wing counter-narratives.

I’m working on a more in-depth piece for another publication that explores the relationship between authoritarian discourses and public education. Central to the thesis is the shift in authoritarian discourse that happened around the time of the Great Recession and the election of President Obama.

In essence, from the late 1970s through the 2000s, authoritarian discourse was framed in terms of Neoliberalism. This discourse was expressed in education “reform” by emphasizing market values, value-added, efficiency, accountability, and competition as central to effective schooling. Public schools were to focus on preparing students for participating in the market. The result, if not the specific goal was to create a two-tier education system in which the ownership and investor class benefited from high-quality education, while the middle and working classes were imbued with a market ethic to consume, compete, and accept authority.

After the Neoliberal discourse collapsed with the W. Bush Administration culminating in two military quagmires, spiraling debt, and the collapse of the global economy due to unfettered investment, the conservative movement was soundly discredited. To maintain political viability, authoritarian movements had to shift their rhetoric to appeal to the more monstrous elements of the right. This more paranoid style attracted and empowered the conspiratorial, xenophobic, and anti-democratic end of the conservative movement, creating a more extreme authoritarian discourse.

The empowerment of the right-wing monsters, centered in the Republican Party, resulted in the displacement of the establishment, Neoliberal conservatives with what has recently been described as Christian Nationalism, alt-right, proto-fascist, or what this author prefers, simply Fascism. This authoritarian discourse was to be expressed in classrooms with more direct control of curriculum, exclusionary values, and intensive policing of increasingly disempowered teachers. The groundwork was already laid by the authoritarian neoliberals before the Great Recession, but for the fascist right, these market-based reforms did not go far enough. Public schools had to be purged of any whispers of liberalism, internationalism, multiculturalism, equity, and inclusion.

Indeed, this movement in education is exemplified in The Free State of DeSantis. Yet, as I reflect, I wonder how significant the authoritarian break of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama on influencing the latest chapter of anti-democratic education policy.

The 2008 election and the collapse of establishment, neoliberal, conservative legitimacy was the break the Christian Nationalists needed to take over the Republican Party by 2016. Scott Walker drew the schematic for right-wing capture of public education and crippleing teachers’ unions. In the end, however, neoliberalism remained the driving policy for public education nationwide.

After the Great Recession, neoliberal Democrats like President Obama continued to perpetuate market-based assumptions regarding public education during their tenures in office. They thereby legitimated neoliberal pedagogy despite the clear collapse of market-based theories in the actual economy. Neoliberal education became a centrist, liberal mainstay. An activated right-wing, in contrast, could only embrace a more directly authoritarian, anti-democratic philosophy.

What I noticed, however, and I admit that at this point it is an anecdotal observation, is that the real impetus of reactionary authoritarianism was not the Great Recession, was not the 2010 or even the 2016 elections. The real catalyst was the right-wing response to public school strategies for dealing with the pandemic.

Since the collapse of neoliberalism with the Great Recession, the foundation of authoritarian rhetoric rested on a premise concocted by right-wing provocateur Rush Limbaugh when he detailed the “Four Corners of Deceit“. According to this frame, everything emerging from government, academia, science, and the media was a lie designed to advance a global, left-wing agenda to…well…it’s never clear what this massive conspiracy is trying to do, but whatever it is, it’s bad.

Of course, public schools are a convergence point for government, academia, science, and the media. Public schools are run by the government and any analysis of a deep state or state indoctrination must lead to raised eyebrows at the schoolhouse door. Teachers are scholars, motivated by academic freedom at the expense of traditional values. The curriculum is based on scientific methods of evaluating knowledge, confirming validity, testing hypotheses, and critical thinking rather than on accepting authority. Furthermore, public schools accessed media from textbooks to websites to inculcate the deep state’s secular mission.

For the far right, public schools, especially public schools embracing a progressive approach to learning, namely inquiry, critical thinking, innovation, and creativity, were scorned as secular avenues for hedonism, atheism, and socialism. If public schools could not be put under the authoritarian thumb, then they should be avoided. Therefore, neoliberal authoritarianism defined public schools as places to avoid. The right embraced homeschooling, private school vouchers especially for Christian-based institutions, and charter schools as a means of getting around vile teachers’ unions.

When the Pandemic struck, however, the Four Corners of Deceit faced an insurmountable rebuke. Here was a devastating disease that required a strong state response. There were no “market-based” solutions to this crisis. People could not go to work, but they still needed the resources necessary for survival. The dreaded government would have to take care of citizens and businesses during this crisis or none would survive by market forces alone. Massive government stimulus intervened in what would have been an economic calamity far worse than the Great Depression.

In the meantime, academia and science were mobilized to find solutions to the Covid crisis. Facing this new threat, experts from fields as diverse as public health to urban planning were engaged in finding ways to mitigate the threat of contagion. Epidemiologists, virologists, and other scientists from all over the world collaborated on finding cures and treatments while hospitals burst at the seams with the infected and death tolls skyrocketed. The media became a crucial link for informing the public of the latest discoveries, the most pressing threats, and concerns, up-to-date information, and the best strategies for keeping families safe. And people turned to these sources for succor…a sharp rebuke of a foundational right-wing premise that each was entangled in some global, deep-state conspiracy to deceive the public on everything.

As always, public schools were center stage in this crisis. By the spring of 2020, schools around the country closed their doors in the face of contagion while districts mobilized resources, and teachers reinvented schooling to provide continuing education to their students. By summer, teachers were lauded as heroes alongside the harried healthcare professionals at the front lines of the disease. Parents were direct witnesses to the lengths teachers would go to help their students learn even in the face of crisis. Furthermore, parents learned firsthand just how difficult teaching really was. This learning curve was best exemplified by television producer Shonda Rhimes who Tweeted, “Been schooling a 6-year-old and 8-year-old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or week.”

Lived experience betrayed the Four Corners of Deceit model. Progressive government policies were proving effective at not only dealing with economic collapse but also in addressing social problems like poverty. Furthermore, they were becoming popular, with appeals to make permanent what were intended to be temporary measures.

The underlying assumptions of American authoritarianism from the moment Ronald Reagan declared that government was the problem were severely challenged if not disproven. Any reasonable person might predict that this would be the end of the right-wing authoritarian narrative in the face of irreconcilable contradictions. Of course, that’s not how movement politics works. In the face of the most recent and most telling event invalidating authoritarian pretensions, the movement right simply sharpened their rhetorical frame.

As is the case in any complex social crisis, mistakes were made. Some strategies did not work or had trivial effects in dealing with the virus. Such is to be expected. Facing a unique crisis means realigning strategies as new information comes to the fore. Covid was no exception. For right-wing issue framing, however, every misstep, every false assumption, was not simply an understandable and natural consequence of this novel crisis. Rather, it was proof positive of the deep state conspiracy to turn freedom-loving Americans into docile sheeple. Mask mandates, quarantines, and even the vaccines themselves were not to be trusted.

To be clear, the consequence of this framing was heart-wrenching. NPR reports that as many as one-third of Covid deaths in the United States could have been avoided but for the misinformation spread about vaccines. Right-wing leaders, including the President, didn’t care. The movement (or cynical self-interest) took precedence over people’s lives. Authority had to be preserved at all costs…and the costs were devastating.

As Covid Summer ended, fatigued parents, having spent six whole months taking care of their own children without the respite offered by public schools, were disappointed to learn that many school districts were not yet ready to open their doors. Teachers, only recently lauded as heroes just months earlier, had the audacity to ask school districts to look after their health as well as the health of the children they would be tasked to serve before reopening schools. We had some information on how to mitigate the risks through mask mandates, strict regimens of hygiene and disinfecting, and acute tracking of the virus with home quarantines. Some districts, like my own, were well-positioned to deal with the challenges of reopening, partially reopening, and conducting hybrid learning. Other districts were not so well provisioned.

Regardless, many teachers had their own health concerns, or health concerns for their households. Many teachers taught in school buildings that were unhealthy even in the best of times. They were reluctant to return to overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms. Teachers asked only that reasonable measures be taken to guarantee their health, and accommodation be made for those teachers with specific health conditions that precluded them from returning to work.

The right wing was outraged!

Parents were appalled that these selfish teachers were not willing to sacrifice their health or the health of their own families for the sake of getting those schools open and those kids out of the house. This was the perfect opening for the right-wing counter-narrative against the value of public schools and the heroism of public school teachers. If teachers weren’t willing to return to work, regardless of their own health concerns, then they should be fired. After all, anyone can teach.

And no, our children are not going to be discomforted by being required to wear masks. That’s tyranny. Public schools, and public-school teachers and their unions were vilified in the right-wing press. School board meetings were marred by grown adults spewing anger and bile at the podiums demanding that those lazy, pampered teachers return to classroom instruction and please, for the love of God, take our kids off our hands!

From there it was just a matter of degree to make the claim that teachers were not only indoctrinating students with their socialist mask mandates. They were also indoctrinating our children with left-wing dogma.

In the face of an increasingly effective reframing of racism by Black Lives Matter activists, authoritarian propagandists like Christopher Rufo jumped at the opportunity to fabricate a counter-narrative. Black Lives Matter, for movement activists like Rufo, was not inspired by real concerns about racism. Rather, all this racial tension existed because Marxist teachers in left-wing public schools were indoctrinating our students with Critical Race Theory.

Many parents remembered overhearing lessons on Zoom dealing with The Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, Segregation, and lynching. Could this be part of the conspiracy? Authoritarians, receiving a frame that confirmed their xenophobia embraced the Critical Race Theory panic and demanded political action. This was intentional, as Christopher Rufo himself admitted, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

From mask mandates to accusations of rampant “Cultural Marxism” and Critical Race Theory, the avenue was paved for further conspiracies titillating to the paranoid. Fascist rhetorical formations require an “other” to be vilified as intrinsically corrupt. Teachers weren’t just teaching radicalism and racial shame. They were also grooming children into the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. What might seem like an innocent children’s book about penguins is really gay pornography used to soften good Christian children up to accept sexual perversion as normal.

After 2010 and 2016 the authoritarian right was already politically positioned to advance regressive policies on their public schools. None were more energized by this discursive opportunity to impose Medieval policy on public education than Florida’s very own Ron DeSantis. Teaching in Florida public schools is now a stultifying, suffocating experience. After decades of holding public education together despite ridiculous and dehumanizing neoliberal reforms, teachers have reached their breaking point under the new heavy hand of contemporary authoritarianism.

Authoritarians are an ever-present bloc in any society. In democratic societies, whether they are established, or aspiring, authoritarian movements are often relegated to what is considered a lunatic fringe. When that lunatic fringe finds a crack in the underlying democratic superstructure, however, they may use that crack to build political legitimacy and encourage participation and membership. The last forty-five years or so of neoliberal incursions into American society left many cracks in our still struggling democratic pretensions. These fissures widened as a result of the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s subsequent election. The Movement for Black Lives and the advances associated with the LGBTQ+ movement inspired authoritarian backlash. Concurrent with the Covid Pandemic, fissures became available by which authoritarians could build a political discourse or a rhetorical frame around safeguarding our children from racial shaming and sexual predation.

A big part of promoting and preserving democratic goals is understanding how social crises like economic recessions, natural disasters, pandemics, technological displacements, and other sources of social stress, might create fissures by which authoritarians can undermine the superstructure. In doing so, authoritarians can build their political blocs, discredit important knowledge structures, and impose their own regressive vision of social order on what used to be a democratic society.