WebPEN America 588 Broadway, Suite 303 New York, NY 10012 T (212) 334-1660 F (212) 334-2181 PEN America Los Angeles 1370 N. St Andrews Place Los Angeles, CA 90028 T A smaller number of bills would confer this right on the state attorney general, the county attorney, or some other public official. No public funds may be spent for any purpose that would violate this law. This punishment has appeared in 22 percent of bills introduced this year, up from 15 percent the year before. And in Georgia, a nonpublic school found to have discussed sexual orientation or gender identity in a primary grade level would, under SB 613, have been unable to participate in either the states Special Needs Scholarship Program or any athletics tournament in which a public school is a member.103Georgia SB 613, https://legiscan.com/GA/text/SB613/id/2542860/Georgia-2021-SB613-Introduced.pdf. . While governments have greater leeway to determine what is taught in K12 schools, that does not mean that prohibitions on promotion are wise. But the potential for abuse is both obvious and inevitable. Without these freedoms, university educators would be unable to engage in rigorous scholarship or effective teaching, intervene critically in public debates, invite speakers representing a range of views to campus, or distinguish forcefully between truth and falsehood. It builds on PEN Americas 2021 report on educational gag orders, as well as the PEN America Index of Educational Gag Orders, a comprehensive dataset, updated weekly, of every gag order bill introduced since January 2021. This report consists of six sections. In 2021, the governments of Turkey, China, Pakistan, Belarus, and Iran engaged in harassment of and attacks against exiled writers, ranging from mounting legal charges and extradition attempts, to actual and attempted kidnapping, to physical threats to the writers and their family members. On their face, by prohibiting compelled speech, these gag order bills appear to adhere to existing First Amendment doctrine. One Indiana bill states that students must be taught that. It is also likely that we will continue to see the adoption of district-level educational gag orders that are not enshrined in state legislation. For years now, Putin has held in prison the historian Yury Dmitriev on specious charges of child pornography. Similarly, a lawsuit by Parents Choice Tennessee, citing one of Tennessees two educational gag order laws, seeks to ban Wit & Wisdoman English language arts curriculumfrom Williamson County schools. CNN Book bans in public schools kept rising during the first half of the 2022-23 school year, and nearly a third of them were the direct result of newly enacted Tags: Censorship, Diversity, Florida, Freedom of Expression, Freedom to Publish, Inclusion, PEN America, Politics, United States. American Civil Liberties Union, Legislation Affecting LGBTQ Rights across the Country, July 1, 2022. Overall, there has also been an increase in the complexity and scale of legislation, as lawmakers have sought to assert political control over everything from classroom speech to library content, from teachers professional training to field trips and extracurricular activities. In a lawsuit challenging HB 7, a University of Central Florida professor explained that he no longer felt free under the law to discuss with his students Michelle Alexanders 2010 book, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This law prohibits public colleges and universities in South Dakota from compelling students to adopt or affirm certain ideas from a list of divisive concepts related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin. Such legislation seems likely to have a pronounced chilling effect on teachers and to exacerbate tensions between educators and the communities they serve. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin has actually created such a tip line via an email address, though no legislation specifically called for one. The second provision extends this same prohibition to classroom instruction in public K12 schools, colleges, and universities. For instance, lawmakers have introduced 14 bills that explicitly limit use of the New York Timess 1619 Project on the grounds that it identifies slavery as part of the nations true founding. Other bills have targeted similar historical perspectives that emphasize the deep roots of slavery in American history and society. Texas led the country with the most book bans 713 affecting 16 school districts, Others have gone further. The first is so-called curriculum transparency legislation, bills that, in practice, have often amounted to a kind of surveillance of teachers. Nevertheless, shielding American history and society from negative moral judgments has been a major priority for lawmakers in 2022. states baldly that history shall be taught using the standards, customs, and traditions in use at the time of the historical event., sought to forbid teachers from promoting any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools which does not include the worldwide context of now outdated and discouraged practices., would have prohibited teaching that America has more culpability, in general, than other nations for the institution of slavery; that America, in general, had slavery more extensively and for a later period of time than other nations; or that one race is the unique oppressor in the institution of slavery while another is its unique victim., Other educational gag order bills in this category have focused less on US history than on the current state of American society. At the heart of this war are educational gag ordersstate legislative attempts to restrict teaching, training, and learning in K12 schools and higher education. In a statement, Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of PEN Americas free expression at risk programs, says, PEN America is sounding the alarm that the number of writers and public intellectuals detained or imprisoned in 2021 remains intolerably high, and we are particularly distressed to see Myanmar among the top three jailers of writers, in the wake of the juntas ruthless crackdown on free expression and human rights., In many parts of the world, Writers are being jailed for the crime of exercising their right to peaceful expression and, in many cases, for using the power of the written word to counter authoritarianism and hold powerful leaders to account. In 2022, that number has increased to 39 percent, several of which, like South Dakotas HB 1012, focus exclusively on higher education.24South Dakotas HB 1012 became law in 2022. any training or instruction where ideas from a list of divisive concepts about race, sex, color, or national origin are espoused, promoted, advanced, inculcated, or imposed. Thats what I kept thinking while rewatching Her, Spike Jonzes 2013 burst of prescience. Lawsuits have begun to appear that ask courts to interpret gag orders as broadly as possible, while state boards of education have handed down draconian penalties in excess of what the laws require. Anika Exum, Why Williamson County Parents Are Suing School District, State Education Commissioner,. Included in each anthology are original groundbreaking illustrations by artists both with and without justice involvement. Advocates who believe that educational gag orders are narrowly focused instruments to fight indoctrination of students should recognize that these laws, in practice, create broad and unspecific new government restrictions on speech that are difficult to interpret and easy to overenforce. Second, the law requires school districts to collect these challenges, regardless of their merit or outcome, and report them to the commissioner of education. Our report on the inaugural Freedom To Write Index report in 2020 is here. All Rights Reserved. public schools do play an important role in fostering a healthy civic culture, imputing national ideals, and instilling an understanding and appreciation of students community and society. This law prohibits public K12 schools from adopting or engaging in any curriculum, classroom instruction, or mandatory training program that promotes ideas from a list of divisive concepts related to race. Jonathan Friedman, Big Brother Is Headed for the Classroom, Daily Beast, February 14, 2022. As an arts critic (National Critics Institute), he was with The Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Tampa Tribune, now the Tampa Bay Times. For example, one of the concepts that HB 7 prohibits faculty from espousing is that an individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion. By any reasonable interpretation, HB 7 makes it illegal in the state of Florida for a law professor to articulate arguments in favor of affirmative action in the classroomeven though affirmative action exists and is currently held by the Supreme Court to be constitutional in some forms. A few died thanks to effective politicking by their opponents; this list includes multiple gag order bills in Indiana, which were defeated in 2022 amid political gaffes, citizen pressure, and disagreements among Republican legislators over whether the bills went too far or not far enough. This includes Floridas HB 1557the so-called Dont Say Gay billand 22 others. Kirk Cameron and his publisher, Brave Books, are calling on the federal government to investigate the American Library Association as the Christian author and actor claims the association advised libraries to find ways to block or sabotage his upcoming nationwide event in August. Our aim is not to take a position on. With damage estimated at about 12m and more than 110,000 books and documents destroyed, the incineration of the state-of-the-art library in this neighbourhood The teaching of history, civics, and American identity has never been neutral or uncontested, and reasonable people can disagree over how and when educators should teach children about racism, sexism, and other facets of American history and society. Of the educational gag order bills introduced in 2022, 55 percent have included some form of explicit punishment. For instance, a history teacher might wish to assign, as part of a unit on the US Civil War, Alexander Stephenss 1861 Cornerstone Speech, in which the Confederate vice president mounts a defense of slavery. In practice, however, they would outlaw historical perspectives that explore how racial discrimination and slavery were entrenched in the lives of the Constitutions framers and the country they birthed. This executive order prohibits public K12 schools from directing or otherwise compelling students to adopt or affirm any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including a list of divisive concepts related to race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or religion. Not all of these bills are considered by PEN America to be educational gag orders, a term we reserve for legislation prohibiting the expression of certain ideas in a school or university. Summer Lopez, Chief Program Officer, Free Expression Programs; James Tager, Director of Research; Nadine Farid Johnson, Managing Director, PEN America Washington and Free Expression Programs; and PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel reviewed and edited the report. No punishment is specified. For example, under Louisianas HB 837, public school teachers would have been unable to cover the topics of sexual orientation or gender identity in any classroom discussion or instruction in kindergarten through grade eight or to discuss [their] own sexual orientation or gender identity with students in any grade.
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