Students in New Hampshire are heading back to class soon, and it's the third year their teachers will be dealing with new rules around how they can talk about race, gender and sexuality.
Republicans led an effort in 2021 to pass a state law restricting certain teaching on those issues, and that law is currently being challenged in court.
New documents from that ongoing court case offer a window into how it's affecting teachers, districts and the state officials who are in charge of overseeing education.
NHPR's Sarah Gibson has been following the case and these issues more broadly, and she recently joined All Things Considered Host Julia Furukawa to share what she's learned from the latest records.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Julia Furukawa: Just to start off, can you remind us a little bit more about what this law is about and where the lawsuit came from?
Sarah Gibson: So in the last few years, there has been a lot more scrutiny on schools. Some of this is directly related to the pandemic, to COVID policies, to remote schooling at a lot of public schools. But there's also been a fair amount of backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion — otherwise known as DEI initiatives — in schools, so things like efforts to address racism, to diversify the curriculum, to more actively welcome LGBTQ students.
At the same time as this backlash has been happening in New Hampshire and across the country, Republicans really rallied around efforts to give parents more tools to take action if they have problems with school policies or classroom content. And New Hampshire's very own education commissioner, Frank Edelblut, has said he really sees as part of his job the need to respond to parental concerns.
One of the results of all of this, together, has been this new law that restricts how teachers teach about race, gender, sexuality and other identities. Several New Hampshire teachers unions and individuals have brought a lawsuit against the state, basically alleging that the new law chills free speech. They say it's unconstitutional, and it's basically so vague that they don't really ever know when they're violating it. And they also allege that this is contributing to a hostile environment for teachers.
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OK, so the lawsuit is still very much not settled, but do you have any sense of whether teachers are facing more hostility because of the new law?
Well, it's really hard to parse what is stemming from any one policy or just these kind of broader political movements that I just talked about. It's also challenging because a lot of the complaints processes and investigations are confidential.
But through the lawsuit, there are certainly stories that have come to light. You know, one includes a situation in Windham. There was a social studies teacher there showing music videos in her class, basically trying to help students make connections between contemporary culture and the Harlem Renaissance. A parent issued a complaint, and then the investigator from the Department of Education calls the school. And this teacher, in the lawsuit she says that she was interrupted in class three times in one day to speak with her superiors about the music video clips. These are very popular music videos, I might add — it's one of Beyoncé's famous videos — and she says that this kind of behavior contributed to a climate of fear and unease among teachers. In fact, she says, "One colleague decided not to show a clip from a popular TV show because she did not want to face the same kind of scrutiny and stress that I had faced."
So definitely some complaints about curriculum. What about books? Are there any signs that the law is being used by people to try to ban access to certain titles?
Well, there have been multiple complaints about the book "Gender Queer." That's a graphic novel with a nonbinary main character. It's been banned in multiple states, and folks have probably heard about it on the news.
In New Hampshire, one of the people who's been tasked with handling complaints about this and other books is actually the guy at the state Department of Education who investigates teacher misconduct at large. So he deals with all kinds of complaints coming into the department, including really serious ones — ones that are, you know, alleging abuse by teachers. So he's in charge of all of those. In his deposition for the lawsuit, he says he's also been asked to gather information about things like whether a book like "Gender Queer" is in a school library. And he says, "Parents are very creative when it comes to complaining about the books. So you have to cut through the nonsense and determine whether or not there's actually a code of conduct violation."
"Gender Queer" is not the only book that's come up multiple times. For example, the court documents show that a parent from the Exeter area complained to the Department of Education about a book that's called "A Good Kind of Trouble." It's about a Black girl's experience with the Black Lives Matter movement. And what the documents show is that this parent, who feels she's not really getting through to the superintendent, she emails the state education commissioner, Frank Edelblut. He then gets involved. He calls the superintendent to ask for and about this book, "A Good Kind of Trouble." Then when he doesn't hear back, he asks the attorney at the Department of Education to get the book for him, and he discusses it with leaders of the district. However, it's not really clear what happens after that.
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Have we learned anything else about how this law — or the Department of Education's approach to these issues — is affecting the school environment?
Again, right now we're kind of operating off of the examples that are in the lawsuit. One is from about a year after the law was passed. The commissioner of education wrote an op-ed — and he often does this, he often writes op-eds. This one was specifically about curriculum that was at odds with certain families' values. And he pulled a number of examples from complaints from parents: things like photos of posters in classrooms, or certain surveys or tests.
There was one example in the op-ed referencing a slide about gender pronouns that had been made by a local art teacher, who themselves is transgender and uses the title Mx., instead of Mrs. or Mr.
And this published op-ed also included a photo of the teacher, though their face was blacked out. In the court documents, that teacher says they were easily identifiable, and they say that they felt personally targeted. They also say the op-ed, along with growing hostility towards transgender educators, led them to quit teaching at the end of 2022.
Still, at this point, these are individual anecdotes — and it's unclear to what extent these individual teachers’ experiences reflect a broader pattern that can be linked directly to state policies.
