Oklahoma’s education board has revoked the license of a former teacher who drew national attention during surging book-ban efforts across the U.S. in 2022 when she covered part of her classroom bookshelf in red tape with the words “Books the state didn’t want you to read.”
The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.
An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision.
its very telling that they want children to not only not have access to these materials, but not know they they are be prevented from seeing those materials.
kind of horrifying… very weird ,cult-like behavior from conservatives.
Right? This is some legitimate dystopian shit.
It is called the bible belt and as a gay man that grew up there, let me tell you, it is some scary shit. Thanks to the people there still fighting the good fight.
Brainwashing
Also its highly likely that all these children have access to the internet anyways and can access all of it and much more.
How do they know it exists from their advertised and curated algorithm bubbles of proprietary app social media?
Chasing away your teachers is a great way to make sure your state stays at the bottom of every US state comparison table, so great job.
… is a great way make an uneducated population for the benefit of the next authoritarian ruler
Yes. Failing the populace is not a side-effect, it’s the point.
What fun is it being the king of an unhappy, sickly, unemployable mob of peasants? Your dictatorship will not last a month.
Quite the contrary. An uneducated population is easier to fool and to control. And uneducated != unemployable.
The ditches don’t dig themselves! The hogs don’t clean their own mess. The stamping machine only severs an arm at a time, so get up there and run the stamper with your good arm, Billy!
Automation is so much less fun than institutional cruelty!
Hatred and entitlement aren’t logical.
Oklahoma imports it’s high education labor from neighboring Nebraska and Texas, then keeps the locals ignorant and pliable for the cheap local labor
neighboring Nebraska
Kansas: “Am I a joke to you?”
Yes. Kansas is a joke
Hey, at least they were able to protect abortion access via direct ballot voting.
I’m wondering what percentage of high education labor is military veterans who utilized their GI bill to get a better education, Tinker AFB ain’t small. Huge military populations for Texas too, and there’s a history of dumping retirees out the gate and saying “good luck!”.
Oklahoma University and OSU both have big out of state populations, too.
Chasing away public school teachers on our way to privatizing schools is a goal of theirs so yeah mission accomplished
Their education system doesn’t care. They want 1 of 2 things. Easy to control and submissive teachers, or they want to completely tear down the system and build a private one.
… With authoritarian hierarchy and submissive teachers.
Shout out to the Austin Public Library (and Austin as a whole) for continuously telling the Texas legislature to go fuck itself.
They realize with house prices there’s no magical white collar job Howard Cunningham can get that will provide enough
Does capitan underpants got banned?
Thank you, Summer Boismier, for standing up for what is right and being a true patriot.
PraegerU content? Totally fine.
Books kids actually want to read? Verboten.
I dunno, this penis Prager guy seems pretty cool
Teacher will eventually get a fat, taxpayer-funded lawsuit award. The republicans are such backwards, self-hating, broken people.
How hard would it be for another state, that isn’t so dedicated to shooting its own foot, reinstate/award them a teaching license as a gesture?
For teachers in that state it would be pretty easy since it’s a compact state. I would recommend Oregon or Washington.
For 3 seconds or so I was confused, wondering why Oregon or Washington would be considered particularly small or dense
Generally? Well within the executive power / administrative law of any given state as noted by BlueFalcon below.
Practically? I’d expect it to be quite a struggle. For licensed professions in general (doctors, real estate, insurance, hairdressers, etc.) most or all states ask a question to the effect of “Has your license for profession ever been suspended or revoked in any other state?”. It may or may not be an automatic disqualifier, but even if not it’s an uphill battle.
It prevents the real estate agent who stole someone’s earnest money from upping stakes to the next state and getting licensed, but since the standards for suspending/revoking licenses vary widely by state I lean towards believing that perhaps it should be a factor, and perhaps the state board of profession should meet to review the application, but previous disciplinary action in some other state is in no way an absolute statement about someone’s fitness to practice in their chosen field.
An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City
I am assuming and hoping they are talking about the teacher getting a job there. That’s fucking awesome if so
I’m hoping the same, that’s quite the story in and of itself.
Right? I couldn’t believe no one had brought it up
Well, it sounds like the attorney has a job still, and it probably pays a little better too, so I assume so.
I thought they meant the attorney.
The first line of the article calls her “a former teacher” so I took it to mean she was the one working at the NY library.
Edit to add …
Boismier lost her job after she gave students a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned project. Now she’s in charge of teen initiatives at the library, and will be part of its Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute with PEN America. The free, online four-week training program will teach high school students to combat book banning in their schools and libraries. Source
Yeah, she got the fuck out of dodge like two years ago. This case has been dragging on for a long time - OSDE has done shady shit like change the meeting time when they saw KFOR reporters there.
How regressive and backwards and detrimental to humanity you have to be to get mad at a teacher for distributing educational material.
Religious conservative levels
Do you think its a feedback loop that states with the worst test scores make the worst decisions about education?
A designed loop until they can make the whole thing implode and eliminate public education. Goal is to then drive to religious schools with vouchers that cost more and more work time and importantly to keep woman in the home, not working, and persistently pregnant.
They think they can force the '50s on America? They realize with house prices there’s no magical white collar job Howard Cunningham can get that will provide enough for a house and allow Miriam to stay home and care for Ritchie and Joanie, right? Even if Miriam has no education and there’s no choice, it’s not enough to support 4 people and a house.
Even beyond the textbook cruelty of subjugating one person under another based on sex like it’s Afghanistan, limiting education so they’re pliable and dehumanized and dependent, the fact remains: it’s impossible financially to re-create the McCarthy era no matter how much they really really want it in their twisted, poisoned hearts.
For so, oh so many reasons, we’re not going back.
In this scenario, how does the ruling class maintain their numbers? Do they send their kids to private schools where the actual education occurs? Or they haven’t thought that far ahead yet?
Do they send their kids to private schools where the actual education occurs?
Yes. That’s what they’ve been doing for well over a century. It’s also one of the greatest arguments for banning and criminalizing private educational institutions. Forcing the wealthy to use the same schools also forces them to not destroy it.
I have met some rentier class people (massive wealth from charging for their massive assets), and their kids went to expensive private schools. The scenario is not hypothetical.
Kidnapping is a real fear at that level of remove from the ‘Great Unwashed.’
No because the same fuckers have been in power for the last 70 years. They’re the ones that started the changes.
Where do I buy that shirt? It’s awesome!
https://shop.bklynlibrary.org/products/books-unbanned-qr-tee-black
Looks like it’s print on demand so they aren’t paying to house a large warehouse of stock.
While it may show words and a QR code with the same message, that one is not something I’d pay for or wear due to the different style. Thanks for the link though.
Okay, now I want that first T-shirt, too!
(Pics copied for reference)
First one has that 60s Lounge Rock font. 👍🏻
I went looking for it but since the pic is from 2022 I can’t find it anywhere. :(
Thanks. I found the bookstore and book seller, but the t-shirt isn’t on any of their sites.
I should have been clearer in my post.
It’s so dystopian that teachers lose their jobs for encouraging children to read and that “free speech” advocates in state government are literally censoring books, the very thing that the first amendment is designed to stop governments doing.
More nazi shit. . .
I fuckin hate Oklahoma Nazis.
I don’t discriminate, I hate all Nazis equally
Hopefully more teachers engage in this sort of activism: put out QR code stickers on the school walls, in the shape of business cards laying around in public areas, etc
I mean, the solution is pretty easy: just stop teaching children to read. See? Problem solved.
Soon:
Only ‘god’s word’ may be read. But only by those appointed by ‘god’.
Reading is the apple in Eden.
This is how it used to be. Ordinary people couldn’t read the Bible, so they had to take the priests’ word for what was in there. Some evangelicals would truly like to return to this.
The children yearn for the mines.
That’s how organized religion started, so…
Does anyone have that qr code ?
