Oklahoma revokes license of teacher who gave class QR code to Brooklyn library in book-ban protest

girlfreddy@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 902 points – Oklahoma revokes license of teacher who gave class QR code to Brooklyn library in book-ban protest
apnews.com

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.

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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.

Also its highly likely that all these children have access to the internet anyways and can access all of it and much more.

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!

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!".

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.

With authoritarian hierarchy and submissive teachers..

state funded religious indoctrination aka "private school vouchers."

Shout out to the Austin Public Library (and Austin as a whole) for continuously telling the Texas legislature to go fuck itself.

https://austin.bibliocommons.com/list/share/1107633742_aplbeanstackchallenges/2151249439_banned_camp_september_2022

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?

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.

Thank you, Summer Boismier, for standing up for what is right and being a true patriot.

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?

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.

More nazi shit. . .

I fuckin hate Oklahoma Nazis.

I don't discriminate, I hate all Nazis equally

i hate Nazis based off their proximity and power. a nazi may perhaps be allowed to live if they were stranded in the kuiper belt (maybe)

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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

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.

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

How regressive and backwards and detrimental to humanity you have to be to get mad at a teacher for distributing educational material.

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.

Yeah so these people are going to be perpetually in increasing amounts of debt, spending less of their little money on themselves, both being a profit center and reducing their choice to opt out.

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.

Walters said at Thursday’s meeting that Boismier violated rules that prohibit instruction on topics related to race and gender. He told reporters that she “broke the law.”

Oh? I didn't realize providing a link to an online resource was considered teaching or had anything to do with race or gender. 🤔

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. :(

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.

That'd be like firing the college professor who tells the students they can find the PDF for free online.

Like, politics of book banning aside, if you support this, you're a fuckin knob.

I'm sure this has happened at a college campus somewhere. College book stores are a huge sinesure for friends of the administration.

She wasn't fired for bringing the attention of the children to banned books, she was fired because she embarrassed the school system.

I'm not a lawyer so could someone explain to me how laws like this don't immediately fail a prior restraint test?

Probably because they are an employee of the government, not a private publisher. (They're also not a publisher at all.)

Does posting to a blog count as publishing? I don't feel like old definitions of "private publisher" are as useful as they used to be. Public schools are such a quagmire of conflicting ideals on the best of days. Don't put up a flier for an unapproved study club, but CocaCola logos everywhere...

I think it does, but that's not what's at issue here. She put it up as a poster in her classroom.

I wonder if she coulda kept her job if (instead of a poster in the classroom) she waited just outside the school grounds to hand fliers out to kids like the evangelicals do. Or would they have said something about her "representing the school" outside of work? I guess I wouldn't be surprised either way.

they should revoke the license of the board and ban them from getting anywhere within 500m of an educational institution

Badlahoma things. What to expect from a state that extolled the virtues of oil industry for primary school children but forbids teaching about climate change?

Is there a list of libraries who offer a digital library card? (Forgot what's our called I think it of state library card)

That's fine. Oklahoma totally does not have a shortage of teachers or anything. /s

I've given up on anything truly positive happening in this timeline. We live in a world where "evil" has long ago won, we're just continually acting surprised at finding out what we already know.

No hope. No future. Unless you're wealthy/powerful, welcome to the new gilded age where a human life is at its absolute lowest value in all of history.

We can fight as much as we want but we can never win.

Its not over yet. I was raised in one of these places. My schooling was a joke. Then I discovered the internet, and all that brainwashing they tried to do in primary school faded pretty quickly.

These kids aren't going to be that easy to lie to with the way the internet is. Some will fall for the propaganda but many will not.

thought experiment:

if everyone in oklahoma ceased to exist, would the world be a better place?

No, this teacher is in Oklahoma and she is trying to make the world a better place

She's actually in New York now apparently.

yes but for all the conservatives we'd lose, it might still be a net gain.

Good maybe they can teach in a non third world shit hole state now

That's cute and all but there are still people there who don't actively believe in fascism, and don't have the money/resource to gtfo. Their kids deserve a real education too.

The real answer is making Nazis afraid again.

So the banned book is available in the public library? Some ban that is.

NYPL doesn't care what books are banned in Oklahoma schools.

Small detail, New York City has three public library Systems (New York, Queens, and Brooklyn). While all three have Banned Books events, BPL specifically (in conjunction with Boston Public Library, LA County Library, San Diego Library and Seattle Public Library) runs a service called Books Unbanned that is said to offer a full collection of Banned Books (I believe NYPL and QPL’s banned collections are curated/limited) to essentially any US resident (Many libraries have residency requirements although I believe NYPL and QPL have waived those [when I was kid you had to bring a piece of mail in NYC to get a card]).

Brooklyn is in New York. Also, actual book bans are unconstitutional under the first amendment. What these laws do is prohibit state funded entities like public schools and public libraries in the state from having the books available. The books are still available in privately owned places.

Except you lose your teaching license if you tell students that, soooo.....