Lawsuit expands as second teacher and NAACP join fight against state’s discriminatory targeting of AP African American Studies. Education and legal battle.
A federal lawsuit filed last month against Gov. Sarah Sanders and her education secretary over a section of the Arkansas LEARNS Act banning “indoctrination” and “critical race theory” in the classroom was re-filed Friday, adding two new plaintiffs and naming members of the State Board of Education as defendants.
The original five plaintiffs, represented by attorneys Mike Laux and Austin Porter, consisted of two students, two parents and history teacher Ruthie Walls, all from Little Rock’s Central High School. They’re asking a federal court to block Section 16 of LEARNS, the governor’s education overhaul law, which contains the prohibition on so-called indoctrination.
Section 16 was cited by the Arkansas Department of Education and Secretary Jacob Oliva last summer in the state’s decision to stop counting a pilot AP African American Studies course toward state graduation requirements. Central is among the six Arkansas high schools that offer AP African American Studies, and Walls teaches the course.
The amended complaint, filed Friday in federal court in Little Rock, adds a second Central High educator to the complaint: communications teacher and debate coach Colton Gilbert. It also adds the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP.
The new defendants are state board members Sarah Moore, Kathy McFetridge-Rollins, Adrienne Woods, Randy Henderson, Lisa Hunter, Jeff Wood, Ken Bragg and Leigh Keener.
As with the initial filing, the amended complaint says the state’s attempt to ban the teaching of certain topics as “indoctrination” violates the First and Fourteenth amendments. It says:
Prior to its enactment, Gov. Sanders explained the purpose of the LEARNS Act: to prevent a “left-wing political agenda” from “brainwashing our children” with “political indoctrination.”
In reality, however, Section 16 is Defendants’ own unprecedented attempt to quash any idea that does not conform to their views of not just what teachers may teach, but how they may teach. Teachers, especially high school teachers, have long enjoyed, by policy and practice, the freedom to use their specialized training to teach the academic standards of their respective subjects to ensure students are widely exposed “to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection.” … Section 16 has largely disrupted that custom with vague, overly broad, contradictory, and proscriptive language that seeks to intimidate teachers and, in tum, prohibit students from becoming critical, engaged thinkers and learners. Teachers are at a loss for what they can and cannot teach, especially when it comes to the history of racism and ongoing racial inequalities and injustice in present-day America.
The language contained in LEARNS puts teachers and others — including students — at risk of breaking the law. It “absolutely chills speech,” the complaint says, and “discriminates on the basis of race by targeting and stigmatizing” AP African American Studies as inferior to other AP classes.
The law also “dissuades prospective AP AAS students from registering because of perceived diminishment of the class and natural concerns about its uncertain future,” the complaint says.
The case was originally assigned to U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker but was reassigned to Judge Lee Rudofsky after Baker recused.
#education #discrimination #lawsuit
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