It seems a too-painful irony that U-M art professor Rebekah Modrak while working on the new book Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back had to work around censorship laws.

Modrak’s co-editor, Nadine M. Kalin, is on faculty at the University of North Texas, “and in the middle of working on the project, Texas created a new law saying that you can’t essentially do work around diversity,” Modrak explained. “So we, at the University of Michigan, had to create an email address for [Kalin] and sponsor her as an academic so she could use our email address as she worked on the project, to create some distance for herself and some protections. And I thought, wow, maybe this is the future of the country, where we have blue states, where work like this is being done, and we protect academic refugees from red states who are being censored.”

Even with this awkward workaround in place, the pair managed to gather oral histories from 14 public school educators who’d been harassed (or outright dismissed) in recent years because of, among other reasons, their gender presentation, or the topics they taught in class, or the books they offered on their shelves.

“The impetus for the book was that they wanted to be able to tell their own story because their stories were so—the way it was being told by parents or outsiders in the community, or by the administration, was such a distortion from the truth as they understood it,” said Modrak. “So they wanted to be able to tell that. A few of the teachers did go to the media in order to try to get that story out and were punished further for it.”

Modrak’s own journey with the topic began during the pandemic when her daughter’s journalism teacher assigned students to tune into Ann Arbor School Board meetings. When board members opened the floor to public comments, Modrak’s daughter hailed her mom and urged her to listen as individuals demanded, because they pay taxes, to reopen schools and teach only what they deemed appropriate.

“Through my lens of consumer culture, I was really dismayed by the misunderstanding of like, what public education is, which is a public good for everybody,” Modrak said. “And I was also dismayed by the undermining of these teachers’ authority, experience, and expertise, and very aware of how gendered this was because there are so many women teachers.”

This led to Modrak publishing an article about what she observed, but along the way, she found Kalin’s work, which focused on corporate culture’s influences on education. The two began talking.

“[Kalin] trains students to be art teachers,” Modrak explained. “One of her students, who had just graduated, had accepted a job in a wealthy suburb, and four days into the job, she was laid off and had reached out to Nadine, wanting to talk about what had happened. Nadine invited me to join the phone call, and that was the first testimony in our book.”

The teacher seemed to have been fired due to her appearance.

“All of the other teachers in the school had long blond hair and wore dresses and heels, and she wore—it’s crazy to say this as a shocking thing, but she wore pants and a button-up shirt, and she had short hair,” said Modrak. “The teachers called 911 and told the police they were afraid for the children. They’d looked at her Instagram page which had, of course, artwork she’d done in college, including figure drawings, which is standard for any art student. … Next thing she knew, she was put on leave without any sort of investigation, without the school supporting her.”

In another Censorville account, a fourth-grade teacher working in a school near Kenosha—where protests were happening, following the police shooting of Jacob Lake—created a lesson plan around the Black Lives Matter movement. In the classroom, students were open and receptive to having the conversation.

“Students who had never spoken up in class were telling their stories, and their peers were empathizing with them and saying, ‘I didn’t know these kinds of things were happening,’ and ‘I’m so sorry to hear this,’ and they asked (the teacher) if they could have these conversations the next day, also,” Modrak said. “There’s this one really sweet story, where the student rides home on the bus, … and when he gets home, the first thing he does is run to his mom and say, ‘We talked about the Black Lives Matter movement today!’ … The next thing that happens is that a parent gets a copy of the lesson plan and writes accusatory things on Facebook, and then it becomes a huge battle in the town.”

Modrak fears these efforts at censorship—and more broadly, the dismantling of public education—are still only gaining power. But in addition to the educators in Censorville who are fighting back, students themselves give Modrak some hope.

“It’s the students that will matter and will have the biggest impact,” Modrak said. “[High school librarian] Martha Hickson was told, ‘Do not involve the students in [an attempt to ban five LGBTQ books].’ She ignored that and said, ‘These are their books. I have to let them know.’ She was involved with the Gay Student Alliance, and they started showing up at school board meetings, and that’s what changed things. … They stopped all of the bans. So students need to understand what’s happening and recognize that they have a lot of power. School boards listen to students.”

Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.

Rebekah Modrak, Jeff Gaynor, and Sarah Anton will discuss "Trouble in Censorville" at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Tuesday, October 1 at 6:30 pm.