By Christopher Lehman, Founding Director of The Educator Collaborative
Do not lose the narrative. This SCOTUS ruling grew from unchecked transphobia in school sports. That festered and permitted the environment for queerphobic, anti-Black, White supremacist school book bans. Leaders and educators that made excuses or stood on the sidelines led to their own demise. Cowering from bigotry did not protect us. “Not being political,” did not protect us. Waiting for this to pass did not protect us.
Understand this: Trans rights ARE education rights. Trans rights ARE human rights. When Trans rights are under attack, all of our rights are under attack.
We, educators, MUST reflect, MUST learn, MUST act. THIS is the moment to rise up—there may not be another. We already allowed too many to pass.
In a one paragraph, unsigned ruling, without explanation, a conservative majority allow Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, to continue mass firings that will essentially gut the Department of Education, making it impossible to carry out its mission. While only Congress has the legal authority to abolish a department that Congress created, SCOTUS has permitted another chilling example of Executive Branch overreach to effectively do what the constitution does not allow.
In response to that one paragraph, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson, is a 19 page documentation of this travesty. It follows from the President’s illegal instruction to the Secretary of Education to close the Department, through lower courts’ injunctions, up to this ruling.
Justice Sotomayor writes that today’s ruling “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues. Equity does not support such an inequitable result.”