Meet the 2022 National Teacher of the Year

This year the Council of Chief State School Officers has selected Kurt Russell as the National Teacher of the Year. Mr. Russell is a high school history teacher from Oberlin, Ohio, who has taught for 25 years. This is the perfect moment to select a history teacher for this prestigious award given the current political climate surrounding history education.

Mr. Russell is devoted to his craft and, most importantly, he cares deeply about his students. He is the kind of teacher that every parent hopes their children comes across at least once in their journey through high school and we should be doing everything to support and encourage educators like Mr. Russell.

Unfortunately, we are doing the opposite. In fact, if you believe Republican lawmakers and their allies, Mr. Russell represents everything that is wrong with education and specifically history education.

Walk into Mr. Russell’s classroom and you will see photographs of Malcolm X and other Black leaders on the wall, not to mention the courses that he teaches. Students can take a course on African-American history as well as Race, Gender, and Oppression, which focuses on women, the LGBTQ community and economic oppression.

But before you start hand-wringing, listen closely to this short interview with Mr. Russell and his students. Is this the face of a teacher hell bent on corrupting his students by encouraging them to hate themselves owing to their race and one another? Does anyone seriously believe that Mr. Russell is teaching his students to hate their country because of the history of slavery, white supremacy or other forms of oppression. That’s certainly not what I hear in this video.

We can and should regularly reflect on and ask the tough questions about how and what students are being taught at various grade levels and whether specific content is appropriate, but that is not what we are currently seeing. The laws passed by Republicans in state after state that claim to be about protecting students from Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are nothing more than good old-fashioned fear mongering.

What Republicans have managed to do over the past few years is to turn the public against teachers like Mr. Russell and cast them as enemies of the state.

There is no question that Mr. Russell deserves this award, but I suspect he would agree with me that he is not out of the ordianry when it comes to public school teachers. In fact, you can find teachers like Mr. Russell in every school district across this country.

This madness needs to stop. I fear that this witch hunt is only going to drive teachers like Mr. Russell out of the profession and make it more difficult to recruit the next generation of educators to take his place. Perhaps that is the ultimate goal.

What I do know is that teachers like Mr. Russell don’t just appear in the classroom out of nowhere. They have to see teaching as a respectable profession from an early age and as something that will enrich both themselves and their students. They need and deserve support from the administration, parents, and the broader community to sustain them from day one on the job.

Anything short of this is an abdication of our responsibilty to both our teachers and our children.

Every student in this country could have a teacher like Mr. Russell if we cared enough to make it happen.