I Taught My Students Slavery Was Wrong. Then MAGA Came After Me

In early 2022, a local state representative began repeatedly and publicly slandering my teaching practice in Fairfield, a southeastern Iowa town of just under 10,000 in Jefferson County.

He said that I was indoctrinating young people to hate America and hate white people. The Republican state representative saw me as an example of why public schools should be defunded. He had earlier called teachers “idiots” for their advocacy around Covid-19 protections. And speaking of the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, he said, “I think it’s fine for politicians to feel pain, or be threatened with violence, whatever.” (I will leave him unnamed out of a desire to not boost his profile or draw him attention, since his actions have been well-documented in the press.)

In my small apartment in Jefferson County, I felt afraid. Teaching is something I saw as my calling, and I loved teaching in rural Iowa. As an Eagle Scout who grew up playing in backyard cornfields, public schools expanded my world considerably. Teaching in the classroom felt like a way to pay society back for that gift.

The night of the politician’s rant, the president of the local teacher’s union called to express her sympathy. She urged me to call 911 if I felt unsafe, warning that there were dangerous people even in the small town of Fairfield.

I was suddenly in the middle of the public education culture war that put public school teachers in the crosshairs. Six months earlier, Iowa had passed its version of a Critical Race Theory censorship law, which barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.” According to author Jesse Hagopian, since 2020, 200 bills have been proposed at the local, state and federal levels aimed at censoring teaching about structural racism and oppression.

My curriculum for the eighth-grade students necessarily included context on structural oppression. It would have been a disservice, for example, to frame chattel slavery as the result of a few prejudiced individuals rather than the state-sanctioned institution of captive labor that it was. I was asking students to think critically and come up with their own analysis—skills that are essential to resisting indoctrination.

It’s hard to say what exactly caught the ire of the politician who would go on to regularly slander my teaching practice. Likely it was my signing a national pledge to teach honestly about history. An early list of signees was picked up by the far-right media website The Daily Wire, who framed it as teachers pledging to break the law. Part of my story eventually went viral when the Washington Post shared a clip of my superintendent expressing uncertainty over whether I was still allowed to teach that slavery was wrong.

While my story made national news, my colleagues of color were treated worse. Some persevered in teaching and supporting students. Some have left the classroom. Upon the advice of my therapist and family, I left the K-12 classroom before the year ended and didn’t renew my contract. The bullying by a local politician, the unwillingness of school officials to offer support and an unspeakable tragedy had pushed me out of the classroom.

That spring, Nohema Graber, a 66-year-old local high school teacher in Fairfield, was brutally murdered by two white students. Graber was a fixture in the Fairfield community. Born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, she was one of the first women in Mexico trained to fly passenger planes. In 1992, she and her family moved to Fairfield where she raised her children, attended the local Catholic Church and eventually taught Spanish. Graber was often seen supporting students at after school events.

During the trial in which the young men would be sentenced to life in prison, a psychologist said that extremist rhetoric against school officials had been a contributing factor in the murder. On the Monday that schools reopened, a few mental healthcare providers from the local Area Education Association (AEA) were brought in for students and staff following the tragedy. Being needed elsewhere, they left before the week was over.

Why billionaires want to destroy public education

Rural schools were already underfunded and under-supported before these recent waves of moral panic and privatization. The Trump administration’s attempts to shutter the Department of Education and the effort to advance private school vouchers in states across the country now threatens to push them to the brink.

At 38, the ginned up moral panic felt new to me, but history shows it is part of a long illiberal tradition.

Because schools have the power to remake the social order, they are often the first venue targeted by those wanting to make social hierarchies more rigid. During the Red Scare, teachers were targeted for supposed Communist indoctrination. During the Lavender Scare, when homosexuals became the scapegoats, teachers were again targeted. The CRT-hysteria in which my career was swept up soon morphed into “Don’t Say Gay” bills that framed LGBTQ+ students and trans athletes as the threat. Today, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is the buzzword.

Playing on fears of racial or gender equity has long been an effective tactic by those who are more interested in protecting freedom for markets than freedoms for people. One new facet of this today is moneyed political groups that use various locales as staging grounds, test kitchens for recipes of hate, to try out new policies that privatize public goods and services. When successful, these policies not only concentrate power and profits, but work to prevent a more inclusive society.

Take the CRT-scare. In 2010, about a decade before Iowa adopted its history censorship bill, Republicans in Arizona’s state legislature banned the Tucson school district’s Mexican-American Studies program. It took years for the courts to eventually rule that the ban was unconstitutional and motivated by nothing more than racial animus.

In the interim, groups like American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council and others backed by billionaires like the Koch and DeVos families retooled their approach.

As the tides in our culture seemed to shift toward a more inclusive account of history with the 1619 Project and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, right-wing billionaires and their allies saw an opportunity to double-down on protecting white identity. Their goal: cut taxes on the rich by cutting public services, push censorship bills and universal voucher programs in red states to gut public education, and regroup when necessary.

The uphill battle of funding rural schools

Rural schools are on the chopping block. This is not the result of some new conspiracy.

The challenges rural schools face today are the natural outcome of both long-standing disinvestment in rural areas and a concerted effort to privatize public schools.

The doors to privatization have been propped open by demonizing the “Other.” In Iowa, the MAGA-manufactured fears of Critical Race Theory, LGPTQ+ youth and DEI were parlayed into an unpopular statewide voucher system.

Despite assurances that the new voucher system would not take money from already under-funded public schools, it has done just that, siphoning off hundreds of millions of public funds. Most of these public funds go to students already enrolled in private schools. At the same time, private schools across Iowa are raising tuition rates to take advantage of tax-payer funded subsidies.

It is telling that Gov. Kim Reynolds invited fellow Christian Nationalist Corey DeAngelis to the 2023 ceremony where she signed the voucher program into law. DeAngelis is a leading figure in privatizing education who has served with various libertarian and Koch-backed lobbyist groups. Their views are wildly out of step with the 71% of Iowans who believe that public schools “are vital in educating our children” and have been “underfunded for too long.”

Two people responsible for Iowa’s education policy show how such disinvestment creates profit for a few at the expense of rural communities.

The first: McKenzie Snow, the Iowa Director of Education. Snow has never formally studied education, nor has she taught in public schools. But in the eyes of Gov. Reynolds what Snow lacks in experience and credentials she compensates for in ideological zeal.

Prior to her appointment in Iowa, Snow bounced between unelected positions in New Hampshire and Virginia. Both states have subsequently seen an increase in their voucher programs. Snow’s work prior to these appointments was for Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd, a school privatization group that paved the way for an appointment to Trump’s first Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos. DeVos, who married into the Amway fortune, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on transforming schools from institutions serving the public to training grounds for advancing “God’s Kingdom.”

The second, a more local example, is Iowa State Rep. Dean Fisher, a Republican who serves Tama County. Shortly after signing the voucher law, Fisher made plans to open a private Christian school. Fisher’s wife, Vicki, serves as the school’s treasurer. Despite an ethics complaint filed by a statewide nonprofit, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI), the Iowa House allowed the school to continue its plans unabated.

Unlike public schools, for which all money must be accounted and cannot discriminate based on religion or ability, private schools lack public accountability and are free to discriminate against special needs students and LGBT youth. Indeed, Fisher’s school plans to openly discriminate against any staff or family that does not adhere to the administration’s religious beliefs, including that life begins at conception and that marriage should be limited to heterosexuals.

Privatization not only allows more opportunities for Christian Nationalist indoctrination. It siphons money away from public schools that are often the backbone of rural communities.

Funding for rural schools is directly attached to the tax-base, another significant problem as rural Iowa faces declining populations. In 2024, one district was forced to do the unthinkable: permanently close. The Orient-Macksburg School District, in southwest Iowa’s Adair County, cited financial pressures when it voted to dissolve the district. Given that schools are often the community centers for rural counties, this loss extends beyond the classroom walls.

I can only imagine what a fraction of the money now going to private schools could have done for Iowa’s rural schools. In one school where I worked, a hole in the wall connected my classroom to the neighboring one. Positions for teacher aides and substitute teachers were not always filled because the pay could not attract committed applicants.

Nevertheless, educators continue to provide exceptional support for students. Kelsi Papesh, 33, one of my former colleagues from Boone County is in her 11th year as a paraeducator. Despite inadequate wages, she remains dedicated to her students. “I’m not making enough money. I’m really struggling,” she says. “But I love [my job] so much. Honestly, for me, it’s the kids.”

Rural districts across the country often rely on a shoestring budget. Funding fails to keep up with inflation. Rarely do state investments in rural schools meet the rising costs of technology, staffing, facilities maintenance and other expenses needed to keep quality educators like Papesh. Meanwhile, many lawmakers suffer from a prejudice against rural people, and tying school funding directly to property taxes only exacerbates existing inequities.

Some districts in Iowa have been able to channel public support for schools into bond issues that raise money for staffing and facilities, but this is often an uphill climb. Last fall, four of six local bond issues across the state passed, but all were contentious and within single digit percentage points of failing. State law in Iowa requires school bonds pass with 60% of the vote. This is challenging and it allows a 41% minority of voters to control education purse strings.

In North Tama school district in Tama County, where Rep. Fisher is setting up a voucher-funded Christian school and enriching his family, a 2023 bond referendum failed to pass by only six votes. Those voting against the bond issue wondered why buildings were allowed to fall into disrepair, failing to recognize that school officials were already tying themselves into knots simply to keep the school afloat. Later that year, a similar bond issue was able to get the necessary votes, but only after the local paper made plain the dire need with a rare front page editorial asking:

“What happens when the town you live in no longer has a school? If voters in the North Tama County Community School District do not approve—by a super majority of 60%—the school bond referendum on the 2023 city and school election ballot this coming Tuesday, Nov. 7, in due time we may all find out.”

Despite such challenges, Iowans are fighting to support rural schools. One way is through an initiative led by Iowa CCI called Public School Strong, inspired by North Carolina’s Public School Strong initiative, which has successfully supported individual teachers and stymied the expansion of voucher programs in North Carolina. Melanie Tietz, a former school board member from Winneshiek County, says the grassroots nature of the organizing appealed to her:

“[I was eager to] get involved with the local school board and offer them support as they do their important work. I like this from the standpoint of: Let’s get involved here locally, let’s make an impact, let’s make our voices known, so that people don’t forget how important education is. We need to continue to support it and nurture it so that we can have it for future generations.”

The initiative’s goal is to support honest, equitable and fully-funded public schools. It is resonating with rural Iowans. People in 38 Iowa counties have already pledged to support Iowa CCI’s initiative and attend school board meetings.

In recent months, Iowa’s Public School Strong has focused on pressuring local districts to adopt a 5% annual increase in funding, and a phasing out of the voucher system. One public school teacher in Jefferson County, the last district I worked in, signed on, saying that children “are our future and will be better citizens for having knowledge of their world, their governing bodies, and knowing how children/adults can live together in peace, with empathy for each other.”

My time away from the classroom has been bittersweet. I’ve enjoyed completing the coursework for a Ph.D., but I miss teaching. As I work on my dissertation, I’ve begun applying to teach again in rural Iowa.

There’s more of us who care about our children’s future and their access to public education than there are partisan hardliners in Iowa. Even as the Trump administration shows no signs of slowing in its efforts to gut public schools, the people are rising up. That gives me hope.

Greg WickenkampMore by this author →

Pushed out of his role as a public school teacher in Fairfield, Iowa, for his refusal to whitewash history, Greg Wickenkamp is an educator, organizer, and proud member of UE Local 896 and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. A Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa, he studies state repression of social movements and works in an after-school program.