The California Teachers Association held a conference last month which promoted the idea that teachers should sift through students’ Google searches and internet activities and eavesdrop on their conversations to recruit them for gay and transgender clubs.
This is according to journalist Abigail Shrier, who says she received documents and audio files that were “authenticated by three conference participants.” The CTA’s October conference, called “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities,” included teachers talking about how to usher students into such clubs without alerting or informing their parents.
“When we were doing our virtual learning, we totally stalked what they were doing on Google when they weren’t doing school work,” middle school teacher Kelly Baraki said. “One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
Aside from encouraging other teachers to monitor students’ internet history, the two teachers leading the workshop titled “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities” can be heard in the audio mocking the concerns of parents and encouraging teachers not to keep any records of their club so parents can’t find out if their children are members. (GSA refers to Gay-Straight Alliance clubs, the popular name for gay and transgender clubs in schools.)
Keeping parents in the dark appears to be the main piece of advice pushed during the workshop. One of the two teachers, Lori Caldeira, even made this clear on a podcast. “And you know, they include those group norms about respect: What happens in this room, stays in this room,” she said of her “Equity Club.” Caldeira, like Baraki, teaches middle school students.
It isn’t difficult to see why exactly parents have become more involved in their children’s education and far more skeptical of social justice activities in schools. The CTA has over 300,000 members, and this is how its workshops at a sold-out conference are advising teachers to act. That this level of secrecy and surveillance is being promoted by middle school teachers makes it even more galling — and makes it even more apparent that parents should be vigilant when it comes to public schools and teachers’ unions.
