The Arizona Department of Education has unveiled an "Empower Hotline" that anyone can call to snitch on teachers they believe "detract from teaching standards" by talking about subject matter that’s recently come under fire, especially in Southern states.
The move is being led by Tom Horne, a Republican superintendent for public instruction who said in a press release, "I promised to establish this hotline so that anyone could report the teaching of inappropriate lessons that rob students of precious minutes of instruction time in core academic subjects such as reading, math, science, history and the arts. That promise is being kept."
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CNN reports that teachers are being targeted for "liberal indoctrination" and for pushing critical race theory, which as we've seen time and time again, is not something conservatives can even define or pin down.
The governor of the state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed a GOP bill last week that would have restricted classroom lessons on race and ethnicity. The hotline seems to be an end-run around that veto to get educators in trouble.
Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, told CNN that Horne doesn't have a good grasp of what's going on in schools and that he's continuing to push "outlandish claims" that he's been repeating for a while.
While claims of a similar hotline put in place in Texas to report on University of Texas professors turned out to be a hoax, this one is 100% true. It's not unlike an email tip line that was launched last year in Virginia to report "divisive concepts" being taught in school. That one didn't go so well. It was shuttered in September.
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