Classrooms aren’t soapboxes

Texas may be the front line of the fight on the southern border, and Florida may be where woke goes to die, but credit Tennessee with progress towards its claim to be “America at its best.” Last week the Tennessee State House moved forward with several positive measures to reform education, including statewide school choice. But one other bill that passed last week is drawing particular fire from an outraged left and LGBTQ advocates.

House Bill 1605 is pretty straightforward: It would bar public schools from flying or displaying flags other than the United States flag, the Tennessee state flag, the POW/MIA flag (memorializing prisoners of war and those missing in action), and an official local government or school flag. The one flag that’s a glaring omission from that list is the rainbow or gay pride flag, which lawmakers acknowledge is the target of the bill.

Flags should be a unifying symbol for a community or country. In a healthy, diverse society like ours, we all honor and respect our nation’s flag regardless of political party. That’s why it’s a huge deal, a month-long national news story, when a sports player refused to kneel during the national anthem—because our cultural expectation is that everyone stands, removes their caps, and joins in honoring America with the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the game. It’s why flag burning provokes such a visceral reaction and has become such an incredibly attention-grabbing way to make a statement during a rally or protest march.

The gay pride flag is not unifying. It is an affirmative statement taking one side in the culture wars. One Nashville state representative described a ban on the gay pride flag as “preventing social representation or a sense of belonging in one’s community.” But the flip side is also true: Displaying the gay pride flag communicates to students with an orthodox faith or conservative values that they are not welcome either. In the quest to intentionally include one set of citizens, another group is silenced.

But that’s not the only message the flag communicates when it is hung in a classroom. When a teacher displays the rainbow flag, it immediately brings sexuality front and center in school. Whether in a second or tenth grade classroom, putting up a rainbow flag is an invitation to conversation, for the teacher to talk to students about sex and gender. And it’s certainly well within the rights of the state to say that teachers should not talk about sex and sexuality outside the narrow confines of the approved human growth and development curriculum, which respects community values and protects parents’ rights.

Displaying the gay pride flag also proceeds from the premise that the classroom is the teacher’s personal soapbox where he or she can communicate any messages or values to students he or she desires. It’s not. Classrooms in public schools belong to the public—the taxpayers who fund them—and should reflect the values of the community, not the individual teacher’s political or ideological agenda. The Supreme Court has (rightly) said that teachers have some personal space to, for instance, have a Bible or devotional on their desk. But they cannot hijack the classroom to press their personal views and values onto the vulnerable youngsters entrusted to their care. It’s education, not indoctrination—regardless of whether the indoctrination is school-wide curriculum or informal teacher-specific preaching.

There’s a simple way to put this principle to the test: If a teacher displayed a Confederate flag, not as an object in a Social Studies lesson but as a permanent display of personal views about the Civil War, how would we feel? Would those same state representatives who criticize this bill feel comfortable saying that flag is divisive and excludes some students from the classroom community? If so, we can see the same principle applied to the gay pride flag, even if the proportion who agree or disagree may be different.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confronted a similar dilemma at the Pentagon in 2020, when gay pride and other flags were being flown on bases and creating controversy within the force. He describes the issue in his memoir at length, but his brief memo at the time emphasized the U.S. flag as a unifying symbol—“treating all our people with dignity and respect, and rejecting divisive symbols.” That wisdom for military bases is even more true for public schools.