Steep Rise in Educational Gag Orders, Many Sloppily Drafted

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Jeffrey Sachs
@JeffreyASachs
BREAKING: Over the last three weeks, 71 educational gag orders (aka "anti-CRT bills&quot have been introduced or prefiled. That's more than half of 122 proposed since January 2021. And they're getting worse.

https://pen.org/steep-rise-gag-orders-many-sloppily-drafted/…
Image
9:26 AM · Jan 24, 2022

https://pen.org/steep-rise-gag-orders-many-sloppily-drafted/

It has been an extraordinary month for educational gag orders. Over the last three weeks, 71 bills have been introduced or prefiled in state legislatures across the country, a rate of roughly three bills per day. For over a year now, PEN America has been tracking these and similar bills. This is where things stand today.

Since January 2021, 122 educational gag order bills have been introduced or prefiled in 33 different states

10 have become law in 9 states
88 are currently live

Of those currently live:

84 target K-12 schools
38 target higher education
48 include a mandatory punishment for those found in violation

A closer look at bills introduced or prefiled so far in 2022 reveals a significant escalation in both scale and severity. Forty-six percent of this year’s bills explicitly target speech in higher education (versus 26 percent in 2021) and 55 percent include some kind of mandatory punishment for violators (versus 37 percent in 2021). Fifteen also include a private right of action. This provision, which we analyzed in an earlier post, gives students, parents, or even ordinary citizens the right to sue schools and recover damages in court.

One final feature that is increasingly common to 2022’s bills is how sloppily many are written. Legislators, in their haste to get these bills out the door and into the headlines, are making basic factual errors, introducing contradictory language, and leaving important terms undefined. Given the stakes, the result will be more than mere confusion. It will be fear.

*snip*