A teacher’s classroom setup can reveal a lot about their approach to learning. April Jones, who is a ninth grade algebra teacher in San Antonio, Texas, has met more than 100 students this school year, in most cases for the first time. Part of what makes an effective teacher is an ability to be personable with students.
“If a kid likes coming to your class or likes chatting with you or seeing you, they’re more likely to learn from you,” said Jones. “Trying to do something where kids can come in and they see even one piece of information on a poster, and they go, ‘OK, she gets it,’ or ‘OK, she seems cool, I’m going to sit down and try,’ I think, is always my goal.”
One way she does this is by covering the muted yellow walls — a color she wouldn’t have chosen herself — with posters, signs and banners Jones has accumulated in the 10 years she’s been teaching; from colleagues, students and on her own dime.
Among the items taped near her desk are a poster of the women who made meaningful contributions to mathematics, a sign recognizing her as a 2025 teacher of the year and a collection of punny posters, one of which features a predictable miscommunication between Lisa and Homer Simpson over the meaning of Pi.
Until now, Jones has been decorating on autopilot. Realizing she’s saved the most controversial for last, she looks down at the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign that’s been the subject of scrutiny from her district and online. But it’s also given her hope.
At a time when states are enforcing laws challenging what teachers can teach, discuss and display in classrooms, many districts are signaling a willingness to overcomply with the Trump administration’s executive order that labeled diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies and guidance an unlawful use of federal funding. How teachers are responding has varied based on where they live and work, and how comfortable they are with risk.
New Rules on Classroom Expression
Like many public school teachers in the U.S., Jones lives in a state, Texas, that recently introduced new laws concerning classroom expression that are broad in scope and subjective in nature. Texas’ Senate Bill 12 took effect Sept. 1. It prohibits programs, discussions and public performances related to race, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation in public K-12 schools.
Administrators in Jones’ district asked that she take down the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign, which includes three hearts — two filled in to resemble the Pride and Transgender Pride flags, and one depicting a gradient of skin colors. Jones refused, garnering favorable media attention for her defiance, and widespread community support both at school board meetings and online, leaving her poised to prevail, at least in the court of public opinion. Then, all teachers of the North East Independent School District received the same directive: Pride symbolism needs to be covered for the 2025-26 school year.
Jones finished decorating her classroom by hanging the banner.
“I did fold the bottom so you can’t see the hearts,” Jones said, calling the decision heartbreaking. “It does almost feel like a defeat, but with the new law, you just don’t know.”
The new law is written ambiguously, while also affecting any number of actions or situations without guidance, leaving Texas educators to decode the law for themselves. Jones’ district is taking complaints on a case-by-case basis: With Jones’ sign, the district agreed the words themselves were OK as an anti-bullying message, but not the symbolism associated with the multicolored hearts.
Jones has sympathy for the district. Administrators have to ensure teachers are in compliance if the district receives a complaint. In the absence of a clear legal standard, administrators are forced to decide what is and isn’t allowed — a job “nobody wants to have to do,” Jones says.
This comes as Texas public school teachers faced mandates to display donated posters of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms, which is now being challenged in the courts. And in other states, such as Florida, Arkansas and Alabama, officials have passed laws banning the teaching of “divisive concepts.” Now, teachers in those states have to rethink their approach to teaching hard histories that have always been part of the curriculum, such as slavery and Civil Rights, and how to do so in a way that provides students a complete history lesson.
Meanwhile, PEN America identified more than a dozen states that considered laws prohibiting teachers from displaying flags or banners related to political viewpoints, sexual orientation and gender identity this year. Utah, Idaho and Montana passed versions of flag bans.
“The bills [aren’t] necessarily saying, ‘No LGBTQ+ flags or Black Lives Matter flags,’ but that’s really implied, especially when you look at what the sponsors of the bills are saying,” said Madison Markham, a program coordinator with PEN America’s Freedom to Read.
Montana’s HB25-819 does explicitly restrict flags representing any political party, race, sexual orientation, gender or political ideology. Co-sponsors of similar bills in other states have used the Pride flag as an example of what they’re trying to eliminate from classrooms. Earlier this year, Idaho State Rep. Ted Hill cited an instance involving a teacher giving a class via Zoom.
“There was the Pride flag in the background. Not the American flag, but the Pride flag,” said Hill during an Idaho House Education Committee presentation in January. “She’s doing a Zoom call, and that’s not OK.”
Markham at PEN America sees flag, sign and display bans as natural outgrowths of physical and digital book censorship. She first noticed a shift in legislation challenging school libraries that eventually evolved into Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, where openly LGBTQ+ teachers began censoring themselves out of caution even before it fully took effect.
“Teachers who were in a same-sex relationship were taking down pictures of themselves and their partner in their classroom,” Markham recalled. “They took them down because they were scared of the implications.”
The next step, digital censorship, Markham says, involves web filtering or turning off district-wide access to ebooks, research databases and other collections that can be subjected to keyword searches that omit context.
“This language that we see often weaponized, like ‘harmful to minors’, ‘obscene materials,’ even though obscene materials [already] have been banned in schools — [lawmakers] are putting this language in essentially to intimidate districts into overcomplying,” said Markham.
State Flag Imbroglio
To understand how digital environments became susceptible to the same types of censorship as physical books, one doesn’t have to look farther than state laws that apply to online catalogs. In 2023, Texas’ READER Act standardized how vendors label licensed products to public schools. To accommodate Texas and other states with similar digital access restrictions, vendors have needed to add content warnings to materials. There have already been notable mishaps.
In an example that captured a lot of media attention earlier this year, the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, outside Houston, turned off access to a lesson about Virginia because it had a picture of the Virginia state flag, which depicts the Roman goddess Virtus, whose bare breast is exposed. That image put the Virginia flag in violation of the district’s local library materials policy.
Anne Russey, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project and a parent herself, learned of the district’s action and started looking into what happened. She found the district went to great lengths to overcomply with the new READER Act by rewriting the library materials policy; it even went so far as to add more detailed descriptions of what is considered a breast. Now, Russey says, students can learn about all of the original 13 colonies, except, perhaps, Virginia.
“As parents, we don’t believe children need access at their schools to sexually explicit material or books that are pervasively vulgar,” said Russey. “[But] we don’t think the Virginia flag qualifies as that, and I don’t think most people think that it qualifies.”
Disturbing Trends
While there isn’t yet a complete picture of how these laws are transforming educational environments, trends are beginning to emerge. School boards and districts have already exercised unequivocal readings of the laws that can limit an entire district’s access to materials and services.
A recent study from FirstBook found a correlation between book bans and reading engagement among students at a moment when literacy rates are trending down nationally overall. The erosion of instructional autonomy in K-12 settings has led more teachers to look outside the profession, to other districts or to charter and private schools.
Rachel Perera, a fellow of the Brown Center on Education Policy, Teacher Rights and Private Schools with the Brookings Institute, says that private and charter schools offer varying degrees of operational autonomy, but there are some clear drawbacks: limited transparency and minimal regulations and government oversight of charter and private schools mean there are fewer legal protections for teachers in those systems.
“One cannot rely on the same highly regulated standard of information available in the public sector,” said Perera. “Teachers should be a lot more wary of private school systems. The default assumption of trust in the private sector leadership is often not warranted.”
Last year, English teacher John McDonough was at the center of a dispute at his former charter school in New Hampshire. Administrators received a complaint about his Pride flag and asked him to remove it. McDonough’s dismay over the request became an ongoing topic of discussion at the charter school board meetings.
“During one of the meetings about my classroom, we had people from the community come in and say that they were positive that I was like a Satanist,” McDonough recalled. “We had a board member that was convinced I was trying to send secret messages and code [about] anti-Christian messages through my room decor.”
The situation was made worse by what McDonough described as a loss of agency over his curriculum for the year.
“All of a sudden I was having the principal drop by my room and go, ‘OK here’s your deck of worksheets. These are the worksheets you’re going to be teaching this week, the next week, and the next week,’ until finally, everything was so intensely structured that there was zero time for me to adjust for anything,” he said. “The priority seemed to be not that all of the kids understand the concepts, but ‘are you sticking as rigidly to this set of worksheets as you can?’”
It didn’t come as a surprise when McDonough’s contract wasn’t renewed for the current school year. But he landed a teaching job at another nearby charter school. He described the whole ordeal as “eye-opening.”
Researchers argue that censorship begets further censorship. The restrictive approach used to remove books about race, sex, and gender creates the opportunity for politically- and ideologically-motivated challenges to other subjects and materials under the guise of protecting minors or maintaining educational standards. Without effective guidance from lawmakers or the courts, it can be hard to know what is or isn’t permissible, experts say.
Legal Experts Weigh In
First Amendment researchers and legal experts are trying to meet the moment. Jenna Leventhal, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, contends that the First Amendment does more to protect students than teachers, particularly on public school grounds.
As a result, Leventhal is hesitant to advise teachers. There is too much variability among who is most affected in terms of the subjects — she cited art, world history and foreign languages as examples — and where they live and the districts where they teach. In general, however, the First Amendment still protects controversial, disfavored and uncomfortable speech, she says.
"Let's say you have a category of speech that you are banning," Leventhal said. "Someone has to decide what fits in that category of speech and what doesn't. And when you give that opportunity to the government, it's ripe for abuse."
Teachers are expected to use their professional judgment to create effective learning environments and students’ critical thinking, discovery and expression of their beliefs. And yet, in recent years, many states have proposed and passed laws that limit how teachers, librarians and administrators can discuss race, sex and gender, creating a void in what some students can learn about these subjects, which can affect how they understand their own identity, historical events and related risk factors for their personal safety.
The Limits of Freedom
McDonough in New Hampshire says when he first started displaying the Pride flag in his classroom, it was at the request of a student.
“I was just like, ‘this space is a shared space, and the kids deserve a voice in what it looks like,’” McDonough said.
This year, he left the choice of whether or not to hang the Pride flag in his new classroom up to his students. His students decided as a group that their community was safe and supportive, and therefore they didn't need to hang a Pride flag.
Meanwhile in Texas, SB-12 has created a de facto parental notification requirement in many situations, including those involving gender and sexuality. Now, when Jones’ students start to tell her something, she is cautious.
She sometimes fields questions from students by asking if their parents know what they’re about to say.
“Because if not,” she warns them, “depending on what you tell me, they’re going to,” she said.
Jones wonders if her compliance with her state’s legal requirements is encroaching on her personal identity beyond the classroom.
“I don’t want to get myself into a situation where I’m mandated to report something, and if I make the choice not to, I could be held liable,” Jones said.
This isn’t the dynamic Jones wants to have with her students. She hopes that going forward, the new law doesn’t push her toward becoming a version of her teacher-self she doesn’t want to be.
“If a student trusts me to come out or to tell me something about their life, I want them to be able to do that,” she added.
Maintaining professional integrity and protecting their right to create a welcoming classroom environment are at the heart of the resistance among some schools and teachers that are defying state and federal guidance against inclusion language. Cases are being decided at the district level. In northern Virginia, a handful of districts are vowing to keep their DEI policies intact, even as the U.S. Department of Education threatens defunding. An Idaho teacher who last year refused a district request to remove an “All Are Welcome Here” sign from her classroom now works for the Boise School District. That district decided over the summer that it would allow teachers to hang similar signs, in spite of guidance to the contrary from the state’s attorney general.
Educators in other states have also refused orders to remove displays, books and otherwise water down their curriculums, galvanizing more attention to the realities of the environments teachers are having to navigate this fall. It’s the adoption of a mindset that censorship is a choice.
“I’m not teaching politics,” Jones said. “I’m not promoting anything. Choosing to have a rainbow heart or a pin on my lanyard — someone would have to look at that and then complain to someone [else] that they feel is above me. And that is a choice that they make rather than seeing this [object] and [choosing] to move on.”
