{"id":74961,"date":"2021-12-02T12:13:39","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T18:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=74961"},"modified":"2021-12-02T12:13:39","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T18:13:39","slug":"74961","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=74961","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Next Step for the Parents\u2019 Movement: Curriculum Transparency.<\/a>
\nParents have a right to know what\u2019s being taught to their children.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America\u2019s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin\u2019s victory over former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has\u00a0promised<\/a>\u00a0to rein in public-school radicalism and \u201cban critical race theory\u201d on his first day in office.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the central moment in the Virginia gubernatorial race was McAuliffe\u2019s comment during a debate: \u201cI don\u2019t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.\u201d Like most Virginia voters, we couldn\u2019t disagree more.\u00a0Research<\/a>\u00a0shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children\u2019s education. To be sure, this doesn\u2019t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But\u00a0public<\/i>\u00a0schools are institutions created by \u201cWe the People\u201d and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.<\/p>\n

At a minimum, parents should be able to know what\u2019s being taught to their children in the classroom. Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children. To that end, we have drafted a\u00a0template<\/a>\u2014building on one of our\u00a0earlier efforts<\/a>\u00a0at the Manhattan Institute and the work of Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute\u2014to inform state legislatures seeking to foster school transparency. The policy proposal is designed to provide public school parents with easy access\u2014directly on school websites\u2014to materials and activities used to train staff and teachers and to instruct children.<\/p>\n

The last year and a half has demonstrated the need for transparency measures. As many public schools migrated to \u201cvirtual only\u201d learning in response to the pandemic, parents received a first-hand look at the divisive, racialist curricula being taught to their children. They learned that public schools were\u00a0forcing<\/a>\u00a0third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities,\u00a0showing<\/a>\u00a0kindergarteners dramatizations of dead black children and warning them about \u201cracist police,\u201d and\u00a0telling<\/a>\u00a0white teachers that they were guilty of \u201cspirit murdering\u201d minorities. These were not isolated incidents.<\/p>\n

These revelations prompted parents to demand to know exactly what was being taught to their children. They felt that the public-school bureaucracies had been hiding controversial materials and exerting undue influence over their children, all in the service of fashionable left-wing ideologies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Frustrated parents understandably pushed back, protested at school board meetings, and, in some cases, forced the resignations of school superintendents who refused to listen to their concerns. School officials often responded to parents\u2019 concerns with resentment. Some were so agitated by the parental pushback that they sought federal intervention\u2014including through a\u00a0well-publicized<\/a>\u00a0(and since\u00a0retracted<\/a>)\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0from the National School Boards Association comparing parents to \u201cdomestic terrorists.\u201d Other school officials insisted that they, not parents and not voters, should be in charge of children\u2019s pedagogy. This is precisely backward. While government schools necessarily cannot meet every parent\u2019s demands, parents have a fundamental right, long recognized\u00a0in law<\/a>, to guide their children\u2019s education and moral conscience. To exercise those rights, parents need accurate information about the learning materials and activities their kids are encountering in government schools.<\/p>\n

Our model for transparency adequately balances the needs for robust curricula and parents\u2019 rights in a pluralistic society. It does not attempt to define specific concepts, methods, or ideologies. Nor does it seek to ban, restrict, or discourage any materials, activities, or pedagogies. Its aim is simply to provide parents with information about the curricula used in the classroom across all subjects\u2014and to let families, teachers, and schools negotiate disagreements at the local level. If they cannot resolve their differences, parents have options: petition elected leaders or run for school board seats themselves, move to a different area, or remove their children from the public school system.<\/p>\n

According to the Education Liberty Alliance, 11 states already have state-law provisions for parental review of curricular material. Legislatures in Utah, Arizona, and Wisconsin have recently seen bills introduced to require online access. More states will surely follow.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to strike the right balance. We are sensitive to the concern that state or local policy should not overburden teachers with compliance-related paperwork. Our blueprint for transparency in education thus requires listing only essential information about curricular materials and activities, such as title, author, organization, and a web link, if available. Moreover, most teachers already use free cloud storage systems, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive, to organize their materials; to satisfy our proposed transparency requirements, teachers could simply share a link. For those who do not already use such systems, the parents\u2019 right to know what is happening in the classroom easily justifies the extra effort.<\/p>\n

By focusing on transparency, our prescriptions sidestep arguments about \u201ccensorship\u201d in public schools. (Realistically speaking, any school necessarily has to pick and choose what to teach among near-infinite options. For the record, we think Toni Morrison\u2019s acclaimed novel\u00a0Beloved<\/i><\/a>\u00a0is an excellent addition to high school curricula; we\u2019re far more dubious about sharing Maia Kobabe\u2019s sexually graphic cartoon book\u00a0Gender Queer<\/i><\/a>\u00a0with elementary school students.) Our transparency-based approach also ignores pointless\u00a0debates<\/a>\u00a0about whether critical race theory is\u00a0actually<\/i>\u00a0being taught in K-12 schools.<\/p>\n

Openness will not necessarily engender trust. Parents will certainly disagree about pedagogy. There\u2019s no simple way to reconcile all competing perspectives. But the answer to these inevitable disagreements cannot be to hide from parents what\u2019s being taught to their own children. We believe that funding common schools in our democratic system requires information and engagement\u2014and so we propose that public schools open their books and let parents see what\u2019s inside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next Step for the Parents\u2019 Movement: Curriculum Transparency. Parents have a right to know what\u2019s being taught to their children. In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America\u2019s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-schools","category-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74962,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74961\/revisions\/74962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}