The Florida House passed a bill to protect “parents’ rights” against decisions by the school system.
The House advanced sweeping, if aspirational, legislation codifying a parent’s “bill of rights” on Monday. The vote in favor was 77-41.
The House version (CS/HB 1059), sponsored by Rep. Erin Grall, now includes a technical amendment that reaffirmed parental rights to any type of school (public, private, and even home schooling).
Another Grall amendment vouchsafed parental rights to spike objectionable instructional material “based on beliefs regarding morality, sex, and religion or the belief that such materials are harmful.”
The amendments offered reassured some Democratic critics of the bill, but not enough to earn their votes.
Parents already have the right to home school or send their children to private schools.
This bill would give parents the right to “protect” their children from topics that are objectionable to their religious beliefs in class, such as sex education.
The bill’s gist: that state or other governments would not be allowed to limit a parent’s right to direct the moral and religious upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of his or her child.
The bill permits opt-outs for students on issues ranging from sex education to vaccination. As well, explicit consent for medical care and data collection for students in a school setting is included in the bill.
Some Democrats thought that the emphasis should be on children’s rights.
Although it is not mentioned in the article, many states expect teachers to report signs of physical abuse, but if parents believe they have the right to beat their children, the parents’ right would be paramount. Why should the teachers have the “right” to report such abuse to authorities?
If parents don’t want their child to be taught by a teacher whose religion is different from their parents, can they switch teachers nor be excused from those lessons as well as any test questions based on those lessons? If parents object to evolution on religious grounds, may they be excused from biology classes that might include any reference to evolution?
If parents object to their child learning about certain episodes in history (suppose the parent is a Holocaust denier or objects to teaching about slavery or genocide), may their child be excused from those classes, as well as any tests about those objectionable subjects? If they are Turkish and oppose any teaching of the “Armenian genocide,” may their children be shielded from those lessons?
You can think of many topics that might be offensive to parents. Do parents have the right to censor the curriculum to protect their child and exercise “parental rights”? This is not a hypothetical question. There have been numerous instances where parental objections have led to certain books being taken out of the curriculum and even removed from school libraries. (With the increasing disappearance of school libraries, this is less of an issue than it used to be.)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Did they include a parent’s right to opt their child out of the testing without repercussions to student or school?
They care nothing about the repercussions to children. The politicians that pretend to be working for the people, are interested in ideology not ideas. School is no longer about ‘learning’.
Here in MD we have no Opt Out. We have to “Refuse” the test and fight every level of administration to get our way. Civil Disobedience is what we have to practice…..and it isn’t very civil dealing with the Adminimals running the system.
🙂
Posted at https://dianeravitch.net/2020/03/12/florida-house-passes-bill-to-protect-parents-rights-vs-school-system/ OEN: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Florida-House-Passes-Bill-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Beliefs_Education_Florida-Hometown-Democracy_Issues-200312-779.html#comment758232
my comment: How sad, legislation focusing on ‘agrievement’ rather than ‘achievement’. Florida already fails its children with its public school systems. How sad for the rights of children.
Good line–focus on ‘agrievement’ rather than ‘achievement’.
This bill reflects the right wing paranoia that public schools foist the “liberal agenda” on young people. What students need are bills that get rid of standardized testing, affirm privacy rights and allow parents to opt their children out of on-line instruction.
yes: over and over we see only that a few parents can shut down all logic
What is the official name of this piece of legislation? The Right to Idiocy Act?
They’re such dopes. The truth is if you put your child in any group setting the child has to compromise. This utterly ridiculous level of individualism is impossible. All they’re doing is kowtowing to the loudest voices to the detriment of the vast majority of students.
If you want to raise your child in a sterile silo where they aren’t exposed to anything outside the narrow confines of people who are all in agreement on everything, please feel free to do that, but leave my child out of it. My child lives in a community and sometimes my child’s wants have to give way to other peoples’ needs. That’s how I’m raising mine- to function in a society with others.
“Me, me, me”. It could be our national motto.
You have to love ed reformers in government, I must say. They accomplish absolutely nothing of any practical use to any public school student, but they are very, very good at promoting their ideology.
Hire some people who actually intend to get some work done instead of loudly proclaiming the superiority of their political views.
The sum total of the ed reform contribution to Ohio’s public schools this year are mandatory posters we have to put up in schools proclaiming their religious superiority.
That’s a year’s work for these folks. For that they collect a public paycheck.
I couple years ago, I briefly dated a fifth-grade teacher here in Flor-uh-duh. She told me that under pressure from parents, the Hillsborough School District had replaced its fifth-grade unit on human reproduction with one on “expressing your feelings using emojis.”
I guess that Flor-uh-duh parents are fine with students being ignorant and putting themselves at risk.
The Flor-uh-duh Right to Idiocy Act would make a nice piece for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah or LastWeekTonight with John Oliver. Sometimes, national public shaming works to reverse such nonsense. Anyone with connections to these two?
Hopefully many get the opportunity to read “Educated” by Tara Westover. It’s a memoir written at the age of 29 by a woman who was raised in a remote niche of Idaho by parents whose idiosyncratic version of “Mormon” excluded nearly all contact w/govtl agencies including school & traditional medicine. Tara survived untreated injuries from unreported car accidents, regular beatings by a brother, multiple accidents due to zero safety measures at the family’s scrap biz– & never heard the word “holocaust” until she got away from them & went to college. They managed all this by staying off the grid even to the extent of home births/ no birth certificates.
Sounds like FL must have a fair share of families like hers, if a bill like this gets this close to passage.
Many of the Republicans here in Florida represent libertarian beliefs along with the interests of Bible Belt, evangelical Christians.
Three years ago, I had a parent call the Assistant Principal at my school to complain that “Mr. Shepherd is teaching demonology and Satanism.” I had assigned the opening scene of Macbeth to my 9th-grade theatre class.
This parent’s daughter was exempted from reading the scene or participating in the associated activity. LOL. And so this parent saved her from my wicked designs–teaching the kids about the astonishing variety of ways in which a given scene could be staged and enacted.
OMG Bob your Floridian tales are a riot today 😀
Maybe parents would have preferred a cabal of ed-reformers muttering “Wise is foolish and foolish wise/ Limbo down so low that learning dies.”
I used to teach pre-AP to 8th graders. A parent objected to the novel The Secret Life of Bees because it had racist language in it. She knew way ahead of time that it was on the curriculum and even though it was addressed in class as contributing to the effect of historical accuracy in the novel, it was about the 60s in the south, an interracial relationship, and actually promoting an idea of racial harmony. I had to create specific lessons for her kids on a totally different topic. It was like basically they couldn’t follow the class for a month and a half. The mother then spent months bad mouthing the school to parents as she wanted the book banned. Her children came in every day and told the other kids that I was teaching racism. Such drama and then she finally pulled her kids out in a huff to homeschool. Ridiculous
A student teacher recently was allowed to quit after a parent complained about the use of the Lynch Letter in a history class. The well-meaning African American lady was interviewed on the local TV about the “rascist” letter. I looked it up. Lynch was a overseer on a Caribbean Plantation who had written a letter to Southern planters in the early 1700s about the methods that could be used to de-humanize and thereby control Africans who were in slavery.
While I was not able to know how the student teacher approached the lesson, it struck me that this student teacher had presented the children with incontrovertible proof that the slaveholders were off the charts in their lack of humanity, even for their own time. Why that was an offensive lesson is beyond me.
That’s so terrible. There are many of these stories in Diane Ravitch’s wonderful book The Language Police.
The legislation in Florida arguing for parental rights is being pushed by ParentalRights.org, a 501(c)(4) non-profit with the same directors as the Parental Rights Foundation a 501(c) 3 non-profit and active in 37 states https://parentalrights.org/about/
Of special interest is the fact that Grover Norquist is on the board of both of these non-profits. Norquist is a long-time DC insider. He is the president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) (opposed to higher taxes–federal, state, and local), president of the American Society of Competitiveness, and on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association, and American Conservative Union.
The 990 IRS form for the Parental Rights Foundation has a whisper type memo indicating that it pays the Home School Legal Defense Association for legal and accounting services. The Home School Legal Defense Association is an ultra-rightwing organization, self-described as a “Christian Organization.” This is a membership organization for homeschoolers. You can see some of the curriculum materials they sell to Christian homeschoolers at https://www.mfwbooks.com/about/resources/HSLDA Forget about science, look at the selections in literature, and what counts as history.
The Home School Legal Defense Association is acknowledged as the authority on home-school education by The American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) in ALEC’s 2019 report card. ALEC also credits other sources of information for its 2019 report card. These are the organizations ALEC loves. All are well-known for undermining public schools and teacher unions: Education Next, Center for Education Reform, National Council on Teacher Quality, and Excellence in Education. The ALEC Report Card says “Their publications that are the backbone of this Report.” https://www.alec.org/app/uploads/2019/09/2019-ALEC-Report-Card.pdf
Florida is promoting copycat legislation from ultra-right-wing groups who are also major supporters of homeschoolers. The ALEC-style cookie cutter legislation is not simply about parental rights, it is in support of Bible-based education and tribalism based on multiple forms of discrimination (by religious belief, race, gender and gender identity, social class, you name it). Make no mistake: This parental rights organization, active in 37 states, wants a constitutional amendment in support of its view of parental rights. See https://parentalrights.org/amendment/
Does anyone here know if anyone is doing research on where who’s sponsored — or worse yet, passed — smart-ALEC bills this year and last year?
I don’t. Check the website ALEC Exposed.
Thank you. They have a lot of information there, but unfortunately much of it is from a few years back. In the case of Michigan, where I live, most of the incidents shown at this site are from 2010-2011.
I’m trying to follow up other leads. For example, the Center for Public Integrity worked with USAToday and the Arizona Republic on a major report last September; I’ve got an inquiry in to them.
Here’s another likely-looking link:
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/category/featured-investigations/alec/