Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire are co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School. It is a book that everyone should read. They recently wrote an article that was posted in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post.
They write:
In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of “parents’ rights.” In Indiana, Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita recently introduced a Parents Bill of Rights, which asserts that “education policy and curriculum should accurately reflect the values of Indiana families.” In Florida, the legislature passed an even more comprehensive bill, assuring that the state and its public schools cannot infringe on the “fundamental rights” of parents. A growing number of states are allowing parents to sue districts that teach banned concepts. And in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin has made parents’ rights a centerpiece of his campaign for governor, staging “parents matter” rallies and declaring, “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
Given this frenzy, one might reasonably conclude that radicals are out to curtail the established rights that Americans have over the educational sphere. Yet what’s actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents. In the words of legal scholar Jeff Shulman, “This effort may well divide child from parent, not because socialist educators want to indoctrinate children, but because learning to think for oneself is what children do.”
When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently. As the political scientist Rob Reich has argued, “Minimal autonomy requires, especially for its civic importance, that a child be able to examine his or her own political values and beliefs, and those of others, with a critical eye.” If we value that end, “the structure of schooling cannot simply replicate in every particularity the values and beliefs of a child’s home.”
The law has long reflected this. Consider home schooling. Although it is legal across the country, states still regulate its practice. Such regulations often aren’t enforced, but they are certainly on the books. Home-schooling parents can be required to establish minimal academic qualifications, to submit examples of student work to school district administrators or even to adopt a state-approved curriculum. As the Supreme Court noted in Wisconsin v. Yoder, a case that granted Amish parents the widest possible exemption from state control, “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education.” And, as the court made clear in an earlier case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the state concerns itself not just with the well-being of the child but also with what the justices broadly called “the public welfare.”
The sudden push for parental rights, then, isn’t a response to substantive changes in education or the law. It’s a political tactic.
Writing in the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that conservatives felt that the country had been “taken away from them and their kind” and that timeworn American virtues had been “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.” In response, they took up what he called the “paranoid style” — an approach to politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Published more than half a century ago, his essay could have been penned yesterday.
The “paranoid style” of politics is particularly useful as a mechanism for organizing opposition. And the Republicans employing it right now have two particular targets in mind. The first is the public education system, which hard-liners have long sought to undermine. At an annual cost of nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, tuition-free, open-enrollment education represents one of the nation’s most substantial commitments to the public good. But well before Ronald Reagan’s failed effort to introduce vouchers in the 1980s, conservatives were making the case for a privatized system — one in which families, not taxpayers, would bear the cost of education, and governance would happen through the free market rather than democratic politics. In recent years, this vision has come roaring back. Conservative legislatures across the United States have introduced bills creating education savings accounts, private-school tuition tax credits and other forms of neo-vouchers that package old ideological wine in new bottles.
But this play is much bigger than education. For years, the Republican Party has understood that the demographic tide is against it. Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance. The recent firestorm over critical race theory is a perfect case in point. Never mind that this concept from legal scholarship isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools or that it isn’t what most protesters believe it to be. Republicans gain an electoral advantage by convincing their base that White children are being taught to hate themselves, their families and their country. Whether this supposed attack on the American way of life is being coordinated by Black Lives Matter activists, Marxist educators or antifa operatives, the point, as Hofstadter observed, is to generate an enemy “thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable.”
Courts have found that parents have great authority when it comes to deciding how to raise and educate their children. This right, however, does not mean that public schools must cater to parents’ individual ideas about education. Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
Thank you for this clear, concise article on the right wing attempt to use suggestible parents to attack the schools their children attend. Their objective is to undermine the trust that parents have in public schools. Conservative media spreads the lies and disinformation so that parents will flood board meetings to complain and protest.
While I do not agree that parents should determine curricula in public schools, in states that are enacting these “parent control” laws, parents should start writing letters to insist that their child’s education must be free of the negative impact of on-line education as there are many legitimate physical, mental and educational reasons to object to this type of instruction. In other words concerned parents should use this opportunity to insist that their child receive an in-person education without the negative impact of computer technology or with limited exposure to this technology. They should turn the tables on these right wing instigators.
I wonder what these parents think about SENDING offsprings to BOARDING Schools?
suddenly I am thinking about the movie DEAD POET’S SOCIETY
POETS’
The sane parents have “aged out” of the system as their children have graduated and what is now left are the angry (and uninformed), scorched earth parents barging into school board meetings demanding action. We sane parents went and expressed our concerns about the over testing, the Common Core, the wonky SEL, too much ed tech, data collection, FERPA, lack of PE/music/art/recess etc and we were blown off and ignored for the sake of more “reforms”. The crazy parents won’t create change either, but they will bring attention to some of the obvious turds floating to the top without touching on what really matters in education. The “reformers” will keep on winning and pocketing tax payer cash while the children will continue to lose. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The crazy parents in Texas made the evening news that millions watch each night. The sane parents that complain about standardized testing, privatization and other issues rarely get any attention from the media that is largely owned by wealthy conservatives.
And that is why we are in this mess. For years, MSM (both sides) has told half-truths (is that not a form of lying?). Just look at how many reputable journalists have left MSM (news papers) for their own Substacks so that they are able to write the whole story without censorship from the top? There is more to this crazy school board crashing , scorched earth politics than meets the eye….the back story…..that no one gets to read about or see on TV. The “truth” lies in the backstory.
I’m in your boat. I never ceased to be amazed at the views of people I would have thought would be natural allies and receptive of the message.
At the school house and while working through district politics I discovered that it was always the loudest parents that wanted control, not the majority. It would be helpful if the Democratic Party quit walking a tight rope around privatization to appease the right and actually advocated for teachers and the full funding of public education.
Well said!
The hypothesis:
Education SHOULD prepare young people to
think for themselves.
AMEN
IF effective propaganda STARTS where
the ability to “think for themselves” ENDS,
what SHOULD have occured, obviously didn’t.
Faulting PE “teachers” or reducing the crisis
to a matter of repub cretins, seems to ignore
the formation of Public Education.
PE didn’t arise as a product of public
debate as it should have in a
so called democracy,
but as a distillation of private discussions,
of the PTB at the time.
If the ultimate goal of PE WAS to
cultivate individuals to
” think for themselves”,or to develope
“falculties of discernment”, the masses
wouldn’t need 24/7 “splainers”, or
thought custodians to keep them on
the path.
It is what it is. Anguish based on
indoctrination doesn’t cut it.
Being constantly miffed because
the hypotheses of state don’t
map onto reality doesn’t cut it.
If the state created PE to be
in charge, to be the “boss”
the state would yeild to your
arguments, demands, or pressure.
The pudding…
“Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression.”
Beginning in the second Bush administration, which won by a losing popular vote, the Republican Party began a systematic fight against the majority. Never mind that the past had seen a degree of moderation in selection of judges and voicing of opinions, the Bush white house began a systematic pushing aside of the wishes of any Democrat in office. His administration never even threw the opposition a bone. Then Obama won, and with him a window of two years of Democratic Party majority. Republicans, then out of power, responded with a firestorm of criticism, suggesting that the Democratic politicians were ignoring their views. The Tea Party was born, which was a thinly veiled opposition to people different from me either in terms of geography, values, or race. Riding this radical move to the right, mainstream Republicans took back the house in the mid-term elections and the storm toward the right has never let up since, coalescing around the fear of immigrants, socialists, and Muslims.
Stoking the fears of its base has brought the Republican Party to its present condition, wherein reason is sacrificed to the gods of election.
The orthodox posters on this blog often emphasis the importance of local political control over schools, yet here is another post arguing against parents in a district having influence over what their children learn.
I hope to hear from orthodox posters what aspects of schools should be controlled by elected local politicians representing the citizens in the district and which aspects should not.
Democratically elected school boards are not the same as changing the curriculum and censoring books at the will of parents. Even you know that.
TE, in accredited schools, education professionals decide what’s taught, as in hospitals, surgeons decide how surgeries are done, as in the courts, judges make the decisions, as in car shops, mechanics repair cars.
People who do not trust professionals, may home-school, may repair cars in their garage and may perform surgeries in their basements on themselves and may treat their covid with ivermectin.
All these arguments for “parents should be able to tell if their kids learn about evolution or the Big Bang or the holocaust or slavery or the butchery of Indians in school” are based on a misunderstanding of democracy. Democracy does not allow outsiders to tell professionals how to do their jobs.
Mate,
If local schools boards should not be allowed to decide what is taught (and presumably how it is taught), what should democratically elected school boards (like that in Mequon-Thiensville School Board that the NYT recently covered) control?
Even if parents send their kids to private school, they don’t have the right to dictate what their kids are taught. How could they have the right? Do I have the right to tell a doc how to operate on my kid since I pay for it? Teaching needs to be left for professionals, not to dilettantes with money.
If some parents don’t trust teachers, they can do homeschooling.