Jill Underly is the state superintendent of education in Wisconsin. In this article, she responds to the demands in red states for “parent rights,” which is usually premised on the belief that teachers are “indoctrinating” their students and can’t be trusted.
Superintendent Underly writes:
Dr. Jill Underly is the Wisconsin State Superintendent, and she offers thoughts to parents and teachers facing the current attacks by legislators.
Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it.
But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I don’t recognize it. Family engagement isn’t about yelling at school staff or suing your school board if they don’t do exactly as you demand.
It’s also not asking caregivers to homeschool or pay for private tuition if they feel unheard or unseen.
Family engagement is about having a real conversation about – and with – our children.
Like you, I build relationships with my children’s teachers, I reach out when I need to, and they know they can call if they need to.
As a parent, I love my children’s school, and I see the ways our district works to involve all families and the entire community, and how the entire community supports our school.
It’s an exchange, because what matters most to all of us is what we all have in common: our children.
Of course, this isn’t what politicians mean when they talk about protecting parental rights when it comes to children’s education. Rather, they’re talking about micromanaging curriculum and preying on our parental emotions during a traumatic time, all with the ulterior motive of placing suspicion on educators by weaponizing lessons about difficult topics, or by placing blame on schools for a pandemic they did not cause but are nonetheless supporting our children through.
As to my fellow educators, you and I all know that this isn’t the first time that politicians in this state have gone after teachers.
And as a former civics teacher, I know that teaching the history of this nation cannot – and should not – be done without tackling difficult topics.
Families know this and support these opportunities for our schools to engage our children to become critical thinkers and critical consumers of information. We want our students to grow up and be active participants in democracy, and that means they need to know how to examine their past, think critically about their present, and make informed decisions about their future.
I’m tired.
Like you, I’m tired of the pandemic. I’m getting tired of this winter. And I’m really, really tired of politicians pitting parents against teachers when our children are the ones who get hurt in the end.
Because they’re the ones who matter most in this conversation and who matter most for the future of our state. And that conversation – how to best meet the needs of our children and students – is one I’m excited to continue having as a parent and an educator, and to lead as your Wisconsin State Superintendent.
I worked in a district that considered parents an important part of the education team. I have served with parents on district wide committees. Whenever the district hired a superintendent, a couple of parents served on the hiring committee that included administrators, teachers and even a high school student. The committee sent three or four finalists to the board for the ultimate decision. The district also did a lot of outreach to other parents including the parents of ELLs.. This district had a family resource center and social workers. Of course, this was before reform when districts had decisions about their own community schools. The basic goal was that when parents and schools worked together to promote communication, the students was the benefit of the collaboration. That was also a time when parents weren’t poisoned by right wing propaganda into believing that public schools indoctrinated students with socialist ideals.
The advocates for so-called parent rights are afraid children will learn to think critically. They don’t just want to maintain current inequity. They want to roll back civic, democratic, and economic rights already achieved.
Education works better when teachers and parents can work together. Today the parents leading the charge have been inspired by misinformation from the right wing media. This group of parents is largely confrontational and adversarial.
The “advocates” are leaders of conservative religion. Ryan Girdusky who formed the 1776 PAC to fund school board members opposed to CRT wrote an interview posted at Pat Buchanan’s site, please read it. The “culture war” narrative was/is spread by Pat Buchanan who is driven by his conservative religion.
Parents’ rights is a term that can be found throughout the political talking points at the almost 50 state Catholic Conference websites. As example of the influence, Catholics take credit for school choice legislation in Indiana. (Southwestern Indiana Catholic Community Newspaper, type in school choice at the search prompt for a question, scroll down to April 2021, “An Insider’s Look…”)
From the Wisconsin Catholic Conference site
“… the U.S. Catholic Bishops explain that ‘parents – the first and most important educators- have a fundamental right to choose education best suited to the needs of their children, including private and religious schools.’ ” (Note that public schools are not excluded from the directive.)
and,
“As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have a right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. The right is fundamental. As far as possible parents have a duty of choosing schools that will best help them in their task as Christian educators. Public authorities have a duty of guaranteeing this parental right and ensuring the concrete conditions for its exercise.”
I recognize the Bishops’ statement as an outright attack on separation of church and state.