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Holding Parents Accountable When Their Children Kill

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2021 //
51

This very important story appeared in the Washington Post.

She had seen her grandson’s red, spiral-bound notebook before that night, but now, as Catherine O’Connor sifted through its pages for the first time, what she read astonished her.

“School Shootings,” Joshua O’Connor had titled the first page, above a reconstruction of the Columbine High School massacre that left 13 people dead. In the pages that followed, Joshua, who’d just turned 18, described a detailed plan to carry out his own massacre: the shotguns, pistols, assault rifle and ammunition he would buy and the bombs he would build; the doors he would zip-tie “so bitches can’t escape”; the spot by the bleachers where he would set off the first explosion; the route he would take on his killing spree; the moment, when it was over, that he would end his own life.

“I Need to make this shooting/ bombing… infamous,” he wrote in early 2018. “I Need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can.”
Catherine O’Connor, a retired probation officer who was Joshua’s guardian, showed the journal to her husband, who was equally disturbed. The next day, after O’Connor dropped her grandson off at school, she searched his room and found a semiautomatic rifle in a guitar case. Then she did what many parents of school shooters never do: called the police to report that a child she loved posed a threat to his classmates, his community and himself.

Last week’s shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, which left four students dead and seven other people wounded, has focused unprecedented attention on the responsibility parents bear when their children fire shots on campuses.

For decades, mothers and fathers have overlooked clear warning signs that their teens were capable of violence, but adults are almost never held accountable when their negligence leads to bloodshed. That’s what makes Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the 15-year-old charged with the shooting, so unusual. They each face four counts of involuntary manslaughter, almost certainly the most serious charges ever brought against an alleged school shooter’s mother or father.

Since 1999, children have committed at least 175 school shootings, according to a new Washington Post analysis. Among the 114 cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, 77 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. And yet, The Post discovered just five instances when the adult owners of the weapons were criminally punished because they failed to lock them up. Another three cases in which adults were charged, including the one against the Crumbleys, are pending.
[More than 278,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine)

In Michigan, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald has argued that the facts justify the felony charges against the couple, alleging “unconscionable” negligence.

Four days before the shooting, McDonald said, James Crumbley bought a 9mm Sig Sauer, which their son, Ethan, later posted a photo of on Instagram, writing, “Just got my new beauty today.” Three days before the shooting, Jennifer Crumbley posted that she and Ethan were at the gun range “testing out his new Christmas present.”

One day before the shooting, a teacher caught Ethan searching online for ammunition, but when the school alerted his mother, authorities say she instead texted her son: “Lol. I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”On the day of the shooting, McDonald said, a teacher found a note on which Ethan drew a person shot dead, along with “blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” When his parents were summoned to the school, the prosecutor noted, they refused to take him home — nor did they search his backpack for the gun. Less than three hours later, his rampage began.

The Crumbleys have pleaded not guilty, and their attorney denied the prosecutor’s allegation that the 9mm was kept in an unlocked drawer, saying “that gun was actually locked.”

School administrators also deny they did anything wrong, but the parents of two sisters who survived the shooting filed a pair of lawsuits, in federal court Thursday, accusing the district of negligence, too.


Regardless of who’s at fault, research shows that such deadly outcomes are not inevitable. In a report issued earlier this year, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center reviewed 67 “disrupted plots” targeting schools between 2006 and 2018. Every time, the report said, “tragedy was averted” when others came forward after seeing alarming behavior. In most cases, friends, classmates or other peers spoke up, but in eight instances — or about 1 in 9 — a parent or grandparent noticed and reported something, sometimes after going through a relative’s bedroom or, as O’Connor did, reading a journal.


She discovered that Joshua had scheduled the attack for April 19 — the day before Columbine’s anniversary. She found the list of his self-diagnosed mental illnesses and the pages with the will that he’d written, explaining what was to be done with his ashes. In the journal’s seventh entry, she read this: “So today I just bought a Hi-Point 9mm Carbine rifle. … I can’t wait for April, it will be a blast.”

The day after his arrest, on Feb. 14, 2018, O’Connor watched what happened when another attacker wasn’t stopped.

Just past 2 p.m., 3,300 miles away in Parkland, Fla., another angry teenager who had threatened to shoot up a campus did just that, killing 17 people during the deadliest high school shooting in American history.
‘Not impulsive acts’

She never feared her grandson, but Joshua’s horrifying plot made clear that he needed help she and her husband couldn’t give him.
“What’s the right next step?” she recalled thinking before alerting authorities. “I don’t know what other choice there was.”

Because she made that choice, her grandson never fired a shot or took a life. Police arrived soon after her 911 call and searched Joshua’s room, where they found a collection of bomb parts and confiscated his rifle and notebook. Within hours, he was taken into custody.

Four decades before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and two decades before the shooting at Columbine, a teenager named Brenda Spencer opened fire on a San Diego elementary school on Jan. 29, 1979, killing two adults and wounding eight children and a police officer.
Spencer was 16, and her father, Wallace, had given her the .22-caliber rifle a month earlier. It was, just like Ethan Crumbley’s handgun, a Christmas gift.

Prosecutors never charged the man with a crime.

His potential culpability garnered little attention in the press at a time when school shootings were considered disturbing anomalies rather than a national crisis that demanded intensive training, expensive technology and armed officers to deter.
[‘Scared to death’: More than 4 million children endured lockdowns in the 2017-18 school year]

Not much had changed by 1998, when Kip Kinkel shot 27 people, killing two, at Thurston High in Oregon. He used three guns from home, including a Glock his dad had bought for the firearm-obsessed 15-year-old as a way to strengthen their relationship.

Kinkel had access to the weapons despite being an angry, violent, depressed and deeply delusional ninth-grader who had twice been suspended for attacking other students and, another time, was caught by police trying to buy a stolen firearm. Whether prosecutors would have charged his parents for their negligence is impossible to know; Kinkel killed them both the day before the school shooting.

Much of the country would not awaken to the threat of school shootings until the next year, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others at Columbine.

Klebold’s mother, Sue, has talked about her experience perhaps more than any other shooter’s parent, even writing a book about her son, the attack and its aftermath.

“Dylan did not learn violence in our home. He did not learn disconnection, or rage, or racism. He did not learn a callous indifference to human life,” she argued in “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.” “Dylan showed no clear and present danger, the way some children do.”


Harris’s parents, who have never given an interview, could not make the same claims, according to Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.”
“Eric Harris’s parents knew he had anger management problems — they said he punched a wall about every four weeks — knew he had been suspended for hacking into the school’s computer system and stealing everyone’s locker combination, knew he had been arrested for breaking into an electrician’s van and stealing equipment, and also knew that he had built at least one pipe bomb,” Langman said. “They also knew he drank and smoked pot. This, of course, does not predict mass murder, but should have warranted at least conducting room searches to see what else might be going on.”

Mass shooters, experts have found, seldom kill without warning.
“These are definitely not impulsive acts,” said Matt Doherty, who used to run the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center. “They are planned in advance, and that planning can occur over days, weeks or months or years.”

In 2017, parents in Maryland discovered such a plan in their 18-year-old daughter’s journal, where she laid out a “Columbine-type attack” on her high school, said Frederick County Sheriff Charles A. Jenkins.


The teen’s father also found materials for explosive devices, shotgun shells and a shotgun she had purchased, Jenkins said. The parents contacted school officials, who called the sheriff’s office. She later pleaded guilty to possessing explosive material.


“I wonder how parents cannot see signs that are developing in a home and in a family situation,” Jenkins said. “There are always signs somewhere.”

Few school shooters offered more warning signs than Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland gunman who pleaded guilty to the murders.

On the first day that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission gathered, one of their investigators presented a slide breaking down nearly 50 instances of threatening behavior that people knew about but didn’t report or that authorities knew about and didn’t act on. Instances in which Cruz tortured or killed an animal: seven. Times he was seen with a bullet, knife or firearm: 19. Declarations of hatred he made toward a group or person: eight. References he made about wanting to hurt or kill someone: 11. Threats that he would shoot up a school: three.

The commission’s chair, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, called Cruz’s mother, Lynda, an “enabler.” She died a few months prior to the Parkland shooting.

“There’s no question about it,” he said in an interview, noting that she had taken her son to get a state ID card when he was 18 so he could buy a gun, despite knowing he was violent. Investigators learned that Cruz had once knocked out three of her teeth and, at least once, pointed a gun at her.

“There is no way she should not have known” what her son was capable of, Gualtieri said. “There is no way a reasonable, prudent person wouldn’t have recognized and identified it.”


‘A wake-up call’

Twenty-one years ago, in a town just 40 miles from Oxford, Mich., a first-grader found a handgun in a shoe box, took it to school and used it to kill a 6-year-old classmate. The 19-year-old man who owned the weapon later pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and served 29 months behind bars.

No gun owners since have faced a harsher penalty for allowing their firearms to fall into the hands of a child school shooter.

Politics are often blamed for the lack of accountability. Three years ago, Commonwealth’s Attorney Mark Blankenship wanted to charge the stepfather of a 15-year-old boy who had used the man’s gun to kill two people and wound 14 more at Marshall County High, in a deeply conservative part of Kentucky.

But, just as in Michigan, state lawmakers in Kentucky had never passed a regulation mandating that adults prevent children from gaining access to their firearms, limiting Blankenship’s options. He lost reelection, blaming the failure, in part, on his comments about going after the stepfather.

Safety advocates now wonder whether the Crumbley case represents a broader shift in the way that the country assigns responsibility after school shootings. But its long-term impact may depend on the outcome. If the couple are convicted, will more prosecutors feel emboldened to go after negligent gun owners and, specifically, parents? If they’re exonerated, will the case have the opposite effect?

Regardless, some experts say, the charges could make a meaningful difference right away.


“My hope is that this will be a wake-up call for gun owners who are not safely storing their firearms,” said Allison Anderman, senior counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “There are millions of teens and children who live in homes with unsecured guns.”

In fact, if the only change America had made after Columbine was to prevent children from obtaining firearms, hundreds of kids who accidentally shot themselves or each other would not have died or been maimed or suffered through the guilt of their mistake, at least 10,000 children might not have ended their own lives in suicide and more than half of the country’s school shootings wouldn’t have happened.

For Catherine O’Connor, the woman who reported her grandson to police in Washington state, doing the right thing came at a devastating cost. She pleaded with the court to show Joshua mercy, but he still received a 22-year prison term.


At a hearing, the judge called her a hero. O’Connor hated that. She just wanted to help her grandson.


The case has eroded her faith in the justice system, but she agreed with the Michigan prosecutor’s decision to charge the Crumbleys. O’Connor couldn’t comprehend why they hadn’t searched their son’s backpack during that meeting at the school.


“That’s so irresponsible, beyond belief,” she said. “That just outrages me.”
O’Connor said she had long been wary of allowing her grandson to go near unsecured firearms. She and her husband owned guns but said they were always hidden and equipped with trigger locks.

Of course, she could do nothing to stop Joshua from buying the semiautomatic rifle when he turned 18. But even her grandson came to a realization about America’s gun culture.


“Grandma,” he said the first time she saw him after this arrest, “guns are too easy to get.”

Categories Accountability, Guns, Guns in Schools, Parents

Jennifer Berkshire: Will “Parent Rights” Be a Winning Issue for the GOP?

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2021 //
35

Jennifer Berkshire wrote a fascinating article in The New Republic about the politics and history behind the “parent rights” issue. She reminds us that the issue came to a boil in the 1990s, as the GOP cynically seized upon it as a sure fire winner to motivate the base. And that it has an even longer history, as she shows.

Will it prove to be a winner for the GOP?

Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin jumped on the issue in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and he won.

Berkshire writes:

In Youngkin’s upset win, the GOP saw its path to forever rule. And it was lined with angry parents. In his election-night letter, dashed off as votes were still being counted, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pledged to roll out a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” as a central plank of the GOP’s efforts to retake Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. Josh Hawley, who aspires to occupy that residence, announced his own rights bill, one that would “turn back efforts to shut parents out of their children’s education.” The Wall Street Journal made the new cause official: The GOP was now the “Parents’ Party.”

Republicans’ newfound passion for America’s parents has a straightforward explanation. As the Virginia victory demonstrated, parental rage can be mined for electoral gold. And right now parents have plenty of reasons to be unhappy. Pandemic schooling, with its arduous, unpredictable schedule of shutdowns and mandates, is in its third year, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, school districts are fumbling as they grapple with an array of contentious issues, including the appropriate way to teach about racism and how best to accommodate the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. The result has been an incendiary debate about not just what schools teach and how they’re run but whose voice really matters in those decisions.

This is not the first time parents’ grievances have been exploited for politics’ sake. Three decades ago, the GOP and a familiar line-up of conservative groups coalesced behind the same banner of parental rights. The cause even made it into the GOP’s Contract With America, the ambitious legislative agenda laid out by conservatives en route to flipping Congress in 1994. When Pat Buchanan launched his 1996 presidential bid, he declared himself the candidate of parents. “You have my solemn word,” Buchanan intoned on the stump in New Hampshire, a state he went on to win. “I will shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and parental right will prevail in our public schools again.”

And yet within a few years, the issue came to be seen as a stalking horse for the religious right’s agenda of dismantling public education, and it fizzled with surprising speed. Now, as conservatives once more wave the banner of parents’ rights, the sudden demise of a potent political issue 30 years ago offers some valuable lessons.

Once more, the GOP has grabbed the issue, this time to push their privatization agenda. If Democrats are wise, they will read Berkshire’s article and prepare for the GOP offensive. To do so, they must support public schools, unions, and public school teachers vigorously, instead of trying to cut a deal with charter schools, hedge fund donors, and enemies of unions.

Categories Elections, Parents, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Remember Sandy Hook.

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2021 //
22

Nine years ago, a deranged gunman blasted his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He murdered 20 children and six educators, including the principal, Dawn Hochsprung. The children were all 6- and 7-year-olds. Teachers shielded their children as best they could, and some died while protecting the children.

Many thought this slaughter of babies and educators would compel Congress to enact meaningful gun control. It didn’t. It even inspired a ruthless radio host to claim that the massacre never happened. Many grieving parents received death threats, due to the radio host’s lies. A court has held him liable for his cruel campaign. Meanwhile the murders continue, and Congress does nothing.

I received this message from Sandy Hook Promise, which continues to advocate for gun control:

Nine years ago today, our children and loved ones were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary.

There are no words to describe how deeply we miss them, or how agonizing it is to mark another year since the last hug, smile or laugh we shared with them.

It’d bring such comfort to know you’re standing with us today. Will you sign our remembrance card to honor the precious lives taken from us? http://lil.ms/cydj/8zthf9

-Sandy Hook Promise

Since December 14 also is the date on which my beloved two-year-old died of leukemia many, many years ago, I grieve with and for with the parents of Sandy Hook, and with all families who have lost a child. You never forget.

Categories Connecticut, Guns, Massachusetts, Parents

Leonie Haimson: To Reduce Inequality, Cut Class Sizes

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2021 //
23

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is one of the nation’s most persistent advocates of class size reduction. She is the voice of many parents in New York City, who regularly tell pollsters that their number 1 wish for their children is smaller classes. Now that the city’s public schools anticipate a new infusion of funds, Haimson and many parents are pressing to get a commitment from the city to reduce class sizes.

She writes in The Nation:

New York City public schools are often as crushed as the subway during rush hour, with literally thousands of students forced to learn in overstuffed classrooms—sitting side by side, elbows knocking into each other, or sometimes leaning against the wall or resting on a radiator. Even in the age of Covid-19, hallways are so jam-packed it can be hard for students to get to their next class.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way—and, if the city’s mayor and the City Council speaker would pass a crucial piece of legislation limiting class sizes in New York’s public schools, it wouldn’t have to continue. But as the end of the council’s term ticks closer, the two are standing in the way of a popular bill, adding a new and frustrating chapter to a drama that’s been playing out for decades.

New York City parents and educators have been calling for smaller class sizes since at least the 1960s. In 2003, the state’s highest court agreed with them. It concluded that class sizes were too large to provide students with their right, guaranteed by the state Constitution, to a sound basic education. It found that the plaintiffs, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, “presented measurable proof” that New York City schools have “excessive class sizes, and that class size affects learning.” It concluded:“The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”

To remedy this and other inequities, the court ordered that the state provide more funding to high-needs districts, and in 2007, the state passed a law requiring New York City to use these funds to lower class size. But then the Great Recession hit, and the full state funding never materialized. Class sizes actually increased.

Today, classes in the city’s public schools are larger than they were in 2003—especially in the early grades. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, more than 330,000 students—roughly a third of the school population—were crammed into classes of 30 or more. On average, classes in the city’s public schools are 15 percent to 30 percent larger than they are in the rest of the state. While both Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, the city’s most recent mayors, promised to address this critical inequity during their campaigns, both failed to follow through once elected.

Now, the pandemic has brought the perennial problem of class size into sharper focus, as the need for social distancing has made smaller classes more critical than ever. At the same time, Covid-19 has helped bring unprecedented resources that could be used to address the issue: Over the next three years, the city is due to receive an additional $8 billion in federal and state funds for our schools.

The federal funds are meant to help the city improve both the health and safety of the classroom environment—goals that smaller classes could help achieve. The state funds—which amount to $1.3 billion in additional annual aid, due to be phased in over three years—represent the long-overdue fulfillment of the mandate of the CFE case.

Together, these funds represent a remarkable opportunity, one the City Council recognized when it proposed that a substantial portion of them be allocated toward reducing class size. But the mayor balked. So the council’s education chair, Mark Treyger, introduced Int. 2374 in July, a bill that would effectively phase in smaller classes over three years. It would do this by increasing the per student square footage required in classrooms, ranging from about 18 to 26, depending on the grade level and room size.

The legislation currently has 41 cosponsors out of 50 members—a supermajority that could overturn the mayor’s likely veto. Yet the vote on this bill has been delayed by Speaker Corey Johnson, despite the fact that there are fewer than two weeks before the council adjourns for the year and a new one takes over in January.

Read on to review the research supporting the value of class size reduction as the most important and effective reform that schools should enact.

Why is City Council Chair Corey Johnson blocking this crucial measure?

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York City, Parent Groups, Parents

Missouri: A List of Bills Filed by Legislators for the Next Term

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2021 //
13

A group committed to equity in schools—the Missouri Equity Education Partnership—posted a list of bills that have been filed for the 2022 session of the Legislature. The group makes no judgment about the bills. If you scan the list, you will see that the general trend is to clamp down on discussions of racism and to guarantee “parent rights.”

The first bill listed is HB 1457, which “prohibits the use of the 1619 Project in public schools.”

Several other state legislatures have already banned this book. Why should the State Legislature have the power to prohibit the use of a specific book? This is censorship. I have read The 1619 Project, and I think it is excellent course material for high school students. As I have written previously, teach the book and teach the criticism of the book, and let students debate the controversy. It will encourage them to think.

Apparently the thought of students reading about racism frightens GOP legislatures. perhaps even more frightening is the idea of students thinking for themselves. Thought control—which this is—should be banned.

Categories Academic Freedom, Democracy, Missouri, Parents, Racism

Peter Greene on the GOP’s “Parent Bill of Rights”

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2021 //
39

Peter Greene reviews efforts by Congressional Republicans to pass legislation guaranteeing parent rights. He goes through the legislation point-by-point and concludes that most of the “parent rights” are already common practice in American public schools.

He writes:

The bullet point version of the bill lists five rights– the right to know what’s being taught, the right to be heard, the right to see school budget and spending, the right to protect their child’s privacy, and the right to be updated on any violent activity at school. Most of which seems… kind of redundant, giving parents rights that they already have.
But maybe the actual bill reads a little better. (Spoiler alert: it does not. It is far worse.).

What the GOP is really seeking is to give parents the power to veto whatever is taught, which is alarming as it will lock in place the “right” of parents to rewrite history.

American public schools have many problems related to class sizes, lack of investment in repairing and upgrading obsolete facilities, racial segregation, and the need to retain qualified teachers, but the GOP does nothing to address critical needs. What it is actually willing to do is to pander to its aggrieved base.

Greene writes:

There’s are also levels of irony here. For one, the voucher programs that the GOP loves so well (e.g. Betsy DeVos’s Education Freedom Scholarships) champion schools that don’t have to do any of these things–and often strongly resist any pressure to make them do any of these things. The other is that the GOP is still trying to brand itself as the Parent’s Party, despite its opposition to paid family leave, medicare for all, and a variety of other measures that would actually help parents (like. say. addressing the US’s shameful maternal mortality rate). But why actually do something when you can instead float some doomed symbolic legislation that doesn’t actually do anything, let alone something useful.

Categories Accountability, Parent Groups, Parents, Republicans

Massachusetts: Parent Coalition Protests New Charter in New Bedford

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2021 //
14

Two leaders of the New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools—Cynthia Roy and Roberto Rosa—are outraged that the state is about to plunk a new charter school into their district.

They expect the state will approve the “Innovators Charter School,” and they know that parents will condemn the decision.

They wrote in a local newspaper:

One of the most morally disturbing aspects of the Innovators Charter School proposal for New Bedford and Fall River is the joining of considerable political and economic power to withdraw resources from public education systems that have been historically underfunded. What is appalling is the deliberate indifference to the impact on our public school systems in New Bedford and Fall River which, together, serve 22,563 students. As students and families are seduced to exit their public schools, the operating costs in these schools remain the same. This proposal is just more of the same looting of the public school system that we have seen with charter schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Parents, Resistance

Schneider and Berkshire: Parents Do Not Have the Right to Decide What Their Children Learn

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2021 //
18

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.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Parents, Race, Religion, Segregation

Peter Greene Responds to the WSJ Attack on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2021 //
22

The Wall Street Journal, owned by billionaire RupertMurdoch (who also owns Fox News), runs a steady diet of anti-public school editorials. Sometimes they bash public schools. Sometimes they praise charter schools and vouchers. Sometimes they do all of this in the same editorial. While an opinion piece that expresses a dissenting opinion occasionally gets published, it’s fair to say that the WSJ does not like public schools. In my last book, Slaying Goliath, I praised retired Austin librarian Sara Stevenson for responding to every WSJ vilification of public schools.

Peter Greene responded to the opinion piece by law professor Philip Hamburger, who claimed that public schools are not “constitutional” because they suppress parents’ freedom of speech, that is, their ability to ensure that their children hear, read, and learn only what their parents want them to learn.

Greene begins:

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal (Fox News’ upscale sibling) published an op-ed from Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded pro bono firm that takes cases primarily to defend against the “administrative state.” It’s a hit job on public education with some pretty bold arguments, some of which are pretty insulting. But he sure says a lot of the quiet part out loud, and that makes this worth a look. Let me walk you through this. (Warning–it’s a little rambly, and you can skip to the last section if you want to get the basic layout)

Hamburger signals where he’s headed with the very first paragraph: The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

Hamburger offers no particular evidence for any of this catalog of arguable points. Various surveys repeatedly show that the majority of parents approve of their child’s public school. The rest is a litany of conservative complaints with no particular evidence, but Hamburger needs the premise to power the rest of his argument.

So here comes Hamburger’s bold assertion:

Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination. Conservative talking points about public education routinely assert and assume that public education is a service provided to parents, rather than to the students or society at large. It’s case I’ve never seen them successfully make. At the same time, society’s stake in educated members is clear and the entire rationale behind having non-parent taxpayers help pay the cost of public education. In any other instance where the taxpayers subsidize a private individual’s purchase of goods or service (e.g. food stamps, housing), some conservatives say the social safety net is a Bad Thing, so it’s uncharacteristic for them to champion public education as, basically, a welfare program for parents when they want to dramatically reduce all other such programs to bathtub-drowning size (spoiler alert: they’d like to do that with public education, too).

But Hamburger has taken another step here, arguing that speech to children somehow belongs to their parents. It’s a bold notion–do parents somehow have a First Amendment right to control every sound that enters their children’s ears? Where are the children’s rights in this? Or does Hamburger’s argument (as some angry Twitter respondents claim) reduce children to chattel?

Hamburger follows his assertion with some arguments that don’t help. He argues that public education has always attempted to “homogenize and mold the identity of children,” which is a huge claim and, like much of his argument, assumes that schools somehow have the power to overwrite or erase everything that parents have inculcated at home. But then, for the whole argument currently raging, it’s necessary to paint public schools as huge threat in order to justify taking dramatic major action against them….

But “education is speech” is not the really bold part of his argument. That really bold part is where he goes on to say “therefor, parents should have total control over it.” I have so many questions. Should parents have total control over all speech directed at or in the vicinity of their children, including books, and so would I be violating a parent’s First Amendment rights if I gave their child an book for Christmas? And where are the child’s rights in this? Would this mean that a parent is allowed to lock their child in the basement in order to protect that parent’s First Amendment right to control what the child is exposed to?

Hamburger’s argument has implications that he doesn’t get into in his rush to get to “do away with them and give everyone vouchers.” The biggest perhaps is that he has made an argument that non-parent taxpayers should not have to subsidize an education system. I’m betting he’s not unaware of that.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Deregulation, Education Industry, Librarians, Parents, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

WSJ: The Libertarian View of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2021 //
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The Wall Street Journal recently published a screed against the very existence of public schools, written by a libertarian lawyer. Imagine teaching in a school where children are allowed to learn only what their parents already believe, no matter how bizarre or hateful it may be. Imagine the difficulty of having a coherent society where there are no compromises, no bonds of mutuality among people of different faiths and ethnicities. The illustration accompanying the article shows the government turning diverse children into identical cookie cutter people. No one today could reasonably argue that the people of the United States, 90% of whom were educated in public schools, have identical views, values, and beliefs. It is Libertarians who would have all of our children molded into clones of their parents and grandparents, with everyone attending schools that narrowly confined them to their own religious, racial, and ethnic enclave. In reality, private sectarian schools are far more likely to “indoctrinate” children than are public schools that include teachers and children from different backgrounds.

Is the Public School System Constitutional?

Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.

By Philip Hamburger Oct. 22, 2021

ILLUSTRATION: PHIL FOSTER

The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, said in a Sept. 28 debate. The National School Boards Association seems to agree: In a Sept. 29 letter to President Biden, its leaders asked for federal intervention to stop “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” against public school officials. Attorney General Merrick Garland obliged, issuing an Oct. 4 memo directing law-enforcement agents and prosecutors to develop “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

Mr. Garland’s memo did acknowledge that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” That is true but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination.

Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values.

The goal was not merely a shared civic culture. Well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by a fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children. Many Catholics and other minorities escaped the indoctrination of their children by sending them to private schools.

Nativists found that intolerable. Beginning around 1920, they organized to force Catholic children into public education. The success of such a measure in Oregon (with Democratic votes and Ku Klux Klan leadership) prompted the Supreme Court to hold compulsory public education unconstitutional.

The case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), was brought by a religious school, not a parent. The justices therefore framed their ruling around the threat to the school’s economic rights. But Pierce says that parents can educate their children outside state schools in accord with the parents’ moral and religious views.

Although the exact nature of this parental freedom is much disputed, it is grounded in the First Amendment. When religious parents claim the freedom, religious liberty seems an especially strong foundation. But the freedom of parents in educating their children belongs to all parents, not only the faithful. Freedom of speech more completely explains this educational liberty.

Education consists mostly in speech to and with children. Parents enjoy freedom of speech in educating their children, whether at home or through private schooling. That is the principle underlying Pierce, and it illuminates our current conundrum.

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.

There is nothing unconstitutional about taxation in support of government speech. Thus taxpayers have no generic right against public-school messages they find objectionable.

But parents are in a different situation. They aren’t merely subsidizing speech they find objectionable. They are being pushed into accepting government speech for their children in place of their own. Government requires parents to educate their children and offers education free of charge. For most parents, the economic pressure to accept this educational speech in place of their own is nearly irresistible.

To be sure, Pierce doesn’t guarantee private education. It merely acknowledges the right of parents to provide it with their own resources. And one may protest that economic pressure is not force. But the Supreme Court has often ruled otherwise.

Merely denying a government benefit will often suffice to violate a right—as when government refuses a benefit without a hearing (Goldberg v. Kelly, 1970), denies a grant on account of the recipient’s religious beliefs (Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, 2017), or subsidizes a media organization on the condition that it refrain from editorializing (FCC v. League of Women Voters, 1984). Financial pressures clearly count.

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.

A long line of Establishment Clause decisions recognize the risk of coercion in public-school messages. In Grand Rapids School District v. Ball (1985), the high court condemned private religious teaching in rooms leased from public schools. “Such indoctrination, if permitted to occur, would have devastating effects on the right of each individual voluntarily to determine what to believe (and what not to believe) free of any coercive pressures from the State,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority.

Coercion seemed central in such cases because of the vulnerability of children to indoctrination. Summarizing the court’s jurisprudence, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, concurring in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), observed that “when government-sponsored religious exercises are directed at impressionable children who are required to attend school, . . . government endorsement is much more likely to result in coerced religious beliefs.”

These precedents concern only religion in public schools and the coercive effect on children under the Establishment Clause. But the danger of coerced belief is not confined to official religious speech. Subjecting children to official political, racial, sexual and antireligious speech can be equally coercive. And if public-school messages are so coercive against children, it is especially worrisome that parents are being pressured to adopt public educational speech in place of their own.

Rights are “exceptions” to power, James Madison observed. That is, rights defeat power. But contemporary judicial doctrine allows power to defeat rights—at least when government asserts what is called a compelling interest. One might think that a state’s compelling interest in public education overpowers any parental speech right. Yet because such analysis allows power to subdue rights, it is important to evaluate whether the claimed government interest is really compelling.

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling. Further, the idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism.

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.”

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestants.

This goal of shaping future voters gave urgency to the government’s interest in public education. As today, the hope was to liberate children from their parents’ supposedly benighted views and thereby create a different sort of polity. Now as then, this sort of project reeks of prejudice and indoctrination. There is no lawful government interest in displacing the educational speech of parents who don’t hold government-approved views, let alone in altering their children’s identity or creating a government-approved electorate.

The inevitably homogenizing, even indoctrinating, effect of public schools confirms the danger of finding a compelling government interest in them. A 1904 nativist tract grimly declared that the public school is “a great paper mill, into which are cast rags of all kinds and colors, but which lose their special identity and come out white paper, having a common identity. So we want the children of the state, of whatever nationality, color or religion, to pass through this great moral, intellectual and patriotic mill, or transforming process.”

The idea of a common civic culture among children is appealing when it develops voluntarily, but not when state-approved identities and messages are “stamped upon their minds,” as the 1904 tract put it. Far from being a compelling government interest, the project of pressing children into a majority or government mold is a path toward tyranny.

The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference.

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. It was long used to grind down the papalism of Catholic children into something more like Protestantism. Since then, there has been a shift in the beliefs that public schools seek to eradicate. But the schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others. That’s why they are still a source of discord. The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture.

There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of a compelling government interest.

The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.

Parents should begin by asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.

Judges will be reluctant to vindicate the uncomfortable truth that education is mostly speech. Many have assimilated the nativist ideal that public education is a central and compelling government interest. As in 1925, however, the threat to parental speech has become unbearable.

Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia Law School and is president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Categories Freedom, Parents, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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