We are now in the middle of a new outcry for “parental rights” in public schools — an issue that has repeatedly flared in U.S. history. As I noted in a previous post, we’ve heard it over the decades when, for example, some parents objected to the racial desegregation of schools, or to the expansion of regular curricular material to include Black history and achievements, or to comprehensive sex education.
According to some historians, this new chapter in the “parental rights” movement has been fueled by conservative political organizers who say that schools are trying to hide from parents what they are teaching children. And the assertion has been embraced by right-wing politicians including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who, according to his website, introduced a bill in Congress called the Parents’ Bill of Rights Act “to defend parents’ fundamental rights against efforts to shut them out of their children’s education.”
Is that what public schools are doing? This post, written by a veteran educator, explains what is really happening in schools. The author is Anne Lutz Fernandez, who taught English in Connecticut public middle and high schools for 20 years. Before this, she was a consumer products executive and also an investment banker with Credit Suisse First Boston, where she was chief operating officer of the Merger & Acquisition Group.
Fernandez is the author, with anthropologist Catherine Lutz, of “Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change,” and “Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on our Lives.”
By Anne Lutz Fernandez
“The next battle in the war for parents’ rights in education” blares a Fox News headline trumpeting a Wisconsin bill Republicans plan to use as a model, hoping to keep suburbanites enraged through the coming election cycle.
Now that GOP politicians in dozens of states have promoted base-stoking “divisive concepts” laws restricting teaching around race and gender, and while elected officials are busy publishing lists of books they want banned from school buildings, next steps are underway in a crisis manufactured by political operatives and opportunists and pushed by right-wing media.
What’s next: forcing what they call transparency in curriculum through bills like that proposed this week by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). By transparency, they mean to require schools to pre-publish every scrap of material used in classrooms. Like their earlier efforts, this one is based on a false premise, and, if effective, will debilitate teaching and learning.
How do we know these calls for transparency are being made in bad faith? Parents have more access to what’s going on in classrooms now than at any time in U.S. history.
Parents have long known what their children learn in school via curriculum nights, teacher conferences, emails and phone calls. Some have volunteered in classes. Of course, since kids learned on slates, parents have asked them what they did in school that day, helped them with homework, and reviewed returned assignments. These methods still exist, but a fire hose of electronic information has blasted open what might once have seemed a black box.
Want to know exactly what a child is studying, reading, viewing, hearing, discussing and debating in class? Most districts provide 24/7 access to online gradebooks that list each assignment and assessment.
In addition, many now use electronic assignment pads such as Google Classroom. There, parents can view past, current, and upcoming assignments and assessments, with links to readings, handouts, slide decks, videos and online discussions. There is much more: state websites publish standards along with resources for teaching them. Districts publish skills and content curriculum for every level and subject.
So why a push for transparency that already exists? Because activists are less interested in “parental control” of schools than in controlling parents and educators through an atmosphere of fear and distrust. There are side benefits: creating an administrative burden for educators and investing parents in the project of sifting through materials looking for “gotcha” stories that further the dangerous but energizing false narrative that public schools are secretly indoctrinating children. This is political engagement masquerading as parental engagement.
Advocates argue that parents need access not just to what children are learning but what they’re going to learn. In recent months, parents have been encouraged to demand to see up to a year’s worth of lesson plans and materials. This might not seem an unusual request. Teachers often plan in advance.
Sadly, what these parents are asking for is only possible if teaching and learning are debilitated.
They are asking for curriculum that is canned and scripted. That could be taught last year or next year, unconnected to current events and their children’s lives. That is undifferentiated to their child’s individual needs and unresponsive to their particular development, say, during a pandemic.
They are asking for teachers who are script-readers, not active, creative partners in their child’s learning. Who do not need deep content or pedagogical knowledge. Who do not need to know or be part of the community.
They are asking for the kind of teaching and learning that does not go on in extraordinary classrooms, schools or districts. The kind that is unlikely to produce high ratings by the ranking systems they think matter, the kind that students resist or slog through. The kind that colleges and businesses don’t want: cookie-cutter, outdated, last century. The kind that is less likely to secure the life they want for their children.
On curriculum nights, I asked parents to tell me something they wanted me to know about their child as the year began. They always shared very specific aspects of their child’s unique personality or ways of learning or motivations. I can’t help but compare those notes, vibrating with love and yearning — each so different and meaningful and helpful — with the cold demands superintendents and principals are receiving.
Parents who seek to know what goes on in schools really have to want to know. To know the philosophy, the objectives, the methods, the context, the scope and sequence. If they want to find a problem, they will: because even the teachers in their child’s school don’t agree on all these things.
And they have to want to know because they’re invested in their child’s education, not in a political agenda. Then we can meet in the doorway between school and home, open wider than it ever has been, and have a discussion like the grown-ups that our children deserve.
