The American people deserve to know where their tax dollars are going.
The American people deserve to know where their tax dollars are going.
A rizona taxpayers are getting ready to remind the education bureaucracy of the Golden Rule:
“My gold, my rules.”
The Arizona state Senate has passed a curriculum-transparency bill, one of many similar measures making their way through state legislatures. If it becomes law, it would require that public-school teachers make public certain classroom materials (curricula, syllabi, reading lists, that sort of thing) so that parents and taxpayers have an opportunity to provide informed feedback. Many teachers and administrators do not want the law to pass — mostly because they do not want the feedback.
How intensely public-school teachers do not want transparency and feedback may be judged from the fact that the Rhode Island branch of the National Education Association (one of the nation’s two major teachers’ unions) has sued a local mother who filed more open-records requests than the teachers would prefer.
As you might expect, idiots have said idiotic things about these proposals — PEN America calls the transparency rules “educational gag orders.”
Public-school teachers and administrators are public employees and as such are answerable to the public that employs them, and school-board elections are not the only instruments of accountability. If the teachers do not want taxpayers involved, then they should get out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
Every political idea, political movement, political tendency, and political faction comes in a dumb or embarrassing version. And much of the rage directed at school boards and school administrators has been dumb and embarrassing, all that hooting and cursing and denouncing Toni Morrison as a pornographer. But the existence of a dumb complaint does not erase the existence of legitimate complaints. No, Beloved is not pornography — but surely there are some school-age readers who are too young for it. Much of what is said about critical race theory is nonsense; much of it is not.
As opposed to trying to legislate our way through these controversies book-by-book and issue-by-issue, transparency rules enable parents and other concerned parties to keep an eye out for abuses and excesses without writing up every lesson plan themselves. And they have a good reason for wanting to exercise oversight: Our public schools are full of people who wanted to be politicians but ended up teaching fifth grade, teachers who abuse their positions of trust to engage in political activism and political indoctrination. That is not what they are there to do.
The recent dispute about these issues in Florida resulted in the mendaciously nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” law. “Don’t say gay” is a willfully dishonest account of what the law requires, but — now that you mention it — “don’t say gay” is a reasonable position to take vis-à-vis kindergartners and first-graders, for whom the ins and outs of homosexuality are rather low on the list of immediate educational needs. It isn’t the people who don’t want schools to instruct eight-year-olds about transsexualism who are the fanatics.
It used to be said that the Catholic hierarchy believed the role of the laity to be “pray, pay, and obey.” The public schools, exhibiting a sense of institutional entitlement not at all alien to the clergy, want parents and taxpayers to pay up and shut up, to put their money where the mouths aren’t. But there isn’t any plausible scenario in which parents (and taxpayers — let us not forget the poor taxpayers!) are not involved in these matters.
It wasn’t Ward and June Cleaver who launched the culture war in the public schools — left-wing activism, old-fashioned Democratic partisanship, and rank indoctrination have been a feature of our educational practices accepted with too much docility for too long. This isn’t purely a big-city issue and it isn’t particularly new: If you took American history at Lubbock High School in the 1990s, you would come away thinking that the only three things that had ever happened were slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the Triangle Shirt-Waist Factory fire — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn never sat through so much labor-movement propaganda. The same holds true across much of purportedly conservative small-town America. This is, of course, educational malpractice, and helping teachers avoid accountability for that malpractice — or accountability for anything else — is what teachers’ unions and their allies are there to do.
Teachers have a job to do — and social-justice advocacy is not it. If progressive activism is your calling in life, then teaching isn’t, and you should get off the public teat and do your thing on your own dime or on the dime of the Ford Foundation or some other like-minded organization.
But those groups will want to know where their money is going, too — that Golden Rule again.