The Uses and Abuses of “Parents’ Rights” Rhetoric in Education
And a preview of SXSW EDU!
The purpose of education is learning, plain and simple. Schools and colleges are meant to be places where students can learn meaningfully and well, but the systems we have put in place (think standardized tests, scripted curricula, GRADES, legislative priorities, and more) often set up significant obstacles to this goal.
Which is why lots of people want to change these systems. The key to understanding the kinds of changes that will benefit students and the kinds that will only reinforce the barriers, though, is to explore the motivations of those who want to make the change in the first place.
I wear very thick rose-colored glasses, and I like to believe the best about everyone, but the simple truth is that there are many out there who seek to reform education not because they want things to be better for children and young adults, but for other, less noble reasons.
Some, for example, simply want to make money, and they sell their product to schools, districts, and colleges for that express purpose, but they couch their pitch in claims about transforming education and about the benefits for students. Now don’t get me wrong: some educational technologies have been remarkably beneficial for student learning, but there are just as many others that have not. When it comes to for-profit entities, it is always about the bottom line, regardless of the impact on students.
Other would-be reformers want to bend education to their will, forcing our schools to align with their own political ideology. I want to focus on these folks today, particularly a subset of bad actors who weaponize the rhetoric of parents’ rights to enact harmful changes in educational policy and practices.
Parents, of course, should have a number of rights with respect to the education of their children. Some of these include:
the right to safe schools, free from physical, emotional, and/or psychological threats of harm to their kids
the right to have public education fully funded by state legislatures
the right to regular and clear and thorough communication from teachers and school administrators
the right to be heard when they feel as if the system is not working for their kids
the right to an education for their children that privileges knowledge-building, discovery, creativity, curiosity, and transformative ideas rather than high-stakes testing on discrete standards
The conservative groups who use “parental rights” as both a sword and a shield rarely talk about the kinds of rights I have just listed, however. In fact, we have seen a recent emphasis from right-wing organizations on school vouchers and book bans, and they wave the flag of parents’ rights as they push their dangerous agendas.
I want to take each of these issues in turn to show that they have nothing to do with parents’ rights and are instead primarily about undermining our schools, our teachers, and—ironically—the vast majority of parents themselves.
Book Bans
Let’s start with the easy one.
Premise:
Parents DO have the right to make individual decisions about what is appropriate (developmentally or otherwise) for their children to read, see, watch, or listen to.
BUT
Parents DO NOT have the right to make that same kind of decision for other parents by banning, or seeking to ban, books and other media from public schools and libraries that are funded by tax payers.
(Note: I would personally argue that no one ever has the right to ban books in any context at any time, but I’m sticking to a specific scenario for this post.)
Book banning has been in the news a lot lately. Florida has been a particular hot spot for book bans, but it is happening all across the country. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Save Our Schools are petitioning to have books removed from a head-spinning number of schools. In some cases, members of these groups are running for, and winning, school board seats so that they can more easily enact these bans.1
To make their case for book bans, they fall back on a flawed notion of parents’ rights—that is, they claim it is a parent’s right not to have their child subjected to the mere presence of a book that someone might deem inappropriate for some reason. They want school boards to act in loco parentis and take books off the shelves so that their children might not intentionally accidentally find the book and be scarred by it.
The logic would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging to parents’ actual rights when it comes to education. These groups simply want to remove content that they themselves find morally troubling, but by doing so they seek to take away other rights of parents—the right to send their kids to a school that believes in the freedom to read and the right to send their kids to a school where they can freely access knowledge, even when that knowledge challenges their worldview. This, after all, is an important goal of education.
Book bans drive schools into ideological corners. They are the antithesis of what our educational systems should be promoting, and they limit the rights of the many in favor of the politics of the few.
School Choice vs. School Vouchers
Most people who use any kind of critical thinking skills understand that book bans are bad, so let’s tackle a thornier issue: the issue of school choice and how this is leveraged by conservatives who advocate for school vouchers.
Premise:
Parents DO have the right to send their children to a school they feel will be most effective for their kids. They absolutely do. This is a privileged choice, though, and many do not have the financial means to pay for a private school or to move into a school district with more resources.
This is the issue of school choice.
Parents DO NOT have the right to take money allocated to public schools and divert it to programs that fund increased attendance at private schools.
Such programs often use what are called school vouchers.
The idea behind a voucher system is allegedly that every child in the state receives a set amount of individual funding (via a “voucher”) that can be put toward tuition at a private school. What happens if tuition exceeds the amount of the voucher? I bet you, wise readers, can guess. Parents have to foot the remainder of the bill. Is there ever an explanation of how the private schools themselves will handle these vouchers in admissions decisions. I bet you can guess the answer to that one too.
Advocates for school vouchers, like those in Texas and my own state of Mississippi, will muddy the waters of this discussion by equating vouchers with school choice, but they are two different issues. They will also, then, use the language of parental rights to lobby legislatures to adopt a voucher system.
They make things even more hazy by connecting the issue of economic equity that I described above as leverage to suggest that a voucher system increases equity, but that is a mirage. Why? Two major reasons: 1) none of these advocates have clearly articulated a framework for vouchers that explains how they will be deployed equitably. How will the wait list work? Is it possible to manipulate the wait list? (narrator’s voice: people always find ways to manipulate wait lists.) 2) Taking funding away from public schools means that the poorest schools become poorer and therefore do not have a real chance to improve, leaving many families worse off than they were before. These are the areas where the parents cannot afford to send their children to other schools, so many of them will be stuck in this system, despite claims to the contrary by voucher supporters.
Once again, the use of parents’ rights rhetoric actually leads to efforts that subvert the rights of most parents. It is time to shine a spotlight on this misuse and take the discourse back to fight for students everywhere.
Up Next
On March 3rd I make my way to Austin, TX, for SXSW EDU, one of the largest education-related events in the world. I’ll be giving a solo talk called “Scarlet Letters: Fixing the Problem of Grades,” in which I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts on the harms of grades and how we can help students focus on learning in a system obsessed with evaluation. It looks like I might also be serving as a mentor on a roundtable about supporting new teachers, but the details on that are being finalized now.
This is the first time I have even attended SXSW EDU, let alone presented, so I’m very excited to talk about the future of education with lots of likeminded colleagues.
In the next issue of the newsletter, I’ll do some live reporting from the event to keep you up to speed on the conversations about schools and learning that are happening in real time. Wish me luck!
Which are not limited to books, by the way. They also delight in trying to remove topics or whole disciplines from school curricula.
With each post/article/wise-critique, I am weekly affirmed in my teaching practices. Thanks, bro.
So, I will ask for patience with my horrible grammar and play devils advocate. At what point should there be bans on what is in a public school library? Should 2nd graders have access to pornography? Should works deemed too controversial be in a roped off section like a 80’s movie rental store? Parents have a right to what there child is exposed to and not exposed to. If I don’t want my child exposed to To Kill a Mockingbird because I disagree with it for some reason, do not have the right to ask the school not to expose my child to it? What about when teachers decide they know better than I do and decide to expose my child to something? Parent rights and students rights are a fine line my friend, and the right pushed that line but the left equally pushes that line even more. It just doesn’t get covered the same. As for school vouchers, we can agree to disagree. If the school my child is assigned to sucks, I shouldn’t have to pay for my child to go to private school or rely on a scholarship. If the state is the responsible steward of tax dollars then it is on them to provide the proper setting, if they can’t they absolutely should be on the hook for it. Look at the school in Boston they are trying have the National Guard called into it order to maintain order in it.