As Opposed to What?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

 

Here’s the Washington Post with a scoop for the ages:

 

Teachers are changing their lessons amid increasing scrutiny from parents and a raft of state laws and school policies that circumscribe lessons on race and gender, according to one of the first nationally representative studies of the subject.

 

Okay. As opposed to what? Public schools are created and run by state governments — or by the counties that those state governments have created — and they are informed by the parents who use and pay for them. Unless you don’t believe that we should have public schools, those schools are inevitably going to be subject to “scrutiny” from parents and state-level legislators. We can debate what policies that those parents and state-level legislators should set, but, unless we want public schools to represent a fourth branch of government for which taxpayers are responsible financially but over which they have no control, there is no way of avoiding public influence. If parents don’t like progressive ideology being smuggled in — which most don’t — then both they and the state-level legislators and school boards that they elect are going to balk at having it in schools.

 

The Post continues:

 

Teachers who live and work in states with restrictive laws were more likely to report altering their curriculums and teaching than teachers who live in states without such laws, the RAND report found.

 

Again: as opposed to what? Public schools are creations of the state governments, and they are obliged to follow the laws that those state governments set. Where those laws exist, teachers will follow them; where those laws don’t exist, they won’t. The surprised tone in which this development is currently being reported is just bizarre — especially given that, as the Post notes, people aren’t exactly thrilled by the schools for which their taxes are paying:

 

Meanwhile, U.S. adults are losing their confidence in the public school system. A Gallup poll this month found that Americans’ belief in grade-school teachers’ honesty had dropped to an all-time low of 64 percent, while a July poll found that just 28 percent of Americans have substantial confidence in public schools — the second-lowest this number has fallen since Gallup began asking about this topic in 1973.

 

In other words: parents aren’t happy with the public schools, the United States is a federal democratic republic, the public schools are subject to local democratic input, so parents are using that local democratic input to change the schools with which they aren’t happy.

 

Or, as the Post puts it:

 

Notwithstanding the spate of restrictive laws and policies, “teachers most commonly pointed to parents and families as a source of the limitations they experienced,” the report reads.

 

Well, yeah.