By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Arizona 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.
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