Yesterday, House Republican leadership introduced the “
Parents Bill of Rights
,” following through on a key plank of Speaker McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” plan. Due more to the polarization of our politics than to any principled philosophical disagreement, the bill is unlikely to become federal law. But it does contain three key ideas – two of which AEI’s
Conservative Education Reform Network
has featured in our
Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda
series – that lawmakers can and should pursue at the state level.
The first is academic transparency. Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has
endorsed
the principle that parents should have a right to review curriculum. The question is when and how. Should they only have the right to come to school and review it in person? Or should curriculum be posted ahead of time, easily accessible for parents to see and discuss? In his New Conservative Education Agenda
contribution
, the Goldwater Institute’s Matthew Beienburg argued that, especially in the era of Google Docs, it would be simple, easy, and effective to ask teachers to upload their lesson plans and reading assignments for parental review. In addition to helping parents understand and reinforce what their children are learning, he also argued that it would provide a hedge against overly politicized instruction.
Notably, my AEI colleague Robert Pondiscio has
cast doubt
on this theory of action, arguing that you can learn more about a restaurant from its menu than about a school from its curriculum, given that so many teachers triage their materials from online sources. Curricular transparency could, he argued, lull parents into a false sense of confidence. Perhaps. Or, done right, it could have the salutary side-effect of revealing the reality of how slap-dash so much teacher-generated curriculum is and drive demand for more systematic phonics-based instruction in early grades as well as well-scaffolded, knowledge-rich curriculum in latter grades. We won’t know the second-order effects of academic transparency until it’s tried – and it’s well worth finding out.
The Parents Bill of Rights would also – as Parents Defending Education (PDE)’s Erika Sanzi argued for in her New Conservative Education Agenda
contribution
– change the paradigm for school surveys from opt-out to opt-in. While surveys can play a healthy and useful role in providing valuable information for school administrators, PDE has documented many instances of surveys that step into the controversial territory of gender identity, sexuality, and race. What’s more, these questions are often used as a pretext to bring in DEI consultants, who
peddle
divisive applied critical race theory concepts to school administrators. Allowing parents to see what questions the school wants to ask would provide a hedge against ideological over-reach, or at the very least advanced warning of whether a school is likely to go down the road of DEI-ification.
The third simple yet elegant idea: notify parents every single time a fight breaks out. As has been well-documented and reported, student behavior has seriously deteriorated in the wake of the COVID pandemic. What’s worse, schools have switched to a lenient “restorative justice” behavior management paradigm that prioritizes reducing disciplinary consequences (i.e. detentions and suspensions) as an end in itself. This leads to a situation where school administrators pride themselves in decreasing suspension statistics, even as school safety and classroom order deteriorate. Teachers, meanwhile, find themselves too intimidated by the threat of administrative retribution to speak out about the true state of affairs.
In my New Conservative Education Agenda
contribution
, I recommend that states mandate anonymous, open-ended school surveys that allow teachers to speak directly to parents about the conditions in their classrooms. This would provide parents with the information they need to organize and press school board members to restore consequence-based discipline. But simply mandating parental notification of instances of school violence would have the same effect with far greater administrative ease. If parents start receiving weekly, or multi-weekly, notifications of violence, they could team up with teachers to press their districts to restore order.
None of these ideas should be partisan, but unfortunately none are likely to receive support from congressional Democrats. The National Education Association, a bulwark of the Democratic Party, attacked the Parents Bill of Rights on the grounds that it would “stoke racial and social division,” even though a reasonable mind would be at a complete loss to see how. But the bill does represent a collection of ideas, many of which AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network has highlighted, which provide a solid agenda for state-level leaders to be “for” in education in addition to school choice.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.
