Academic Transparency

Knowing what kids are learning in school has become especially important in recent years. Why is that? Because political activists, with the backing of complicit school administrators, have been turning classrooms into hotbeds of indoctrination. Schools are casting aside lessons about our country’s founding principles and replacing them with politically charged, divisive content.

For example, over the past couple of years, thousands of schools across the country have implemented materials from the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” an effort aimed to displace the historical significance of July 4, 1776, and reframe the United States as a “slavocracy” rather than a democracy. The intended effect of these lessons and other imbued with the Critical Race Theory worldview is to disabuse students of the notion that America was built on fundamentally good and decent ideals—and to instead tell young Americans that this country is not theirs and is not worth preserving.

All of this is happening right under parents’ noses—and they have little recourse.

When her daughter was entering kindergarten in a Rhode Island public school district, Nicole Solas wanted to know whether Critical Race Theory or gender theory would be taught in class. Rather than answer her questions, the school district instructed Nicole to submit formal public records requests. But when she did as she was told, not only did the district evade vast portions of her requests, they threatened to sue Nicole for submitting too many of them. Then they hit her with a bill for $74,000 to fulfill her records request. The Goldwater Institute’s team of litigators stepped in to help Nicole in her fight.

“I was bullied by school administrators—just for trying to find out what my daughter would be taught in kindergarten,” Nicole said. “This sort of information should not be a government secret: All parents have a right to know what their kids are learning.”

Unfortunately, when parents ask basic questions like this, they are often met with these insurmountable barriers. But no public body, and especially our public schools, should obstruct access to public information by demanding onerous fees. In fact, schools should simply have information about what their children will be taught and what informs the school’s curriculum easily available upon request.

Parents—not politicians or political activists—must be given the tools to navigate their children’s education. One of those tools is knowledge, and the Goldwater Institute is leading an effort to apprise parents of what their children are learning so they can make well-informed decisions about their kids’ educational experience.

Goldwater’s Academic Transparency Act would require each public school in the state to prominently post on its website the learning materials and activities that were used for student instruction at the school during the most recently completed school year. This lets parents have a more complete understanding of the lessons the school is teaching. And it enables parents themselves to judge the caliber and character of instruction awaiting their students—before making a final decision on the school in which their child will enroll.

Read the state level version of our Academic Transparency Act here. Read the district level version of our Act here.