January 14, 2020
By Matt Beienburg
Parents can easily
access a lot of information about their child’s school online, including
student performance data, graduation and dropout rates, and enrollment practices.
But when it comes to the very curriculum their child is learning in the
classroom, that information is not always so easy to get—and it’s time for that
to change.
In K-12 schools across
the country, politically charged content is spreading at an extraordinary pace,
in some cases even eclipsing more academically rigorous instruction—causing alarm
among partisans of all stripes and leaving parents and policymakers to grapple
with increasingly polarized school environments. However, a new report from the
Goldwater Institute, De-Escalating the
Curriculum Wars: A Proposal for Academic Transparency in K-12 Education,
offers a solution to defuse this challenge before it further consumes our
public school dialogue.
In the last year alone,
politically motivated content has begun displacing academically based
instructional materials within many K-12 schools: For example, Chicago Public
Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, recently implemented
resources
at every one of its high schools that suggest that most Americans believe “1776
is the year of our nation’s birth… [but] this fact, which is taught in our
schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong.”
(emphasis added)
As documented in the
report, such examples have prompted conservative education scholars to warn
that “activists on the Left [are]
imposing their views” onto K-12 curricula, “moving further from the unifying
impulse undergirding the entire purpose of public education,” while at the same
time, liberal
“critics argue…public school students are being exposed to what equates to
right-wing, free-market propaganda.” With
such warnings from across the political spectrum, it is no surprise, the report
points out, that polling
has found nearly 1 out of every 2 voters now express concern about politics in K-12
classrooms.
All this has left
parents to navigate an increasingly partisan educational landscape when it
comes to the materials their students may encounter in the classroom—materials
those parents usually have limited knowledge about until their student is
already in the process of consuming them. Meanwhile for policymakers, there
seems only an unhappy choice between heavy-handed curricular intervention on
one side, or passive indifference on the other. Fortunately, there exists
another solution, as explored in the new Goldwater report.
That solution is to
equip parents with the information they need to discern which schools
are teaching academically rigorous, politically neutral content, and which are
not. To this end, the report highlights the widespread practices of schools posting
information online and suggests policymakers apply similar tools when it comes
to academic content. More concretely, the report proposes that schools post on
their websites a list of the materials they use in the course of student
instruction. In other words, give parents the information they need to
make an informed decision and allow them—not political activists or
special interest groups—to decide if they want their children attending a
school that teaches 1776 or 1619 as the birth year of the United States.
As the Goldwater paper
documents, state legislatures across the country have for years already made
clear their intent that parents have full knowledge of the academic content
presented to their children. In Arizona, for example, state law declares unequivocally,
“A parent of a student in a public educational institution has the right to
review learning materials and activities in advance,” while others like Texas
similarly assure,
“A parent is entitled to review all teaching materials, instructional
materials, and other teaching aids used in the classroom of the parent’s
child.” Yet outdated protocols frequently require parents to physically travel
to district facilities during specified hours (often when they need to be at
work), prevent parents from reviewing a full list of materials (outside basic
textbooks and the like), and/or allow for a review of materials only after a
student has already been enrolled in a particular school.
As the report makes
clear, it is time to replace these burdensome requirements with a 21st-century
approach, one which builds on the work of innovative schools at both the K-12
and college level already working to provide parents with online access to such
information. It’s time to infuse our public K-12 system more broadly with that
same kind of transparency.
Matt
Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.
