A chest binder given to a 13-year-old girl by her public school counselor. A “gender transition” secretly encouraged by school officials. A deliberate effort to keep the parents from finding out.
It couldn’t be clearer, the child’s outraged mother told Fox News host Laura Ingraham: “We, as parents, are no longer in charge of our kids.”
The horrifying ordeal that Maine mom Amber Lavigne shared on Ingraham’s primetime show is a microcosm of what’s happening in school districts around the country. Now, the Goldwater Institute is defending Amber’s rights.
Activist educators and bureaucrat bullies have launched a full-frontal attack on parents’ constitutional right to direct the education, upbringing, and healthcare of their children. Whether it’s matters of children’s health or what’s being taught to students, parents deserve to know what’s happening to their children in school—but the public education apparatus is trying to keep this crucial information from them. Now, parents like Amber are standing up for their rights—and in capitols and courtrooms across the country, Goldwater is standing alongside them every step of the way.
Read more about Amber’s story here, and watch her Fox News interview here.
School officials have grown particularly brazen as they seek to propagandize children in the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) agenda, whose “woke” guiding principles are rooted in racial discrimination—and officials are doing it under a cloak of secrecy, an attorney with Goldwater’s American Freedom Network (AFN) writes at In Defense of Liberty.
AFN attorney James Fitzpatrick is helping Pennsylvania mom Ann Trethewey get answers after her children’s school district rejected Ann’s public records request for DEI-related documents used to instruct faculty or students. The district claims this information is exempt from disclosure because it “constitutes or reveals a trade secret or confidential proprietary information.”
“The phrase brings to mind sensitive information that, if released, would jeopardize a business’ economic competitiveness over that of a fierce rival,” Fitzpatrick writes. But the exemption certainly shouldn’t apply to training given by government employees to public school teachers who then use it to brainwash children.
Now, Goldwater is challenging the district’s unjust decision with the state Office of Open Records. “Parents deserve to know what their children, and their children’s teachers, are being taught by the school districts to whom they fork over their hard-earned tax dollars,” Fitzpatrick concludes.
Read more at In Defense of Liberty.
Ideological indoctrination is running rampant in our public schools. But as Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes in The Washington Times, the Goldwater Institute has a policy solution: Academic Transparency.
“No policy will boost the impact of school choice more dramatically nor equip parents more powerfully to push back on woke activism in K-12 education than requiring public schools to disclose online the specific materials being presented to students,” Beienburg says.
States across the country are following Arizona’s lead and expanding school choice to millions of families. But to exercise informed school choice, parents need to know what their children are learning before they make an enrollment decision. That’s why Goldwater is promoting Academic Transparency in states around the nation—and lawmakers and governors in states like Missouri, Texas, Arizona, Indiana, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Iowa are supporting it.
“When coupled with school choice, Academic Transparency will ensure that public schools are accountable and forthright about what materials they present to students,” Beienburg adds. “And this, in turn, will ensure that schools cannot teach critical race theory and other politicized topics without full parental awareness.”
Read more of Beienburg’s Washington Times op-ed.
