You don’t have the right to know what your children are learning in school.
Teachers can refuse to give you information about your child’s behavior and performance in class.
Your child’s math teacher can take time out of class to discuss the nuances of gender identity and sexuality.
Oh, and one other thing. It’s now nearly impossible to terminate a teacher for ineffectiveness in the classroom.
These ludicrous provisions are reportedly part of a proposed collective bargaining agreement between the Rochester, Michigan, school board and the teachers union for the district. This assault on parents’ rights demonstrates the urgent need for all states to adopt Goldwater’s landmark Academic Transparency reform.
As students were forced to move to online learning during the pandemic, parents across the country gained new insight into classroom content, and many didn’t like what they saw. The revelation that students were wasting time on radical political content and other irrelevant subjects prompted parents to demand greater transparency from schools. Parents made the entirely reasonable claim that they had a right to know what their children were learning, to fulfill their duty to direct the education of their children. To assist in this effort, Goldwater created the Ask Your School Now resource to educate parents on how to submit public records requests to their local schools.
Now, the teachers unions are striking back, attempting to block these attempts to bring sunlight into public school classrooms. The proposed Rochester agreement states that “any record of classroom procedures, whether by mechanical, electronic or other means, shall be made only with the express permission of the teacher.” In other words, teachers can prevent parents from finding out what is happening in their child’s classroom simply by refusing the creation of records. Kaitlyn Buss, the Detroit News editor who exposed the proposed agreement, points out that under this broad language, teachers could prevent students from taking notes during class.
Perhaps even more absurdly, the draft agreement grants expansive “academic freedom” protections to teachers. Buss reports that, according to the agreement, “‘no limitation’ will be placed ‘upon study, investigation, presentation and interpretation of facts and ideas concerning humanity, human society, and the physical and biological world and other branches of learning.’” This sort of protection for academic freedom may be appropriate for a university professor, but this language seems intended to shield teachers from accountability for raising irrelevant or inappropriate subjects in a public school classroom. If your child’s math teacher decides to spend the class period discussing the presidential race instead of the algebra lesson, tough luck. And remember that the agreement couples these so-called academic freedom protections with provisions that make it harder to fire teachers for ineffectiveness.
Ominously, the agreement also reportedly protects information regarding “special circumstances that surround the teacher/learning relationship.” It is unclear what this means, but once again it seems to allow teachers to deny parents information about their child’s behavior and performance.
These ridiculous proposals in the draft agreement do nothing to promote educational excellence. Instead, the teachers union is shielding its members from accountability. Guaranteeing job security for adults takes precedence over educating our kids.
The outrageous proposed agreement shows the urgent need to empower parents with information about their children’s education by passing Goldwater’s Academic Transparency reform. This commonsense policy, which is already law in several states, requires school districts to post a list of all instructional materials used in the classroom to an online database. This policy saves both parents and school districts time and money by eliminating the need for formal public records requests. All parents could quickly and easily access their child’s educational materials online.
Ensuring access to this information shouldn’t be controversial. But as we see with the proposed agreement in Rochester, teachers unions will unfortunately fight to cut parents out of their children’s education. It’s time for policymakers across the country to stand up for the rights of parents by guaranteeing Academic Transparency.
Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
