The Education Wars by Jennifer C. Berkshire

Author:Jennifer C. Berkshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

Other Parents’ Rights

In the spring of 2023, parents, teachers, and students showed up in force for a school board meeting in deep-red Hernando County, Florida. They waited in line for hours to make this point: state laws and directives restricting educators in the name of “parental rights” were hurting students and driving teachers to flee the profession. One of the educators leaving the district was fifth-grade teacher Jenna Barbee, who was investigated by the Florida Department of Education for violating the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Barbee’s crime: showing a Disney movie that featured an openly gay character.

In recent years, Florida—along with virtually every other red state—has enacted a raft of new laws and policies amplifying the power of some parents while limiting the authority of others. The “Don’t Say Gay” law, for example, explicitly gives individual parents the authority to object to specific books and requires school districts to address those complaints, including restricting access for all the kids in a school or even an entire school district. That means that the views of a small minority of parents carry an outsized weight affecting everyone.

As a Washington Post investigation found, in the roughly 150 school districts that fielded book challenges between 2021 and 2022, the vast majority originated from just eleven people. If that’s a reflection of parental rights in action, then it’s a vanishingly small number of parents who have gained those rights. And this trend is on the march. Seven states have now adopted laws that threaten school librarians with jail time and hefty fines for giving kids books deemed “obscene” or “harmful,” though what those descriptors mean is left undefined.

New policies governing how schools handle questions of gender identity also let small groups of parents dictate how the children of other parents are referred to at school. In Virginia, for example, a model policy governing the treatment of transgender and nonbinary students allows other parents to object to the use of a student’s preferred pronouns on the grounds of their First Amendment and religious freedom rights. Justifying this policy, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration pointed to what it identified as parents’ fundamental rights. But a more accurate explanation is that the rights of certain parents are being privileged above others.

“They’re talking about increasing rights for a very limited number of parents. Other parents who don’t agree are losing their rights,” argues Julie Womack, the organizing director for the advocacy group Red Wine and Blue, which launched a Freedom to Parent campaign in 2023.6

A growing number of states also allow, or even encourage, parents to sue schools, districts, and even individual teachers over policies and materials they object to. In New Hampshire, for instance, a controversial law banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” lets anyone claiming to be “aggrieved” by a suspected violation file a lawsuit against a school or district. Similarly, school officials in Tennessee and Florida can now be sued if a transgender person enters a bathroom or locker room that doesn’t correspond with the sex on their official record.

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