Today the NC General Assembly published a proposal that would make changes to parenting and teaching in North Carolina. You can read the full text here.
There’s a lot of nonsense in this proposal, but here are 5 items that most jumped out to me after a first round of notes.
1. Create another curriculum standards commission to make it harder to teach truth
Social studies standards were recently approved, and health and science standards are being reviewed through an existing thorough, accountable, and transparent process. Some folks were unhappy with some of the modifications and are now legally inserting themselves as a “check” on this process to prevent certain facts from being shared with students in the future.
2. Eliminates current events & requires one-size-fits-all instruction
Without a crystal ball, I do not know at the start of the course which current events I’ll incorporate into lessons to apply course concepts.
I also respond to students’ learning needs and vary my lessons during the semester to best support them.
I also work with other teachers who teach the same course and while we’re largely aligned, we also exercise autonomy on some instructional delivery to serve the needs of students in our own classrooms.
For all of those reasons and more, it’s unrealistic to expect a school to pre-post all materials for a single course taught by multiple teachers who adapt instruction to meet the needs of students they have not yet met.
It’s odd that the same “school choice” supporters behind this proposal who accuse public schools of “one-size-fits-all” now want to mandate that model for public schools.
3. One parent’s “fundamental right to parent” can veto many parents’ “fundamental right to parent”
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and potentially a financial reward to the tune of $5,000 + lawyer’s fees. To avoid a lawsuit by a parent who perhaps is upset their child received instructional materials on a current event that wasn’t pre-posted for their review, a district is motivated to enforce a “chilling effect” throughout classrooms to cater to the gripes of a small subset of parents.
It’s tyranny of the minority by empowering a few parents seeking to “direct their child’s education” by using S90 to nitpick schools and step on the parental rights of all the parents who approved of that teacher, principal or superintendent’s action and its direction of their child’s education.
Traditionally, a parent’s power to direct a child’s education has been to read with their children, teach responsibility and respect, help with homework, volunteer at the school, join the PTSA, etc. If a parent wants even more power over their child’s classroom, school, or district, they should run for their local school board and win the support of their community, instead of wield a lawsuit. Only elected school boards should hire, fire, fine or demote superintendents, not a group of 5 parents in the district.
4. Consent for clubs
Because of the paperwork and consent already required for a student to participate in a school sport, the provision below is likely referring to clubs as an “extracurricular activity.”
I’ve been the teacher sponsor of several clubs over my tenure. I have never had to collect permission slips from parents consenting to their student’s participation.
Clubs are how students build community with each other. If this provision passes I would no longer be able to allow a new student interested in learning more about their classmates’ club into my classroom without a permission slip. It’s not exactly the welcoming initiation into an environment clubs are designed to create.
But it’s not likely the Economics and Finance Club that bill sponsors have in mind, yet they’ll get plausible deniability with their broad brush instead of saying the quiet part out loud.
5. Treating more students as suicidal
Teachers are already mandatory reporters if we believe a student is being harmed by others, may harm themselves, or may harm someone else. This provision elevates identifying as gender nonconforming to that level of harm.
If a student changes clothes and applies makeup when arriving to school, I don’t have to report it if she’s a girl (though she’s likely doing it because her parents wouldn’t approve.) I’d be legally obligated to report similar behavior if the student was not born female.
When I was young, I played sports with the boys at recess. I was almost always the only girl on the field. Nobody deemed this worthy of a phone call to my parents though it defied gender norms at the time.
In my first T-ball experience, I had a pink wooden bat and a Ninja Turtle glove (Donatello if you really want to know). Nobody thought I was gender confused, just that I enjoyed playing baseball.
While some parents didn’t like when I got more playing time than their son, nobody criticized my parents for not raising me “in a manner consistent with the child’s biological sex.”
Nobody equated it as information rising to the urgency of one who expresses suicidal thoughts.
What now?
Republicans in the General Assembly are focused on legislating parenting based on the standards of the hate group, “Moms for Liberty.”
We have 5,000 teacher vacancies, among the worst school funding effort in the country, and defiance of a court order to provide resources for a “sound, basic education.”
If you’re as disgusted by the misaligned priorities as I am, prioritize reaching out to your state representatives. You can find them here: https://ncleg.gov/FindYourLegislators
educatEDpolicy 