States Respond to Parents’ Demand for Transparency and Empowerment

Recent revelations regarding school activities and teaching materials have awakened and enraged parents in a number of states.

School board meetings have become contentious as parents seek to have their concerns heard. Parents are asking to be made aware of what their children are being taught once they leave them in the care of their neighborhood school.

Lawmakers in several states have introduced legislation requiring government schools to make their curriculum more available to parents and transparent to the public, NBC News reported on January 20. Requests have been made to post curricula online and governors of three states, Florida, Iowa, and Arizona, have called for transparency laws after hearing concerns about the racist nature of teacher discussions.

“Florida law should provide parents with the right to review the curriculum used in their children’s schools,” Governor Ron DeSantis said in his State of the State address on January 11.

Last year, 25 states considered legislation to ban critical race theory (CRT) and nine enacted laws limiting the discussion of race and gender, NBC News reported.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who was elected in part due to parental concerns with the education system, has established a hotline to report incidences of CRT in schools, Daily Caller reported on January 25.

Youngkin issued an executive order banning the teaching of CRT in Virginia schools on January 15. “Anyone who thinks that the concepts that actually underpin Critical Race Theory are not in our schools has not been in the schools,” Youngkin said in an interview with Fox News on January 16. “Parents should have a say in education,” Youngkin stated in an op ed for The Washington Post on January 25. “Virginians know that the practice of silencing parents, the era of divisive partisan politics and the time for statewide mandates are over.”

“Virginia’s parents have had enough with the government dictating how they should raise their children,” wrote Youngkin. “To parents, I say: We respect you. And we will continue to work to empower you in the education and well-being of your children.”

Parents are speaking out at board meetings and filing lawsuits, but that is not enough, says Joy Pullman, writing for The Federalist on January 26.

“The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity,” wrote Pullman.

Transparency in schools is becoming a larger issue as parents realize what the education system is doing without their knowledge.

Jessica Konen, the mother of a student in the Spreckels Union School District in California arrived at a school meeting only to be “blindsided” when her daughter’s teacher and principal informed her that her middle-school daughter was “trans-fluid” and would be given a new name and referred to with male pronouns, Breitbart reported on January 25.

Konen discovered that a teacher had convinced her daughter to join the school’s LGBTQ club and secretly manipulated her into believing she was a boy. The school created a support plan for the 11-year-old child without informing her mother. The mother is filing a lawsuit, states Breitbart.

Konen’s attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, said that since filing this lawsuit she has heard from other parents reporting the same type of “selective trans grooming,” as Konen describes it.

“Incensed parents now make news almost daily, objecting to radical material taught in their children’s public schools, wrote Abigail Schrier on Substack. “But little insight has been provided into the mindset and tactics of activist teachers themselves.”

Audiotape of a recent meeting of the California Teachers Association (CTA) revealed the plan and intent to intentionally subvert parents, Schrier reports.

“Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Schrier writes.

Parents are disrespected and disregarded by the education establishment, says Pullman. It is time for parents to remove their children from the harmful school environment.

“If the parents wanted to be truly effective—as well as truly honest—they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably,” wrote Pullman.

“School boards don’t care about complaints,” wrote Pullman. “They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.”