The Parental Rights in Education Act, passed in July 2022, has been used to implement forms, curriculum challenges and book bans. The bill is a great inconvenience for students and teachers alike, but it is a necessity to protect students from what some consider indoctrination. Many don’t understand why parents need to have more rights in the classroom, instead they see it as a breach of privacy and authority. However, looking back to three events in 2020, it becomes clear where this bill came from.
In 2020, COVID-19 forced students across the nation into virtual learning, which gave parents an unprecedented look into their children’s education. In the summer of 2020, the George Floyd riots sparked national debates about Black Lives Matter and race relations. The last event is the election of President Joe Biden on his diversity, equity and inclusion platform, which intensified debates on LGBTQ+ topics, feminism and gender ideology. Just as the rest of the world was discussing these issues, teachers were doing the same in classrooms. Teachers informing their students about current events is not a problem. However, certain rogue teachers were using these topics to push their ideology on students instead of presenting the facts, and parents took notice.
The political environment of 2020 resulted in a fourth grade teacher in Wisconsin giving a presentation about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. This lesson got the attention of parents who claimed she was indoctrinating students. The debate did not stay local and became a national story that divided parents and educators. Since then a Florida teacher was fired for discussing her pansexual identity, and a California teacher and Antifa member was let go for saying he wanted to turn his students into “revolutionaries”. These are just some examples of rogue teachers going outside curriculum to teach concepts that are indoctrination.
Virtual learning in 2020 caused parents to be alarmed at the things that teachers were teaching students. Parents claimed that teachers were indoctrinating students into believing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology and communism. Educators and the mainstream media’s defense to these accusations was to point out that these concepts were not in the curriculum and therefore were not being taught. This defense is disingenuous because Critical Race Theory is a college level concept that would take a dedicated course to learn, but just because CRT is not in the curriculum does not mean teachers haven’t been using ideas from CRT to indoctrinate students.
It is clear that just because a concept is not in the curriculum does not mean a teacher will not teach it. This is what Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Act seeks to address. At its basic level the bill gives parents the right to decide what their student is exposed to at school in an attempt to lessen the effect of rogue teachers. The methods that DeSantis uses to give parents rights are hotly debated and are heavy-handed, but they are better than letting rogue teachers indoctrinate students.