THE PROGRESSIVE APPROACH TO EDUCATION IN VIRGINIA: ‘GET PARENTS OUT OF SCHOOLS’
Parental rights had already been front and center during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign. Then Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe delivered this moment of candor at the September 28th debate: “I’m not going to let parents go to schools, and actually take books out, and make their own decisions….I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
In case it wasn’t clear before, when progressives and educational elites declare they are for parental rights or parental involvement in the education system, they are only trying to appease parents.
One of the many problems with McAuliffe’s meaningful rhetoric is that it actually conflicts with state law. Code of Va. § 1-240.1 provides that “[a] parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent's child,” a statute that codified the opinion of the Supreme Court of Virginia decision in L.F. v. Breit, issued on January 10, 2013.
McAuliffe made those debate comments in response to Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin reminding the audience about a bill passed by the General Assembly in 2016 that McAuliffe vetoed, which would have ensured school districts inform parents if their kids were being taught sexually explicit material, and would have allowed parents to opt their children out of that material.
In an attempt to clarify his position during a recent interview, McAuliffe actually doubled down when he said, “[l]isten, we have a Board of Ed working with the local school boards to determine the curriculum for our schools.” In other words, only professional educators are capable of determining appropriate curriculum is. The concerns and input of parents simply don’t matter.
McAuliffe has also been very critical of Glenn Youngkin’s position that school curriculum should not include “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), arguing that it’s not being taught in Virginia’s schools. Yet, when pressed, McAuliffe has been unable (or unwilling) to provide a definition of CRT. It was also reported last week that while McAuliffe was governor, his Department of Education was conducting training that encouraged schools to incorporate elements of CRT principles into their curriculum.
In 2019, Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction James F. Lane published Superintendent’s Memo #050-19, dated February 22, 2019, to all school districts, “encouraging” school leaders to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education by Edward Taylor, David Gillborn, and Gloria Ladson-Billings, which calls critical race theory "an important analytic tool in the field of education" for addressing "power and privilege."
If educational elites in Virginia really did value teacher and parent input, then they wouldn’t stifle free speech or categorize public dissent as a form of domestic terrorism. The National School Boards Association appeal to President Biden to treat parents at schools boards as “domestic terrorists,” which resulted in U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland ordering the FBI and other federal law enforcement agents to begin monitoring parents at local school board meetings, is beyond the pale.
The reality is that teaching a modern sexual revolution and Marxist philosophies (like CRT) in our schools is far more important to educational elites than the livelihood of teachers, parental rights, and the bodily safety of students, and they will go to extreme lengths to force our obedience to this worldview.
Just ask Scott Smith, the Loudoun parent whose teenage daughter was sexually assaulted and raped in a female bathroom by a boy dressed in a skirt pretending to be a girl, only to have the incident covered up by school officials and board members. All this happened while considering a transgender and gender-expansive policy, that included allowing students to choose the locker room or bathroom based on their self-proclaimed gender identity.
I’m reminded of John Stonestreet’s quote: “ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.”
It’s time to listen to the concerns of parents and respect their rights, along with their children’s rights, before we have more victims in Virginia.
