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Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill and Parental Rights

photograph of school girl sent out of class

On Tuesday, March 8th, the Florida Senate passed H.B. 1557, following its approval by the Florida House. It’s now just a signature from Governor Ron DeSantis away from becoming law. Opponents have labeled it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill due to a proposed, but withdrawn, amendment that would potentially require teachers to “out” LBGTQ+ students to their parents. Defenders of the bill argue that this is misrepresentation; Gov. DeSantis has framed the bill as defending the rights of parents to not have young children indoctrinated, and some defenders, including Gov. DeSantis’ spokesperson Christina Pushaw, have said the bill is about preventing “grooming” of children, insinuating that critics are pedophiles or enablers.

To get a better understanding of this measure, we should ignore the noise and go directly to its heart. What does the law actually say? Troublingly, not very much. The law is seven pages, two and a half of which are preamble. The law requires schools to develop policies on notifying parents of changes in their child’s “mental, emotional or physical health or well-being.” In addition, the bill forbids school officials from encouraging students to withhold information about these matters from their parents.

However, the lightning rod for controversy is this sentence:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

Let’s break it down. There are two clauses separated by an “or.” So, each of these clauses is introducing a unique requirement. The first clause outright forbids “classroom instruction” for K-3 grade students on “sexual orientation or gender identity.” The second clause requires that all discussions from 4th grade onward are “age-appropriate.” Clearly, the bill does more than prohibit discussing sexuality with kindergarteners.

The trouble is that none of these terms are defined. There is no explanation of what “instruction” consists of and how it differs from, say, a discussion. Further, lines 21-23 of the bill’s preamble state that it is intended to prohibit discussion, creating internal incoherence about the goals. It contains no description or suggestion of what age-appropriate instruction would look like. There’s no statement about the kind of “change” in students’ “mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being” that might require teachers to inform parents.

Critics argue that the bill is designed to chill all discussion of gender identity and sexuality in schools through this vagueness. The bill does not set up criminal or misdemeanor punishments for violators. Instead, like the recent Texas abortion law, it gives parents the right to file suit against any school district or official that they believe violates the bill’s demands. Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming. Thus, many school officials would, justifiably, avoid engaging in behavior that could trigger a lawsuit.

So, critics offer scenarios like the following: Imagine a 1st grade classroom. One student, the child of two gay men, makes a comment about her dads. A confused student asks the teacher why her classmate has two dads when she only has one. Even though this isn’t instruction, the teacher may want to immediately squelch this conversation – a student could go home, say that she learned some families have two dads but no mom, and an upset parent may file suit. For similar reasons, any school officials who are members of the LGBTQ+ community may believe that they must hide this part of their identity from students.

This criticism is important – it gives us serious reason to question the bill. Especially when considering the larger cultural context. However, even if this bill made no references to sexuality and gender identity, it would still contain something very problematic. This was revealed through an exchange on the floor of the Florida Senate. Senator Lori Berman asked if a school would be required to inform parents that their child requested vegetarian lunches. Senator Dennis Baxley, the bill’s sponsor, gave a non-answer in response – he merely repeated that parents should not be kept in the dark. This is, to me, quite telling of the bill’s intent.

Parental rights regarding education have become a hot topic in recent months. However, most of these discussions have dealt with rights that parents have against institutions, namely, the right to know about, and reject, contents of the curriculum. Very little has been said about what rights parents have against their children, in comparison. H.B. 1557 gives a strong picture of parental rights – parents have a broad right to be told even what their children do not want to tell them. And the way the bill is framed seems to give parents the right to know whenever their child is engaged in questioning values.

Consider this case. A student in a 10th grade U.S. history class learns about the three-fifths compromise. She raises her hand and expresses some distress. She is deeply upset to learn that people were used as pawns for political purposes – representatives from Northern states literally did not want slaves counted among people, while Southern representatives wanted slaves counted as persons for the purposes of political power, but not in any way that would benefit the slaves. The student has a hard time reconciling this with the values of freedom and equality that purportedly motivated the Founding Fathers and feels that her image of the nation is shaken.

H.B. 1157 seems to require that the teacher report this distress to the student’s parents. Distress could be a change in her “psychological well-being” especially when this concept is left undefined. But I think this overstates the rights that parents have over their children. Even children, especially adolescents, should have some rights to privacy.

Although not yet full adults, in a biological or psychological sense, adolescents are in the process of discovering who they are and express agency while they do so. Part of this process involves questioning, in particular the questioning of values. This is often a painful and upsetting process. Like the experience of physical growing pains, the process of figuring out who you are by sloughing away what you are not can produce serious discomfort. If a young adult does not invite their parent(s) into this process, there is a reason for this – they do not view their parent(s) as able to constructively contribute to the process of self-discovery. This right to control who they invite into their process of self-building should be respected.

The point of H.B. 1557 seems to go well-beyond its restrictions on instruction of sexuality and gender issues. The proposal stands to further stifle the space that adolescents have available to them to question the world and their place in it. It threatens to turn schools into a surveillance apparatus; school officials are now tasked with closely monitoring students and reporting any behaviors relevant to “critical decisions” to their parents. If defenders of the bill are correct and it is indeed just a way of respecting parental rights, then it does so at the expense of children’s rights.

Ultimately, as Rachel Robinson-Greene argued in an earlier post, this may reveal a disagreement about the purpose of education. For those that view education as the transmission of information with a goal of job training, school is obviously not the place for questioning. But if we view education as training adolescents to be citizens in a pluralistic democracy, to think critically, to understand themselves and justify themselves to others, or even as a form of liberation, then schools should allow young people the space to critically reflect on the world, even if this clashes with the values of their parents.

Defenders of parental rights often view themselves as protecting their children from indoctrination. But thinking that your child was indoctrinated because they do not share your values ignores a basic tenant of democratic society – that reasonable people may value different things and come to different conclusions when presented with the same information.

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Restrictive Legislation Prevents Liberation

image of child's mind maturing into adult's mind

In late April, the Wyoming Senate voted to withhold state funding for the Women and Gender Studies Program at the University of Wyoming. In favor of the resolution, Republican Charles Scott described the program as, “an extremely biased, ideologically driven program that I can’t see any academic legitimacy to.” Scott is 76 years old and attended business school. He has no background in Women and Gender Studies. Republican Senator Cheri Steinmetz expressed opposition to the program’s commitment to “service and activism,” claiming that the idea that state funds continued to support such a mission led her to a state in which she claimed, “my conscience won’t let me sleep.” Steinmetz has a background in farming, ranching, and insurance sales, not in Women and Gender Studies. There is no reason to think that either senator, nor any of the other 14 senators who voted in favor of the bill, have spent time reading books or journals on the topic, nor have they spent any significant time in classrooms dedicated to Women and Gender Studies. Even if they had, they would not be experts in this field.

This is just one of the most recent in a series of bills restricting the content of education that have been passed or proposed in recent months. Infamously, both houses of the Florida legislature passed “The Parental Rights in Education Bill” which has come to be known widely as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” This bill limits discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools. The reasoning, such as it is, behind the bill is that children shouldn’t be exposed to “inappropriate content” and that parents should be responsible for deciding how these issues are discussed with children. The best way to accomplish this, they argue, is to pass legislation ensuring that it is parents and not teachers who are discussing this subject matter with students to begin with.

Perhaps most notorious are the spate of laws across the country that restrict instruction and discussion of the topic of “critical race theory” and other such “divisive concepts.” As of February, 2022, 36 states have considered or passed this kind of legislation. Like the legislators responsible for defunding the University of Wyoming’s Women and Gender Studies department, these legislators seem to have little idea of what, exactly, they are banning or when and where it is being taught.

There are many implicit assumptions behind the passage of these pieces of legislation. One of them seems to be that education is valuable, if and when it is, for the purposes of teaching students trades and professions, reinforcing culturally-dominant opinions about institutions and historical events, and assisting in the development of young people into the kinds of adults that their parents want them to be. Educators, when doing things in the way these legislators want them to be done, capture and bottle the zeitgeist of the parents’ generation and pass it on, perfectly preserved and untested, to their children.

In contrast to these assumptions, many educators have argued that education is the practice of liberation. Through encountering new ideas and engaging in rigorous and critical debate, a person can achieve a kind of authenticity that might have been impossible for them otherwise. Real autonomy requires full information, or as close to it as one can get. This involves education, not just about matters of hard fact, but also about the experiences of individuals who are different from ourselves or our parents. The practice of becoming well educated, either in an institutional setting or otherwise, has the power to put people in circumstances to fully guide the direction of their own lives. Education can lead to self-actualization.

bell hooks ends her book Teaching to Transgress with the testimony of hope that,

The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.

hooks describes her experiences with education as a young black girl and young woman, growing up in what she describes as an intensely patriarchal family during a time of segregation. She says,

Attending school was sheer joy. I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Education potentially has transformative power for everyone but can be the most meaningful and even transcendent for disenfranchised populations. For instance, in his autobiography, Malcolm X has the following to say about how his dedication to self-education through reading and debate while incarcerated changed his world entirely,

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read woke in me inside some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

It’s no surprise that the educational practices about which these legislative bodies are most critical and about which they demonstrate also anger and fear, are transformative practices regarding how people think about race, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Racial justice, feminism, and LGBTQ rights are issues about which we have made tremendous progress only very recently in the scheme of things. Not everyone is on board; some people don’t want power dynamics to shift. No wonder, then, that study of these topics is cast as less than rigorous and the idea that educators might turn young people into activists on these topics causes some defenders of the status quo to lose sleep.

This is nothing new. Educational transgressors and liberators have been targets for all of recorded history. Socrates was transgressing accepted social norms by providing conditions for young people to challenge commonly-held beliefs and to engage in critical thinking. For this, Athenian jurists had him executed. Liberation through education is good for the liberators, but bad for the dominant power structure. One of the great virtues of the educator is that they know this history and, nevertheless, they persist.

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Curriculum Transparency and Public Education

image of security camera in a classroom

House Bill 5722 is a new proposal stirring up controversy in Michigan’s state Senate. The bill, introduced by Republican state representatives, would require teachers at public schools across the state to submit lesson plans, assignments, class readings, quizzes, and all other class material to a public database, in the name of “curriculum transparency.” Districts that fail to comply with these rules would lose 5% of their total state funding. The bill aims to address the concerns of parents who worry that their kids are being taught radical political agendas or curricula that are in opposition to their personal values. “This is a perfect opportunity for the schools and parents to work together instead of creating this perception of ‘what are you trying to hide?’” said Rep. Gary Eisen, of St. Clair Township. Over a dozen states have proposed similar curriculum transparency bills. The immediate context for the sudden flood of interest in public school curriculum is fueled by the ongoing national conversation concerning “critical race theory,” a little-understood academic discipline that has become a looming fear in the minds of a sizeable percentage of Republican voters. Specifically, conservatives worry that public school curriculum is teaching “critical race theory” along with other “racially and politically divisive materials” such as the 1619 Project.

Unsurprisingly, the bill has received pushback from public school teachers, who emphasize the unrealistic burden that such “transparency” would place on them. Lesson plans that may, after decades of teaching the same topic, exist only in the minds of the teachers themselves, would need to be transcribed, organized, and filed, before being uploaded. In Indiana, a bill proposing such measures requires teachers to upload the entire year’s collection of curricula, lesson plans, and assignments before the first day of school. Changes to the schedule after upload are not allowed. Because teachers often need to change plans at the last minute, educators allege that this would cause the quality of public education to suffer greatly. Additionally, many worry about the repercussions of — and motivations behind — such unprecedented parental oversight of the minutiae of each day’s lessons. Of course, there are already many ways that parents can access the details of their children’s education; for example, parent-teacher meetings, opportunities to join the Parent Teacher Association, or simply contacting the educators directly. Requiring teachers to put all of their lesson plans online — in addition to bills proposed in multiple states that would see teachers penalized for teaching material that makes students feel “uncomfortable” — understandably has educators worried about their careers. Recently, the ACLU tweeted: “Curriculum transparency bills are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools.”

Aside from the specific background conditions undergirding this new flush of interest in their children’s lesson plans, is there good reason to think that parents of children enrolled in public education have the right to virtually access everything their children are being taught in school? Parental rights are extensive, and for good reason. As the 20th century political philosopher John Rawls argued, maintaining a pluralistic society necessitates allowing children to be brought up under many different parenting styles, value systems, and worldviews, insofar as those views area “reasonable” — that is, able to coexist alongside a shared vision for a unified pluralist state. Only under very extreme conditions do parents typically lose custody of their children; even then, the usual goal of protective services is to place the children back with parents or extended family as soon as it is safe to do so. Yet, parental rights have limits. Parents cannot legally prevent their children from accessing preventative medical care, life-saving procedures, or primary education. In most states, even families who choose to homeschool are required to have their children take standardized tests, to make sure that they are getting an adequate education at home.

Perhaps part of the worry is what is included in an “adequate” education. For example, some people accept flat-earth theory, and reject the idea that the earth is globular. Further, a much larger subset of Americans do not believe in evolution by natural selection. As of 2019, around 40% of Americans rejected the idea that human beings have evolved over time, accepting instead a view that God created humans in roughly the same form as present-day hominids. This makes evolution, if not scientifically controversial, extremely socially controversial. And throughout the 20th century court battles raged regarding the ethics of teaching evolution in the public schools. How can we think about the ethics of teaching socially-controversial issues — including issues related to race and the interpretation of historical events — especially when little or no controversy exists among scholars in the respective fields? And to what extent should parents be allowed to influence the curriculum of the public schools their children attend?

The answer, it seems, will require first answering another question: what is the role and purpose of public education? The obvious response would seem to be that the education of all citizens is a public good that all American citizens benefit from. It is a public good because a country of educated citizens will tend to have lower poverty rates, higher rates of employment, better health outcomes, and more innovation. This public benefit legitimizes the taxes that all citizens pay toward the system, regardless of whether they have children attending. The 20th century American philosopher John Dewey went even further, arguing that public education was a necessary condition for a flourishing democracy:

[A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.

In order to secure these benefits, however, it is necessary that school curricula not be at the mercy of individual districts. If it were, we could expect to see wildly different educational outcomes between districts, due to students learning different material — and this would undermine the general public good served by the public education system. Because different districts across different states will differ dramatically in terms of political and social values, one thing everyone ought to be able to agree on is that all public-school students should all learn approximately the same things in the same subject areas. There is legal precedent to prohibit any form of educational policy changes that could lead to wildly disunified outcomes. In the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Board of Education, defendants of segregation argued for their position largely on the basis of parental choice: parents in a district should have some control over the way that district is run with respect to racial integration or segregation. The ruling in this case, which ultimately led to the desegregation of the public-school system, was based on the following line of reasoning: that leaving districts with the choice between segregation and integration would result in unequal educational outcomes across districts and states, and was therefore unviable as a public educational policy. If there is good reason to think that parental control over school curriculum would have similar results, then Brown provides a legal precedent for safeguarding individual districts from local efforts to make significant changes to the curriculum.

However, even the general consensus on the national benefit of a public education system appears to be waning. Bills across the nation are proposing states adopt a “voucher system” of school funding. In a voucher system, rather than each taxpayer paying a certain amount of tax dollars toward their public-school district, parents of children may instead use those dollars as a “voucher” that will follow their child/children into whatever form of schooling the parents decide on: public, charter, private, or homeschooling. In states where private school and homeschooling are very popular, such a distribution of tax dollars would leave the public-school system impoverished — likely beyond the ability to function, and certainly with far fewer resources than they had previously. Some states, like Indiana, already have a limited voucher system in place, which has seen districts such as Fort Wayne losing over $100,000 per year in annual government funding — and these numbers are rising exponentially. Indiana’s current voucher system is rather limited: capped at 7500 students, with earning limits on families who would like to take advantage of these benefits. Many bills currently sitting in state senates have no such restrictions. Until the nation can once again unite over the benefit and value of a national public education, arguments against maximal parental control may have no traction. A unified vision of the purpose and value of a public education system must therefore be urgently pursued.

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A Stark Divide: On Critical Race Theory in the Classroom

photograph of students studying at desks in classroom

“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist nation.” So declared Senator Tim Scott in his address last month. Refusing to acknowledge a messy explanation of how institutional racism contributes to significant racial disparities in criminal justice, healthcare, education, and economic outcomes, Scott chose the tidier, more familiar framing of racism as an all-or-nothing character trait. As though racism must always take the form of a conscious and deliberate act. As though offenders must have violence on their mind and evil in their hearts. As though longstanding inequities could be the simple work of a few bad apples.

But Scott’s pronouncement wasn’t designed for nuance, it was meant to serve a particular political function: contesting the need for race-based education in our schools.

“A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic. And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”

Race-based education, Scott claims, is infected with the very same racial essentialism it seeks to expunge. Whatever their intentions, these educational programs are thought to be reductive — they reduce individuality and personal responsibility to a matter of skin color and treat race as though it were the only relevant characteristic defining one’s social identity. But, as Scott argued, “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination.” As such, race-based education stands accused of being divisive. By focusing exclusively on our differences, it pits us against each other rather than bringing us together. Perhaps most damning of all, race-based education challenges an article of faith: that the social, political, and economic rewards reaped in this life are proportional to the sweat of one’s brow.

These charges, however, misunderstand (and sometimes willfully misconstrue) the purpose and aims of race-based education. Critical race theory, the unnamed villain in Scott’s address, is designed to question the ways we perceive our society and the ways we are perceived. These reflections provide us the opportunity to develop and strengthen our racial and social literacy. At its very core, critical race theory challenges each of us to appreciate our situatedness (or perhaps “thrownness”). There is no view from nowhere; we all speak from a specific perspective informed by a unique lived experience, and we each possess a particular point of view. If we are to truly come together and bridge that gap, then we must learn to recognize these differences and begin to develop a shared language with which to communicate — identifying the barriers to the inclusive and just society we wish to share, as well as articulating the work needed to dismantle them.

Critics often assert that critical race theory is not a proper pedagogical model because it focuses on what to learn rather than how to learn. In truth, however, it offers us an alternative lens by which to gain perspective on our social situation and consider the ways things could be otherwise. In this way, critical race theory delivers real educational goods: the civilizing of students, the enlargement of imagination and empathy, the cultivation of rich and meaningful autonomy, and the development of independent judgment by challenging dogmatic ways of thinking and perceiving.

The political war being waged on race-based education is not new. Senator Scott’s statements echo Trump’s proclamations that critical race theory represents “radical indoctrination,” and Scott’s words speak in support of Trump’s (since rescinded) ban on the “un-American propaganda” in diversity and inclusion initiatives. Critical race theory is smeared as left-wing proselytizing, the toxic by-product of the Great Awokening spilling out of the ivory tower and threatening education reform from grade school on up. To escape being swallowed up by PC culture and white guilt, there is but one recourse: Resist. And many conservative state legislatures are responding by outlawing any and all attempts to broach the subject of slavery and segregation in American history in the classroom.

In the wake of recent events, many schools have been prompted to reconsider their traditional course offerings. Unfortunately, proposed changes to the education curriculum are continually cast as a struggle over the soul of the nation. Just last month, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate referred to Howard University’s dissolving of its classics department as a “spiritual catastrophe,” signaling the “spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness run amok in American culture.” Contrary to faculty’s explanation, they depict Howard’s decision as a loss of faith. Lacking the strength of conviction to defend the sacred texts, Howard succumbed to pressure from the woke mob. The barbarians are at the gates.

In defending the discipline from would-be reformers, West and Tate emphasize the formative power the study has for its disciples. “Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage” they argue, “is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.” But the idea that one must assimilate oneself into Western culture in order to find one’s true identity and have anything meaningful to say is precisely the problem. It may very well be true that only through understanding our place in history can we ever hope to know ourselves, but the question that remains is: whose history?

This question is especially pressing for a discipline like classics. Even scholars within the field are beginning to question the ways in which the study lends itself to supporting white supremacy narratives, promotes Eurocentrism, and is instrumental to the construction of whiteness. As classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta has argued, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.” So how might we separate the meat from the bone and dismantle the power structures that seem inextricably fused to the life-blood of the discipline?

This discussion regarding what should be excised and what can be rescued within the classics curriculum reflects the substantial difficulty facing us in the larger societal conversation. Unfortunately, these questions are often explored in terms of who is cancelling whom — is the left out to expel all conservatives from the academy, or is the right suppressing academic freedom by claiming that all education is merely liberal ideology? But this way of assessing the debate only encourages us to retreat to our separate political corners. Commentary devolves into scorekeeping: whose tribe is winning? At present, public debate is paralyzed, consumed in accusing the other side of one of two untenable extremes: continuing to actively ignore an oppressive status quo, or burning everything to the ground.

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Does the U.S Need a School Lesson from Finland?

Addressing American families, Howard Gardner, an education professor at Harvard, suggested to “‘[l]earn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States.’” William Doyle, writer for the Los Angeles Times, abided by Gardner’s advice and enrolled his seven-year-old son in a Finnish school. Doyle got an inside look at the higher education system as well when he became a professor in a Finnish University. Reflecting fondly on his family’s five months there, he refers to the school system as “stunningly stress-free” while being “stunningly good.” Doyle recalls, “Finns put into practice cultural mantras I heard over and over: ‘Let children be children,’ ‘The work of a child is to play,’ and “Children learn best through play.’” These values contrast greatly with America’s mentality of teaching for the standardized test.

Continue reading “Does the U.S Need a School Lesson from Finland?”