Parents’ Rights and the Politics of Inclusion
December 01, 2023
Appears in December 2023: School Administrator.
What are some reasonable action measures administrators might take when caught up in partisan crossfire?
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Community members in the Central Bucks School District, a suburb of Philadelphia, recently received an e-mail from the superintendent attempting to quiet the rancorous debate that has embroiled his school district for two years.
“The change we need as a district,” he wrote, “… comes not in the form of me as the superintendent proclaiming organizational positions on current social and political issues or events. Nor will it come in the form of my exclusion or condemnation of members of our community simply because they hold views on social and political issues that some, or even many, disagree with.” In an attempt to lean into shared commitments, he suggested “we need to abandon all the political and social ideology in favor of a rigorous and robust high-quality education that gives every child in our district a solid foundation for life.”
The letter came on the heels of school board struggles, familiar in many districts today. Since 2021, following intense struggles over masking and school closures during the pandemic, the majority of the nine-member school board in Central Bucks is affiliated with the local Moms for Liberty chapter. The organization focuses much of its attention on banning library books, retracting policies aimed to include LGBTQ students and enforcing neutrality in classrooms, which entails restricting teachers’ discussion of topics deemed sensitive.
On the other side of the struggle, a more recent parent- and teacher-founded nonprofit, Advocates for Inclusive Education, is working to protect the well-being and free expression of LGBTQ students and other students and teachers.
Widening Domain
The role of parents in their children’s public schooling has long been negotiated in the American public sphere. Past court decisions questioned parents’ right to opt their children out of specific curricula, but parents continue to advocate for the ability to opt out, for changes in their children’s course assignments and for removal or restriction of books they perceived to be inappropriate in how they deal with gender, sexuality and social matters.
The struggle over parental rights on curriculum and school policy is longstanding, but it is evolving in new ways. The past few years have seen national parents’ organizations, some (such as Moms for Liberty) initiated and coordinated by political parties, take a larger role in advocacy of contentious school issues and in electoral politics. While most policy is made at the state and federal levels and administrators maintain their domain of decision making at their districts and schools, their work is affected by community tensions over issues that were dormant until recent years or were seen as matters of professional discretion.
As the superintendent of the majority-white 17,000-student Central Bucks district learned, leaders are at the center of contemporary flareups around schooling. The current “parents’ rights” movement is best understood as a form of partisan mobilization, whose goals extend well beyond the schoolhouse. The effort is not simply targeting schools but also using schools to inflame emotions and draw public attention toward political goals.
Action Measures
What can administrators do when they are caught up in this partisan crossfire?
Start with your values and professional commitments.
Reflect on your views regarding the issues at hand, looking beyond the political turmoil. How should books be selected for a school library? Has the professional process for doing so been successful so far, prior to being politicized? What should be the role of parents and process for parents’ input on library books on the shelf and ones available to their own children?
Similarly, what has been your system’s approach to gender expression and transition? Has it been successful? How should decisions about the history curriculum be made, and who decides what is appropriate content? Anchoring your approach in current professional practice and in your professional views and values would help you stay focused when working with constituents to address their concerns.
Listen to your constituents.
The first step is to listen. Political party operatives may be behind some local efforts, but their message might resonate with your community members for reasons that you should understand. Is the message you are hearing related to practices and relationships in your district? Are there some messages to which you should listen more carefully, and others you might dismiss as cut-and-paste reflections of misinformed social media exchanges? Even the latter might deserve some attention, if only to dismantle the argument in the context of your school or district.
Listen to the quiet voices, too.
Make sure you listen also to those people whose voices are less organized or not as loud. They provide additional contexts for the exchange of views. Who is speaking? Are they parents/guardians?
In a May 2023 analysis by The Washington Post, it became clear that 77 percent of the widespread challenges to books around the United States were filed by the same 11 people. If similar efforts are affecting your community, you should ensure you hear more diverse voices as well. It is important to listen to voices that might not be heard if not solicited and supported. That can be done at formal meetings, but also in other listening sessions, invited forums and informal contexts.
When faced with rancor and extreme voices, district leaders can invite other members of the community to express their views and make space for diverse voices in community meetings and listening sessions. Some leaders invite members of the community to join them for coffee or a walk, where they can listen to those members of the community whose voices may be less prominent in more formal settings.
Provide facts and correct misperceptions.
Differentiate substantive concerns from boilerplate claims and misconceptions. Consider whether any of the substantive claims present an opportunity to make a positive change. Are the levers for such change in your hands, or can you build a coalition that would make them possible?
Some of the most heated struggles today are based on misperceptions or on misinformation and disinformation that circulates online. As leaders in K-12 education, administrators’ role must therefore include the clarification of facts in the face of misperceptions. That might feel like a Sisyphean role at times. Lies and inaccuracies run faster than the truth, especially because they are often more enticing (Money! Race! Sex!).
As James Ryan, who is a scholar of law and education and the president of the University of Virginia, reminds us, a good place to start is by asking, “Wait, what?”
Set boundaries and norms of conversation.
These are the spaces where we can have community discussion about the expectations concerning how practitioners and parents/guardians are addressed and what we want to model for our children.
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These can be a matter of process: What issues are to be addressed first by a teacher, a principal or a superintendent, how can community members make a complaint, etc.? Clarify when and where people can find you, what are appropriate topics you are willing to consider (versus what should be raised with a teacher or other lower-level professional first), and how you want issues to be addressed: no name calling, no personal attacks, no doxxing (publishing private information about a particular individual on the internet with malicious intent). Be clear about how you would respond to those who breach the norms.
Communicate your goals clearly.
Frame the conversation in terms that are rooted in your district’s context and in your mission and goals. Setting and executing the professional mission of the schools you lead always requires communicating this mission to the public you serve. In times of tensions, this role becomes even more pressing.
The current moment in the longstanding parents’ rights movement reignites the struggle over the authority to educate children and make decisions about their schooling. Clarify the role of educators at all levels and communicate your core goals. Those decisions may be related to process: How are decisions made? Who can have input into specific decisions? They may also be matters of substance: What curricula, courses and books are going to be available to all children? What practices will the school or district implement for specific groups of children?
Protect your professional autonomy and that of your teachers, librarians and staff.
Partisan politics always has had some impact on the work of school leaders, but in recent years this impact has become more polarized and more direct. The political process allows the preferences of the community to be mediated and filtered into decisions about education. Complications arise when these decisions undermine professional decision making, as well as when they exclude the voices of some members of the community, which is contradictory to the general goals of public education.
Communicate proactively but not excessively.
Get in touch with your community about your work, the district’s goals and challenges you face, but be conscious of over-communication and “statement exhaustion.” Sometimes an issue is at the center of your professional concerns, but it might be relevant to just a small segment of the community. Be sure to carefully choose the topics that are worthy of communication to the whole community and try to control those rather than respond to pressures.
Lingering Tensions
Over the past summer, the Central Bucks School District board continued to advance policies aligned with current conservative visions, banning transgender students from participating on high school sports teams that align with their gender. The superintendent’s efforts to remain neutral and focused on high-quality education for all may have helped him keep his post — no easy task for leaders in other districts embroiled in controversy. However, it has not helped quiet the tensions or avoid filing of lawsuits alleging LGBTQ discrimination.
Listening to community members and taking a stand for educational values can be powerful antidotes to some of these challenges.
Sigal Ben-Porath is the MRMJJ Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pa., and author of Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion and Renew Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Twitter: @sigalbenporath
Author
What the Field Says About Countering Book Censorship
BY SUE C. KIMMEL, DANIELLE E. SACHDEVA AND J. SEBASTIÁN CHÉRRES
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The experience of Beatrice, a veteran school librarian in a mid-Atlantic suburban school district, resonates strongly with today’s climate of systematic attempts to remove books from school classrooms and libraries. One does not have to look further than Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws and headlines about organized political attempts by small but vocal parent groups to censor and remove titles from K-12 schools to see the parallels with her experiences.
Beatrice (who like others in this story asked not to be identified with their surnames) recounted harassing e-mails, contentious meetings and a 10-month process that ultimately resulted in keeping two books and removing the third from her district’s school libraries.
Practitioner Counsel
As part of a research study, we interviewed seven educators — school librarians and classroom teachers — about their experience with book challenges. In many instances, we heard stories about supportive and proactive school administrators.
Every educator we interviewed had advice about dealing with a book challenge. Some advice about policy and procedures represents best practices, but other suggestions from the front lines were less obvious. We discovered the indirect effects a book challenge can have on a school’s faculty.
We drew on their experiences for these recommendations.
Be prepared for the unexpected.
Book challenges may come from a variety of sources and for a variety of reasons. Parents, students or staff may bring a concern directly to the librarian or the principal. We advise responding to these concerns by listening with respect and care. As Maggie, the lead librarian in her suburban Midwest school district, told us, “Communication and relationships can de-escalate so many situations to where you don’t get to the point of a formal book challenge.”
In her case, a parental concern about the word “bitch,” referring to the mother dog in a book about puppies, did escalate to a formal challenge where the book ultimately was retained in the collection. She advised while you prepare for “LGBTQ or controversial subjects, you need to be aware [of] the breadth of the things that are challenged.”
Know the policy and process.
When a concern escalates to a formal book challenge, be sure to adhere to the district’s reconsideration policies. Zoe, a classroom teacher in a rural school district in New York, recounted the experience of a formal book challenge that entailed “more meetings than I ever want to have again in my life” and culminated in a public session of the board of education.
While Zoe described her district’s policy for adopting instructional materials as “Orwellian,” she ultimately concluded having a policy is “more important than being midstream and saying, where’s my paddle?” Administrators ought to share these policies schoolwide. Policies should be posted to school and district websites so they are easily accessible and transparent.
For districts lacking a reconsideration policy or with an outdated policy, we recommend reviewing the American Library Association’s model policy for school libraries, which may be adapted for books included in the curriculum. (See resources.)
Monitor faculty and staff morale.
Don’t underestimate the emotional toll a book challenge may have on the educator on the receiving end. Beatrice and Zoe both shared about the anxiety they experienced; Beatrice described herself as “hysterical.” Both also commented on the value of the support they received from their principals.
A challenge may plant fear throughout the faculty, who subsequently avoid literature that might be considered controversial. Sam, a classroom teacher in the Northeast, described a case of “soft censorship” where his colleagues were directed to remove a book from library and classroom shelves. Subsequently, a committee revising curriculum decided to address diversity by choosing “the same books that we had before, but with diverse characters instead of White characters.” Ultimately, according to Sam, “the students are really losing a great opportunity to discuss these topics in an appropriate environment where they can really learn something from it.”
Finding Support
Administrators can communicate why supporting students’ intellectual freedom matters. School librarians in our study reported their professional training included book selection and reconsideration policies. Beatrice shared at a staff meeting why her school was fighting censorship. As a result, “even some of the most conservative people on our staff understood why we were so serious about the challenge, that we were not just going to remove these books,” she indicated.
Where else can you go for support? Professional organizations are available to help. The American Library Association, the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Coalition Against Censorship are known for their anti-censorship stance, and they aid educators handling book challenges. (See resources below.)
When faced with a challenge, educators on the front lines should realize they are not alone. Help is available. In today’s climate, schools may be facing censorship attempts by highly organized groups with national reach and substantial funding. These attempts should be met by organized support. As our participants reported, the backing of administrators means so much during the stressful experience of a book challenge.
Sue Kimmel is a professor of library and information studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. Danielle Sachdeva is associate professor of elementary and secondary education at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega, Ga. Sebastián Chérres is a recent graduate of the University of North Georgia.
Additional Resources
Lead authors Sue Kimmel and Danielle Sachdeva recommend these informational resources relating to book banning in schools:
- American Library Association Model Reconsideration Policy. This resource offers guidelines for schools revising their book challenge or reconsideration policies.
www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit - American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. This department offers support and training for those facing or preparing to face a challenge.
www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/oif - National Coalition Against Censorship. The group’s website curates resources about free speech rights and anti-censorship advocacy. https://ncac.org
- National Council of Teachers of English Intellectual Freedom Center. This website for educators offers guidelines for selecting materials and handling challenges.
https://ncte.org/resources/ncte-intellectual-freedom-center
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