Parents’ Rights and the Politics of Inclusion

What are some reasonable action measures administrators might take when caught up in partisan crossfire?

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.

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