Recently, the Tennessean published an op-ed by Daniel Smith and Adam Kissel entitled: “When should government infringe on academic freedom in a democracy?” The piece argues that when a public university is unaligned with the majority of the citizens who help fund it, the state is justified in intervening to fund neutral centers that encourage students to be open to diverse perspectives.

I grant Smith and Kissel’s argument that it is important for college students to engage with diverse perspectives— something already happening at public institutions across the state. That should, and already does, include perspectives held by a majority of Tennesseans.

But, when Smith and Kissel justify government intervention by referring to the “democratic principle of majority rule,” they overlook competing democratic principles that have shaped public education in the United States. Principles meant to prevent the rights of minorities from being trampled by majorities.

Given that Smith and Kissel’s argue for protecting and teaching minority viewpoints, this oversight risks profoundly undermining their stated goals. To better pursue those goals, let me fill in some relevant gaps. 

The evolution of public education in the U.S.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the rights of minorities in the U.S. public education system. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote in a 1943 decision upholding the free speech rights of two young Jehovah’s Witnesses expelled from a public school for expressing their faith, “The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was … to place [certain subjects] beyond the reach of majorities.” 

Recently, the Tennessean published an op-ed by Daniel Smith and Adam Kissel entitled: “When should government infringe on academic freedom in a democracy?” The piece argues that when a public university is unaligned with the majority of the citizens who help fund it, the state is justified in intervening to fund neutral centers that encourage students to be open to diverse perspectives.

I grant Smith and Kissel’s argument that it is important for college students to engage with diverse perspectives— something already happening at public institutions across the state. That should, and already does, include perspectives held by a majority of Tennesseans.

But, when Smith and Kissel justify government intervention by referring to the “democratic principle of majority rule,” they overlook competing democratic principles that have shaped public education in the United States. Principles meant to prevent the rights of minorities from being trampled by majorities.

Given that Smith and Kissel’s argue for protecting and teaching minority viewpoints, this oversight risks profoundly undermining their stated goals. To better pursue those goals, let me fill in some relevant gaps. 

The evolution of public education in the U.S.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the rights of minorities in the U.S. public education system. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote in a 1943 decision upholding the free speech rights of two young Jehovah’s Witnesses expelled from a public school for expressing their faith, “The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was … to place beyond the reach of majorities.” 

The panel: 

Lisa Morgan — President, Georgia Association of Educators 

Brian Robinson — Republican strategist  

Ty Tagami — State education reporter, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

The breakdown: 

1. Pandemic restrictions and inflamed rhetoric in the lead-up to 2022 elections are spurring division on education.

• Several bills related to masking and parents’ rights are on the floor. 
  • House Bill 1178 and Senate Bill 449, both known as a  “parental bill of rights,” are backed by Gov. Brian Kemp.
  • Kemp is scheduled to sign a bill into law this afternoon allowing parents to exempt their children from school mask mandates.

Georgia Association of Educators president Lisa Morgan said teachers and students are frustrated and have had little relief through a trying pandemic.

2. Bills targeting transgender issues, students also take center stage this legislative session.

• SB 435 would ban schools from allowing transgender girls from participating in sports that align with their gender identity unless there is no equivalent sport offered by the schools. 
• SB 613 would ban private schools from discussing “sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.
  • This legislation models itself after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which was signed yesterday by Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

3. Critical race theory is a hot-button issue, but it is not taught in Georgia’s public schools.

• Critical race theory focuses on how historical inequities and racism continue to shape American society.
• Last year the governor-appointed Board of Education approved a resolution that bans teaching of divisive topics. 
• SB 588 would confirm the public’s right to attend school board meetings  
• Students from Savannah traveled to the Capitol on Monday to speak out against HB 1084, another divisive concepts bill. But their testimony was not heard by the Education Committee.

 4. Private school voucher legislation that was rejected by the Georgia Senate earlier this month remains an issue.

• Proponents of the measures say it would allow more parents to have “school choice.”
• But critics of the bill say the vouchers serve as a coupon for parents who can already to send their kids to private schools.
  • The proposed legislation would offer families $6,000 to pay for private school. 
  • The average private school in Georgia cost around $11,000 annually.

Tomorrow on Political Rewind:

Host Bill Nigut returns with a panel including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Greg Bluestein.

This commentary is by Carol Frenier, a small business owner in Chelsea. She taught American history for a decade in Massachusetts high schools before moving to Vermont in 1992.

Both federal and state courts have ruled recently that religious schools must be included in voucher programs that are made available to other nonpublic schools. 

This has raised concern among many educators and politicians that using taxpayer dollars may involve religious indoctrination.  

These officials might be surprised to learn that many Vermont taxpayers, myself included, do not want their tax dollars used for woke indoctrination either. Indoctrination about transgenderism, variations of CRT, or belief in a forthcoming anthropogenic climate catastrophe, for example, is based on a world view as subjective as any religious belief.

Any educational system you can name teaches some core values. Whether religious, philosophical or political, there is a fundamental point of view behind the content and/or style of instruction. What woke teachers consider to be “true,” I consider to be questionable ideology. What I consider one of the most brilliant documents ever written (the U.S. Constitution), some woke teachers consider a self-serving document written by white, male slave holders.

Conceding this reality, many countries around the world have solved this problem by adopting something called “educational pluralism.” According to Ashley Rogers Berner of John Hopkins University, educational pluralism means that state governments fund and hold accountable a wide variety of schools, including religious ones, but do not necessarily operate them. 

It accepts the fact that education is a community concern but also honors the beliefs of the nation’s families, allowing each school to teach according to its own values and mission, provided the school meets the state standards. As such, she says, it provides a way out of the winner-take-all mentality that characterizes so many educational debates. 

The Netherlands, she explains, is the most educationally plural country in the world. It gives block grants for staff, facilities and operations to each of its 36 different types of schools. In Belgium, she continues, half of its French-speaking students attend Catholic or independent schools that are fully funded by the state. 

These two examples, she asserts, are representative of the majority of countries in the western world. The U.S. is actually the outlier, still believing that the government run schools can teach “objectively.”

In a pluralistic system, parents have multiple choices of schools, as long as those schools meet the academic and citizenship training standards of the state. (Citizenship training prepares students to engage in civil activities and treat other groups with respect.) 

Thus, a parent can send one child to a Catholic school, where discipline and academic rigor are emphasized, and send another child to a progressive school, where sensitivity to social issues can be affirmed and encouraged.

Many people will suppose that such a system would breed division and intolerance. Ironically, early data indicates that, if anything, graduates of pluralistic systems actually score higher on citizenship. Perhaps this is because, from an early age, children watch adults respecting different perspectives when deciding where their children would be educated. 

This system, or some variation thereof, is worth considering. It could get us beyond our winner-take-all mentality and reframe our thinking about religious schools as just one more choice that parents (who are also taxpayers) can make for their children’s education.

In terms of market share, the result is a dramatic shift. A scant 3.3% of tax-supported K-12 students used these options at the beginning of the century. Last year fully one in five — 20% — did so.

By far the largest shift has occurred in Milwaukee, where nearly half of tax-supported students use options other than the Milwaukee Public Schools. The statewide growth will accelerate when an arbitrary cap on private choice enrollment expires in five years.

Much faster growth will occur if Evers is not re-elected. His current GOP opponents support eliminating the enrollment cap and making all families eligible, a position clearly favored by Wisconsin voters.

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Gov. Kevin Stitt wants Oklahoma’s laws to be free of outside influence when it suits his agenda, but when Oklahoma’s conservative-dominated legislature advances ready-made, cut-and-paste social legislation from other states or lobbying groups, Stitt practically greets these grifters at the border. 

In his Feb. 7 State of the State address, Stitt bemoaned the passage of State Question 788, which brought medical marijuana to the state through a 2018 ballot initiative. Oklahomans overwhelmingly voted for medical marijuana by a margin of 57-43, but Stitt thinks they were deceived, too unsophisticated to understand the state question.

“When Oklahomans voted for medical marijuana, they were literally sold a bill of goods,” Stitt said. “The state question was misleading and it has tied our hands as we regulate the industry. Because of that state question, Oklahoma charges just $2,500 for a commercial license.”

“This is a perfect example of why we need to make sure initiative petitions represent Oklahomans and not out-of-state special interest groups,” he said.

Stitt then went on to speak glowingly of California’s system, which can cost somewhere in the upper six figures depending on the scale of the operation. So, Stitt wants to raise the barriers for entry in an industry that has brought in $14 million in licensing fees to the state and over $800 million in sales in 2020.

Not only is his desire to hobble a thriving Oklahoma industry anti-capitalist, it is anti-democratic. Stitt does not believe in democracy if it will not bend to his will.

So when House Bill 1647 failed to pass in the state Legislature, Stitt threw a fit over the defeat. 

Known as the Oklahoma Empowerment Act, an obvious snake-oil brand meant to sell  “a bill of goods,” the bill would have drained state funding from Oklahoma’s public schools for the purpose of sending students to charter or private institutions.

Stitt and his secretary of education, Ryan Walters, engaged in a disinformation campaign that, if it had found success, would have pulled funding away from public schools serving rural areas where no charter or private schools exist. Walters, an opportunist who once was a popular teacher in McAlester Public Schools before turning his back on his profession and his former students, went to town on every public school bogeyman he could find, including Critical Race Theory. 

“In Oklahoma our schools will not go woke,” Walters tweeted ungrammatically on March 17. Since “woke” is now a multipurpose epithet used by conservatives against anyone desiring social progress, it was utterly meaningless, but it spoke to the brazenness with which Stitt ran his campaign against Oklahoma’s children. 

Fortunately, not all of Stitt’s allies in the Legislature were swayed. The bill failed 22-24 on March 23, and Stitt released a temper tantrum of a statement in response.

“It is deeply concerning that so many voted to deny parents and students choices and keep them trapped in a system that has failed many Oklahoma children and left our state 49th in the nation in education,” Stitt said.

Thing is, it is now 2022, and Stitt is now in his fourth year as governor. With that amount of time in office, he does not get to pretend that a system that “failed many Oklahoma children” is not his to let fail. 

This petulant false leader does not want to face his failure as governor, so he tries to kneecap Oklahoma’s public schools so that the next Epic Charter Schools could fleece the state. 

“I will never stop fighting to empower parents and fund students over systems,” Stitt or outside agitator Carly Atchison wrote on Twitter after the defeat. 

Funny thing about that language: it is the exact wording used in tweets this week by Corey DeAngelis, a leading national figure in Libertarian organizations such as the Cato Institute and the National Director of Research for the American Federation for Children, which is an American federation for school choice grifters. 

DeAngelis is the kind of anti-government zealot who retweets Libertarians who say things like, “When are tax dollars EVER ‘spent well’?” On March 29, he tweeted, “BREAKING: Pennsylvania House Education Committee just passed a bill to fund students instead of systems.”

That is almost exactly how Stitt put it, which shows that Stitt does not have as much of a problem with “out-of-state special interest groups” as he would like Oklahomans to believe.

Public schools in America serve a diverse population of students who come from various backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and customs. Some of the students belong to families with strict religious beliefs that involve dietary restrictions. Whether it is avoiding meat, dairy, beef, or pork, a school would never intentionally usurp the desires and beliefs of the family and force students to eat or drink any of the prohibited items. A teacher would never introduce a restricted food simply because she thought it was a better way to live.

This seems reasonable and respectful. If this is true, and generally considered good when it comes to dietary restrictions, why is it so unreasonable and controversial when it comes to what students are exposed to in regards to sex education, gender theory, and sexually explicit material?

Just as some families adhere to strict religious guidelines according a specific set of beliefs relating to diet, there are families who teach and expect their children to adhere to certain ethics and beliefs about sex according to their religious or ethnic customs. If public schools would not think it was appropriate (or legal) to force prohibited food and drink on students, why do they think it is appropriate to force sexual content in the curriculum that does that very thing?

Many public schools across the country have adopted a Comprehensive Sex Education curriculum designed by Planned Parenthood. Even before we address how the organization itself is often in direct opposition to what many faith groups believe, it’s worth noting that the agenda they are promoting and material they distribute in schools alone encroach on parental rights to decide if, when, and how certain topics should be introduced and discussed with their children.

In addition to Planned Parenthood, there are a plethora of other organizations who have developed curriculum specifically designed to teach sex and sexuality from one perspective. Combine those materials with the wide range of Social Emotional Programs (SEL) that are currently flooding the market, and it is clear that the “menu” is endless but not necessarily inclusive to families who have a more conservative view of such topics. 

Students as young as elementary school are being exposed to ideas such as the “Gender Unicorn” which teachers use to explain progressive views of gender identity and expression. How does this respect the students whose families believe that there are only two genders and they are not fluid? In addition, middle and high school students are frequently asked their pronouns by teachers in class. Not only does this teeter on compelled speech, but it introduces a topic that may not align with every family’s values. 

Be it a family’s dietary guidelines or their beliefs about sexuality, it is vital that parents, not the government, are the primary custodian and authority of their children. Just because a school or school employee disagrees with those beliefs does not give them the right to intervene and usurp their authority. It is time for schools to honor the role of parents and get back to the role of educating, not indoctrinating students.