Think tank unveils new ‘transparency’ proposal for public schools so parents can know exactly what their child is being taught

After a tumultuous year between parents and schools, investigative journalist Christopher Rufo and the Manhattan Institute have released a proposal for state legislatures to implement curriculum transparency legislation.

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Quick Facts

• The proposal recommends that schools should be required to share all relevant teacher and staff trainings with parents.
• The template also suggests that states require schools to either post teaching materials on their website or provide an easily accessible online link to the material.
• Numerous studies have shown that the best predictor for school success is active and informed parental involvement in their child’s education.

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“Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children,” Rufo wrote.

The proposal includes a template designed to guide legislators on how to ensure that public schools are sharing with parents and the public exactly what children are being taught in school.

“Research shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children’s education,” Rufo explained. “To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But public schools are institutions created by ‘We the People’ and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.”

He added, “While government schools necessarily cannot meet every parent’s demands, parents have a fundamental right, long recognized in law, to guide their children’s education and moral conscience. To exercise those rights, parents need accurate information about the learning materials and activities their kids are encountering in government schools.”

Rufo said that the proposal does not seek to ban any ideologies or control curriculum, only to ensure transparency. They also sought to make the requirement easy for teachers by simply requiring a link.

The template states that the following information should be available in an easily accessible location:

• All instructional or training materials, or activities, used for staff and faculty training.

• All learning or curricular materials, or activities, used for student instruction. Such display of materials or activities should identify, at a minimum, the source material associated with each learning material and activity; a link to all materials or at least a brief description and information on how to request copies of the materials; and information on the author of any learning materials created for non-public use.

• Any procedures for the documentation, review, or approval of the training, learning, or curricular materials used for staff and faculty training or student instruction at the school, including by the principal, curriculum administrators, or other teachers.

“Openness will not necessarily engender trust. Parents will certainly disagree about pedagogy,” Rufo warns. “There’s no simple way to reconcile all competing perspectives. But the answer to these inevitable disagreements cannot be to hide from parents what’s being taught to their own children.”

This type of legislation is long overdue. Rufo notes that only 11 states have laws regarding parental review of material, but every state should have such a requirement. Frankly, it is hard to comprehend that this is not already a common practice, considering that parents are trusting the education of their children to relative strangers.

Public schools need to realize that they are accountable to the parents, whose tax dollars fund the school and pay their salaries. Parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, rather than to be told to blindly trust the school, if for no other reason than to be able to engage with their child and help them excel academically.

Over the past 18 months, schools have broken trust with parents nationwide by going well beyond traditional academics to unilaterally introduce radical, racialist, and Marxist ideologies to children. The best way to start to regain that trust is for schools to be, at a very minimum, honest and transparent.* *