Stanley Kurtz writes at National Review Online about the significance of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Last month, on the final dramatic day of its term, the Supreme Court in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor affirmed the right of parents in Montgomery County, Md., to opt their children out of public school classes reading “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts, on grounds that preventing such opt-outs unconstitutionally burdens parents’ religious freedom. Although religious liberty has been around since the Founding, its exercise in schools via opt-outs has become newly urgent with the spread of woke curricula.
Potentially, however, the implications of Mahmoud go well beyond opt outs for “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts. That’s because the right to opt out on religious grounds necessarily includes the right to receive advance notice of classroom learning materials and activities. This means Mahmoud just might break the political logjam that has been holding up a critically important reform — the creation of a thorough and efficient web-based approach to letting parents know exactly what their children are learning in school.
The fact that parents don’t already know what their children are being taught is a scandal. While most school districts do have some mechanism for letting parents know the curriculum, that mechanism is usually poorly updated, extremely limited, and/or accessible only in hard copy during working hours. That is more than most parents can manage to access.
Quite possibly, as a result of Mahmoud, the new legal and financial risks to schools of keeping parents in the dark will usher in an age of curriculum transparency. Districts will not want to be sued for keeping parents too uninformed to exercise their opt-out rights. And this would mean a great deal more than a few extra opt-outs. True curriculum transparency would restore the ability of parents — and voters — to democratically control what schools actually teach. In the absence of such transparency, the classroom is a black box. Administrators and teachers can effectively pull the wool over parents’ eyes by forcing on students, with no accountability, woke lessons on race, sexuality, and American history.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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