Parents who think schools are becoming overly politicized have started their own coalition to fight back against curricula they believe are fueling racial and political divisions in their students.
This week, a group of parents formed Parents Defending Education, a national grassroots organization that gives parents resources on how to get involved at the local level and allows people to fill out incident reports with regard to classroom activities they find concerning.
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The coalition made its public debut on Tuesday, but over the past month, it started filing complaints and Freedom of Information Act requests to a number of U.S. school districts over what is on their curricula and how they’re distributing financial assistance to students.
Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said she believes there is a growing unease among parents over what their children are being taught in schools, and there’s been an increased awareness while students have been learning from home.
“Frankly, with the pandemic, it was kind of a perfect storm with people seeing in their living rooms what was going on in the classrooms,” Neily told the Washington Examiner.
Since going public, Neily said her group has received nearly 1,000 incident reports from parents, teachers, and grandparents about what’s being taught in classrooms.
Neily said there’s been significant pushback against critical race theory being taught in schools, especially among younger students who are more impressionable.
Critical race theory is an approach to studying the intersection of law and race, often espousing lessons that white people in society have inherited privileges and the unconscious bias, racism, and oppression implicit in white people have to be remedied by equity and equality programs.
“It’s not OK for schools to treat children differently on the basis of race, on the basis of gender, to make them say things they don’t agree with,” Neily said. “The fact that parents have so little oversight or control over what their children are learning is deeply troubling and something we think needs to be remedied.”
Classroom curricula have been at the center of contentious debate across the country and on Capitol Hill.
Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, educators and school boards have been pondering ways to teach U.S. history and other subjects in a way that tells all sides of a narrative, including from the historical perspectives of minorities.
Some of the lessons teachers were looking to reexamine were the language around the legacy of Christopher Columbus, as well as placing more focus on how Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves in the late 1700s.
Former President Donald Trump and several GOP lawmakers also criticized having the New York Times’s 1619 Project taught in classrooms. The Pulitzer Prize-winning project by Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that the U.S. founding began the year the first slaves were sold to British colonists, instead of 1776, the year the United States declared its independence.
This week, a group of Washington, D.C.-area teachers announced it would seek to better the discourse in social studies classrooms, according to a report by NBC News. Teachers say they wanted to educate students more about democracy, following the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 that left five people dead. Part of that change would include going beyond the basic memorization of dates and names in U.S. history and asking more critical thinking questions, such as how society can be fair to all and why the Bill of Rights is important.
Bills in the Texas and Rhode Island legislatures are currently being debated to prohibit divisive teachings about race, gender, and sex.
Neily says she doesn’t disagree that history and current affairs could be taught in a more well-rounded way to include more voices but says oftentimes, students are getting a skewed perspective on things.
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“There’s so much opinion that’s being injected into it,” Neily said. “Students are first being told only one side of it but are not able to or encouraged to disagree, to inject their own perspective into it. They’re being told what to think and how to interpret incidents instead of how to think critically, which I think does a real disservice to those students.”
