Largo High School English teacher Jennifer Wilson protests book banning at a Pinellas County School Board meeting on Feb. 14 in Largo, Fla.
California kids, do you follow the news about the culture wars over local school boards?
If you do, you’ll see these wars portrayed as political contests between groups that want to take education in different directions: progressives and right-wingers, and fights between parents’ groups and teachers unions.
But you won’t hear much about the role of students in these debates. Because there isn’t one. School boards are meetings of adult politicians where kids are rarely ever heard.
There’s a big reason why you’re being left out. The adults in your lives, for all their performative battles over your schools, share a unity of purpose in the education wars:
They all want to trample on your already very limited rights as students.
They just attack you from different flanks.
On the right, conservative parents and their political allies seek to take away your right to read what you want. Groups with Orwellian names — like Moms for Liberty — are pursuing bans on books and curricula. (Note to kids: “Orwellian” refers to George Orwell, the sort of satirical author that grown-ups, right and left, are trying to keep out of your hands).
Banning books limits what your teachers can teach, and which of your questions they can answer. The right is particularly interested in limiting what teachers can tell you about the most hot-button topics like race and sex.
In related actions, the right is also demanding that teachers violate your privacy and make official reports, including to your parents, if you dare deviate from old-fashioned gender norms. Why can’t these adults get their own lives? Figuring out your identity is hard enough — between gossipy classmates and social media — without adults and administrators being required to inform on you.
Now, to their credit, the left is fighting these intrusions on your privacy. But the left has its own ways of trying to limit your freedoms and your educational horizons.
You remember that teachers unions and Democratic politicians violated your right to an education by closing the schools for too long during the pandemic. Those same state and local leaders haven’t done enough to help you recover the learning you lost in the pandemic, even though most of you are testing below grade level and many of you are chronically absent from school.
And inside your schools, the left is determined to keep you on its prescribed path by limiting your choices of study. Progressive politicians defend outdated traditional school curricula while adding new requirements that match their political preferences — labor rights or ethnic studies. Meanwhile, schools rarely provide the technology courses so many of you want. Unbelievably, just 40% of high schools in California, home of Silicon Valley, even offer computer science.
This isn’t a budget problem. Spending on schools is way up, but the new money ends up going to the salaries of adults.
If you still think your teachers, staff and elected officials respect you, let me disabuse you of that notion.
During the pandemic, the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent faced litigation charging that he was violating students’ right to a good education. He responded by saying that students only had the right to a free education and that it didn’t have to be good or even useful.
Shockingly, California’s leaders and schools have embraced the superintendent’s position as their own — opposing a proposed ballot initiative that would give you the right to a “high-quality” education. Here is the language: “The state and its school districts shall provide all public school students with high-quality public schools that equip them with the tools necessary to participate fully in our economy, our society, and our democracy.”
In opposing that promise, the educational establishment claims that a “high-quality” education requirement will produce a barrage of lawsuits and demands from you.
For your sake, I sure hope they are right.
In this context, students should go unapologetically on the offensive. If adults punish you for being combative, laugh in their faces — and remind them of their own combative educational wars.
You might try a one-day-a-week student strike, like the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and spend that time finding lawyers to sue your school districts. (Lawsuits, and their costs, are what really move school administrators.)
Or you could demand democracy from the Democrats who rule California. Since students know more about schools than most adults, why shouldn’t you have the right to vote and run in school board elections?
Indeed, school boards have been so captured — by teachers unions and parent groups — that there’s a strong case for turning them entirely over to students, who could check adult interests.
Adults are also constantly talking about the need to teach civics — while rarely funding actual civics classes. Turning school boards over to kids would be the greatest civics lesson possible.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
Joe Mathews is Connecting California columnist and California editor at Zócalo Public Square, an Ideas Exchange that is a project of New America and Arizona State University.
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