To The Teacher
In this two-part lesson, students read about and discuss the growing bureaucracy resulting from “parental rights” legislation. The first reading takes a closer look at the situation in Florida, where the expansion of permission slips is requiring schools to adhere to increasingly complex rules and regulations. The second reading explores how parents, students, and educators in some states are pushing back against these restrictions, arguing that students and teachers should have greater autonomy in public schools.
Questions for whole group discussion and microlabs (small group listening circles) follow each reading.
Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash
Reading One: Permission Slips Become Routine in Florida
In the past two years, a variety of states have passed legislation that increased state intervention in schools. In the name of protecting “parental rights,” lawmakers have imposed measures intended to regulate discussions about gender and sexuality, as well as to shield students from books that might include controversial content. These measures have ended up infringing on student freedoms and increasing bureaucracy.
Forced to navigate increasingly complex rules and regulations, school districts have decided to protect themselves by sending home permission slips for what used to be run-of-the-mill school activities. This has left educators and administrators spending far more time on paperwork and compliance, diverting their attention away from teaching itself.
In a January 2024 article for The New York Times, education reporter Dana Goldstein described the situation in Florida:
Got a cut and need a Band-Aid? Want to be called Will instead of William? Or get your vision checked?
Across Florida, hundreds of thousands of students need permission slips for what was once routine in schools.
Educators in the state say recent laws and regulations around parental consent have created an entirely new bureaucracy, filled with forms and nagging phone calls to parents. The requirements have made it more difficult to provide services to children who need them — even services like vision and hearing tests.
“Nurses are spending most of their time trying to obtain permission” from parents, said Lisa Kern, director of the Florida Association of School Nurses. That permission does not always come, as busy parents — particularly those who work several jobs or do not speak English — sometimes do not respond.
The well-being of children, Ms. Kern said, “is taking a hit.”
New laws and regulations under Gov. Ron DeSantis, including his signature Parental Rights in Education Act, are intended to push back against what many conservatives see as liberal orthodoxies embedded in the school system — especially around gender and race — and that they say undermine the role of parents.
But some of the state regulations are vaguely written, school staff said, leading to confusion about exactly which school activities require written consent.
The state’s 67 districts have interpreted the laws differently. Because violating the rules could result in lawsuits or school staff members losing their jobs, many districts have proceeded cautiously, requiring permission slips for an ever-expanding list of activities and services….
In some districts, students without written consent cannot get even a Band-Aid or ice pack after a fall, and must be sent home.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/us/florida-education-schools-laws.html?searchResultPosition=3]
The increased use of permission slips has also expanded to include school events that were once considered routine activities. Writing for Business Insider on February 17 2024, lifestyle and weekend reporter Lauren Edmonds explained:
A Central Florida high school required parents to sign a permission slip for students to watch a Disney film, prompting some to suggest Gov. Ron DeSantis' education laws are excessive.
Sophomore students attending Boone High School decided to celebrate Valentine's Day last week by hosting a "Rom-com movie night" on the football field after classes ended, according to WFTV, an ABC affiliate in Orlando. The teens voted to watch "Tangled," a PG-rated animated film.
It was an innocuous school-sanctioned event that would have caused little stir in the past.
But the new Parental Rights in Education law championed by DeSantis has now saddled such activities with red tape. Under the law, parents must fill out a permission slip before any school-sponsored event.
Some parents told WFTV that the influx of permission slips is becoming burdensome.
"I had to sign a permission slip for my child who could drive himself to see it in a movie theater," Judi Hayes told the outlet.
Parents like Hayes said they must sign a new permission slip for after-school programs and events almost every week.
"It seems like it's just it's out of control. It's every single activity. And it's burdensome on the staff because they have to chase down permission slips. The club's sponsors are getting frustrated and giving up because it's too much work," Hayes said….
This month, parents in Miami were asked to sign permission slips to allow their children to participate in Black History Month activities.
One parent told WPLG, an ABC affiliate in Miami, that they were shocked by the permission slip, which would allow parents to remove their children from classes highlighting Black accomplishments. "I'm concerned as a citizen," she said.
The expansion of permission slips has not only created bureaucratic hassles for students and parents, but it has also called into question what types of events should be considered important parts of the educational mission of our schools.
Post-Reading Microlab Activity
Here's how to do a microlab in the classroom.
1. Divide the class into groups of three or four using puzzle pieces, number cards, or by counting off. Ask participants to arrange themselves in their small groups so that each person can easily see and hear everyone else in the group.
2. Before you begin, explain the guidelines for a microlab:
- It's okay to pass if you need more time to think or would rather not respond.
- This is a timed activity. I will let you know when it is time to move on to the next speaker. You will each have one [or two or three] minutes to speak.
- Speak from your own point of view.
- Be your own barometer - share as much as you feel comfortable sharing.
- Confidentiality is important, especially when we come back together as a large group. We need to agree that what we share among ourselves in the small group will stay private.
3. Introduce your first microlab question. (Use the questions below or create your own.) In introducing each question, it's usually helpful to say the question, then give some specifics about the question or model answering the question yourself, and then repeat the question again. This gives participants some time to think about what they would like to say. In between microlab questions, you may want to remind people to try not to interrupt or engage in dialogue.
- What personal connections, thoughts, or feelings did you have about what you read?
- According to the reading, some Florida school districts are now requiring parents to sign permission slips for activities such as getting a band-aid from the school nurse or watching a PG-rated movie. What do you think about this? How does it make you feel? What do you make of these new rules?
- In the reading, there is also an example of a Florida school district requiring permission slips for Black History Month events. What do you think about parents choosing to keep their children from attending such events? What do you think the results, or consequences, could be? How would you feel if you wanted to attend such an event but your parent, or guardian, didn’t allow it?
- Have you ever had to get a permission slip signed by your parents, or guardians, that you thought was unnecessary? What was that experience like? How did you feel? What was the outcome?
- How does giving parents an increased say through permission slips affect students’ ability to be in control of their educations? Their futures? How do you think it helps them do this? How do you think it hurts them?
4. Reconvene the full group. Invite students to share how the microlab was for them. Then ask for volunteers to share something they said or felt in their microlab. Remind participants of the need for confidentiality - each person should only speak from their experience.
This sharing may lead to a wider classroom discussion. If the issue is a volatile one, discussions can sometimes get heated. If you decide to open up the topic, it would be a good idea to establish some guidelines for discussion or "community practices" ahead of time.
You may want to end the session by having the students brainstorm about questions they have on the issue that would lead to gathering information and further study.
Reading Two: Teachers and Parents Push Back Against “Parental Rights” Legislation
Although Florida has been a leader in adopting “parental rights” legislation, other U.S. states are emulating Florida's lead, bringing the issue of permission slips and “opt-outs” for school events to the national level. A 2023 PEN America report documented at least 400 “parental rights” bills introduced in state legislatures since 2021, and at least ten states have passed such legislation.
In response, educators, advocates, and parents are pushing back against these restrictions and arguing that students and teachers alike should have greater autonomy in public schools. Teachers unions, community groups, and education associations in several states have spoken out against these laws, with some testifying in state legislatures about the burdens the laws create.
Parents have also voiced their concerns, arguing that while it is important that they have a voice, these organized legislative efforts do not effectively represent their interests. Nor do they take into account the views of students, whom advocates argue must be respected if they are to grow into independent, critical thinkers.
In a September 2022 opinion piece for Time magazine, Suzanne Nossel, author and chief executive officer at PEN America, expressed her feelings as a parent. She stated that instead of passing legislation, parents should be communicating more with teachers, and also talking to their own children. As Nossel explained:
As stakeholders in the school system and simply as citizens, parents should participate in deciding how schools are run. Their voices deserve to be heard alongside the expert judgment of principals, teachers, and librarians. But to use legislation and mandates to declare certain stories and ideas off-limits violates the compact underpinning public education. Parents who opt for public schools, rather than private academies or homeschooling, are signing up for a system designed to serve entire communities and general interests; they are pooling their resources with other families to raise future generations. It is one thing to believe that parents have the right to forego regular schooling in favor of imparting an individual belief system to children at home; it is quite another to insist that public school curricula and libraries be remade to match those predilections.
These tactics also risk denying and defeating children’s own sense of educational and intellectual agency. Efforts by parents to dictate what books their teens read and subjects they study stand in the way of allowing children to develop the autonomy and judgment they will need in adulthood. Schools should breed critical thinking such that no book or lesson has the power to indoctrinate a worldview. A major purpose of a library, a broad curriculum, and of the protection of free speech itself is the notion that exposure to the panoply of available ideas and narratives is what enables us to form and test our own opinions and beliefs…
In an era of intensifying polarization and fragmentation, public schools are among the few unifying institutions with the potential to help solder together a diverse rising generation of Americans ready and equipped to live together, solve problems and help build a better nation. If parents are worried about the books their children may find in school, they can speak to a teacher or librarian, and—even more importantly—engage with their child about the values and stories they wish to emphasize. The phrase “parents’ rights” may have a nice ring to it, but the agenda now afoot in its name should sound alarms for all those who care about the future of public education.
[https://time.com/6215119/parents-rights-education-gone-too-far/]
Teachers’ organizations that have pushed back against recent laws contend that they are unworkable for educators, who must reckon with changing and contradictory demands from parents. Writing on October 21, 2021, Washington Post education and foreign affairs reporter Valerie Strauss described how such concerns may arise:
Imagine you have a class of 25 students, and the parents of each one of them have their own ideas about how the teacher should — or should not — lead a lesson on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Each parent or set of parents proceeds to email, call, text or show up at school to discuss with the teacher their view of the lesson. Some demand that the lesson be posted online (a practice some state legislators want to mandate). Children tell their parents about the lesson and those who are unhappy complain to the teacher, possibly the principal, the superintendent and the school board, and may organize protests.
Now consider how many lessons a teacher teaches in a day. And let’s note that some classes have many more than 25 students, especially now, when classes are being doubled in many schools because of teacher shortages.
Of course, all parents won’t weigh in on every lesson, and they won’t do it every day, but the result would still be untenable for any school.
“It’s absurd for parents to tell teachers what to teach,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian and advocate for public schools. “The result would be chaos, and in most cases would be parents telling teachers to teach the way they were taught decades earlier.” What’s more, she said, “It thoroughly discredits the teacher’s professionalism and expertise,” adding: “I can’t think of a more effective way to demoralize teachers and drive them out of the classroom.”
That, essentially, is the practical outcome of the “parental rights” outcry now being sounded in the media, at school board meetings and in politics.…
This is the latest chapter of a decades-long movement in which parents try to dictate what public schools teach, fueled in part by “AstroTurf” groups created to look like they are grass-roots efforts by concerned parents to push the message.
The “parental rights” cry was heard, for example, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. “This same frenzy occurred after desegregation when educators tried to add Black achievements to school texts,” said Leslie Fenwick, dean emerita of the Howard University School of Education and dean in residence at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
“White parents burned books, physically threatened White teachers who tried to teach the more inclusive curriculum, and pressured school boards not to adopt books and curriculum that featured anything Black, by asserting that doing such was a divisive and communist trick,” said Fenwick, who was a leading candidate to be President Biden’s education secretary.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/10/28/parental-rights-in-schools-untenable/]
Opponents of “parental rights” legislation argue that, instead of being a means of improving communication between parents and teachers, new laws in fact damage existing mechanisms that allow all parties—students, parents, and educators alike—to have a voice in shaping how schools function. Writing in The74 in April 2022, education reporter Nadra Nittle explained:
Parents already have ample opportunity to weigh in on learning materials and review classwork, they say, with the chance to provide feedback when school boards vote to adopt curricula or see their children’s assignments via the learning management systems that have become staples in public schools. Teachers see the wave of parents’ rights bills in state legislatures as a ploy to drive a wedge between educators and parents.…
“The reality is parents already have really robust rights, whether they’re in the constitution, state law or federal law,” Duggins-Clay [Paige, chief legal analyst for the Intercultural Development Research Association, an independent education nonprofit in San Antonio, Texas] said. “So, what this does is create this really harmful relationship, or try to generate a really harmful relationship, between parents and the community and schools.”
Opponents of “parental rights” legislation believe that, by increasing bureaucracy and worsening relationships between various stakeholders in public school systems, these bills have had harmful outcomes. Yet because many states are still debating the implementation of these measures, controversy surrounding their impacts will undoubtedly continue to arise.
Post-Reading Microlab Activity
Here's how to do a microlab in the classroom.
1. Divide the class into groups of three or four using puzzle pieces, number cards, or by counting off. Invite participants to arrange themselves in their small groups so that each person can easily see and hear everyone else in the group.
2. Before you begin, explain the guidelines for a microlab:
- It's okay to pass if you need more time to think or would rather not respond.
- This is a timed activity. I will let you know when it is time to move on to the next speaker. You will each have one [or two or three] minutes to speak.
- Speak from your own point of view.
- Be your own barometer - share as much as you feel comfortable sharing.
- Confidentiality is important, especially when we come back together as a large group. We need to agree that what we share among ourselves in the small group will stay private.
3. Introduce your first microlab question. (Use the questions below.) In introducing each question, it's usually helpful to say the question, then give some specifics about the question or model answering the question yourself, and then repeat the question again. This gives participants some time to think about what they would like to say. In between microlab questions, you may want to remind people to try not to interrupt or engage in dialogue.
For Discussion:
- What personal connections, thoughts, or feelings did you have about what you read?
- According to the reading, the requirement for new parental notification or opt-outs for certain materials could impact the ability of teachers to design effective lesson plans or engage students in meaningful discussions? As a student, how do you think giving parents’ more choice over what their children are taught could impact what you learn? How do you feel about this?
- In the reading, some experts argue that parental rights bills are misleading because they suggest parents don’t already have a say in their children’s education, when in reality they can attend school board meetings, join parent groups, or talk with teachers and administrators about their concerns. Have your parents ever had concerns about the education you receive at school? How have they approached this issue? If not, what do you think is the best way for parents to raise their concerns in general?
- This reading primarily focuses on the reactions of teachers and parents, but perhaps the most impacted group is students, whose daily lives at school are changing due to “parental rights” laws. How do you feel these laws might impact your individual freedom or rights as a young person? Do you think the adults in your life trust you to make your own decisions? Do you think that your thoughts, ideas, and decisions are respected by adults in general? Why or why not?
- How much say do you think students themselves should have in shaping their own educations? Do you think there are ways in which the views of both students and families/teachers can be respected?
4. Reconvene the full group. Invite students to share how the microlab was for them. Then ask for volunteers to share something they said or felt in their microlab. Remind participants of the need for confidentiality - each person should only speak from their experience.
This sharing may lead to a wider classroom discussion. If the issue is a volatile one, discussions can sometimes get heated. If you decide to open up the topic, it would be a good idea to establish some guidelines for discussion or "community practices" ahead of time.
You may want to end the session by having students consider strategies they want to do as a class. Explain that you’ve already engaged in strategy #1 (talking about our feelings around climate change) and #3 (acknowledging and validating “negative feelings.”) Maybe students want to reconnect with their love of nature or take collective action to combat climate change.
–Research assistance provided by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas.