Allow Parents a Stake in Education

Parental rights in education are integral to the successful development of the nation’s children.

After all, parents have a special connection with their children and therefore have the unique knowledge to ensure a prosperous classroom experience. This opportunity is wasted when parents are blocked out from the educational process.

It’s important that kids not just learn about the world, but also to love their hometown. This will help instill a sense of community and belonging, with the alternative leaving kids disillusioned and lost, and at greater risk of mental health issues. Despite this, Public education has been continually transitioning to a strict set of national and statewide standards.

While standardization helps protect kids who move homes from missing out on an education, it also takes up precious time for other activities. If educational standards are reconsidered with regional differences in mind, classes would have the time for community-building activities like helping local businesses and libraries, leading food drives and donations, and exploring their town. There is no better way to determine which local family and community-building activities should be run than to allow local families to have a say.

There are many ways to allow collaboration between families and educators. The first step is to open up the process for the feedback of parents. Classroom materials like textbooks and syllabi must be easily accessible to everyone, not just the kids. Parents need to also be notified of changes to the curriculum, with the option of having any questions or concerns realized.

No teacher knows their students better than the parents who raised them, and no teacher knows their home more than collective knowledge of the hundreds of families who share that home. Letting parents into the process isn’t because teachers aren’t good enough, it’s just that teachers are only a small group of similar people. Allowing parents to have a say will enable more perspectives and ideas than a small group of local educators could dream of. Only then can we be guaranteed of a healthy and enriching classroom environment for our children.

The fact is, sometimes teachers can make oversights and sometimes state bureaucrats make poor decisions. We can’t expect teachers to challenge their funding and employment with the already limited pay and time they have. This is why parents are a great provider of the labor needed to say “no.” For example, school libraries in Stroudsburg, PA, allowed middle schoolers to access sexually-explicit books aimed for an older audience.

One of the books, All Boys Aren’t Blue, was critically acclaimed and targeted many important social issues. Books like this should be on library shelves; they just need to be given to the appropriate readers. In this case, parents were able to help raise awareness to the issue and help younger kids make more age-appropriate reading decisions.

There are many similar cases of concerned parents wanting stricter rules on what young kids can access. However, this concern often ends with images of screaming adults at city council meetings. As of now, only the most determined and fearful parents have time to voice opinions with legislators.

The result is a concentration of very specific viewpoints, which can lead very politically biased classrooms. This is simply not representative of the greater movement, and in fact is merely a consequence of limited parental representation. If parental collaboration is incorporated into the educational planning process, opinions, suggestions, and feedback is taken from every community member, education would prosper.