The battle over parents’ rights in education is just getting started

Schools are promoting the notion that some kids – perhaps many kids if recent trends continue – are born in the wrong body. Suddenly, from Florida to Texas to Wyoming, parents are discovering that schools are teaching, seemingly across the curriculum, that an internal sense of gender trumps biological sex. Worse, some schools are changing, at their students’ request – but without their parents’ knowledge or consent – their students’ names and pronouns to conform to a child’s surprising new “gender identity.” When parents come to school board meetings to complain, far too many are met with silence or risible accusations that they are politicizing education. Parents have the primary right and responsibility to raise and teach their children. Many parents delegate part of the teaching task to schools, in an act of trust. Rather than acting as faithful stewards of that trust, too many schools have decided that it’s their job to alienate kids from “regressive” views of their parents. Is it any wonder that this has proved controversial? We could dissipate some of the heat by increasing the rights of parents over their children’s schooling. States should connect school money to children, rather than to school buildings. Universal school choice for everyone – rich and poor, conservative and liberal – would not just make schools better and more competitive. It would make them less of an arena for the culture war that is otherwise roiling our culture. Heritage Expert: Jay Richards