At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, “Can’t we all just get along?”
I am 48, meaning I graduated high school in 1993. (Go Wolverines!) I have four kids, all of whom have either graduated or are still attending public schools in Utah, in both Canyons and Jordan School Districts. I am also a sixth-grade teacher in the Jordan School District. Incidentally, I also (like many Utah teachers), have a master’s degree in education. I hope that some combination of these qualifications makes it appropriate for me to ask the above question. I’m not on the “Teacher Team” or the “Parent Team.” I belong to both sides - but do I have to take one?
I belong to both sides - but do I have to take one?
I hope you will forgive my brief digression. I was raised in the 80’s. I was a good student, and my parents were involved in my education. My mom volunteered in my classrooms regularly, and she could often be seen chaperoning field trips. She also served in the PTA at my school. My dad wasn’t as involved in the day-to-day of my education, but I know how important he felt like it was, and he was as involved as his job as a firefighter allowed him to be. I can’t recall a single time in my K-12 education where I felt like my parents were on the opposite team as the school, the administrators and teachers, or the district—quite the opposite. I always felt that my parents were very grateful for my teachers, and they saw them as integral parts of how I was getting my education. I remember when my mom went to my elementary school to petition the principal to move me to another class. She had some reasons, obviously she felt they were compelling enough to merit a meeting with the principal to make the request. As she tells the story now (I’ve heard it many times throughout the years), she was summarily dismissed. “No,” was the answer. Short, sweet, to the point - and non-negotiable. What did she do? Retain a lawyer? Appear before the school board? No, I just stayed in the classroom I had been assigned to. He was the professional educator; he listened to her concerns as a parent, and even though they disagreed on the solution, they continued to work together, playing important roles in my education.
Gone are those days, for the most part, in Utah. These days, there is a huge social movement sweeping the nation that pits parents firmly against teachers and schools. Something weird happened during the pandemic. At first, as we were all white-knuckling it through those anxiety-filled, seemingly endless weeks of impromptu virtual learning, the prevailing sentiment seemed to be, “Thank goodness for teachers. This teaching stuff is hard! When can you take them back into the classroom?” This sentiment reigned for a while. When I look back to what it felt like going back into the classroom in the fall of 2020, despite the anxiety and fear of the unknown, the major emotion I recall feeling was gratitude. We, students and teachers alike, were grateful to return to school. Schools are unique places, there is an energy in a school that is unlike anywhere else you can go. There is an undercurrent of “what we are doing here matters,” offset by “we are all in this together.” If you don’t believe me, spend more than an hour or two in a school and see what I’m talking about.
When society moved past that emotion of gratitude for teachers and the ability to have kids in schools actively learning, we went so far past it that we left that feeling far behind in the rear-view mirror. Now we have a “pro-parent” initiative that doesn’t just imply that it is parents versus teachers; they go right out and say it. On the Moms for Liberty website, it says, “Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.” What schools are they visiting? Moms for Liberty, the Parental Rights Foundation, No Left Turn in Education, and Utah Parents United are just a few of the “parents' rights” groups that have become the very loud minority are the driving force behind the deluge of anti-teacher legislation that we are contending with, and Utah is no exception.
“But the current parents’ rights movement goes well beyond the usual channels of dialogue between families and schools—parent-teacher conferences, PTA meetings, and calls to the principal,” according to Time Magazine. “The movement is an organized, nationwide effort waged by advocacy groups, including Moms for Liberty, the Parental Rights Foundation, and No Left Turn in Education. They aim to activate parents to contest what is taught in the classroom, what books are available to students, and the professional authority of teachers, administrators, and librarians to carry out their work. This campaign goes beyond a judicious effort to prompt reconsideration of controversial aspects of certain school curricula or questions about the age-appropriateness of certain materials and narratives. Rather, its methods center on censorship and are chilling speech in classrooms nationwide.” (Nossel, S., 2022)
These organizations would cause a person to believe that schools and teachers are not qualified to determine what is appropriate to teach children, nor is it appropriate for them to determine what curriculum or teaching methods to use. Somehow, teachers have become the enemy, not intending to educate our most important resource, our children, but to indoctrinate them in some imagined ideological warfare. The number of education bills in the 2024 Utah legislative session that Utah Parents United tracks and supports is 24 (Utahparentsunited.org, 2024). They oppose only two, which means that (if I can be trusted to do the math correctly) 92% of the bills currently being discussed in the legislative session fall right along the Utah Parents United ideology. 92%. Let that number sink in.
It’s no wonder that teachers are feeling attacked and micromanaged. According to the Daily Utah Chronicle, “Why are we micromanaging teachers? S.B. 55 places a magnifying glass on everything educators do, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if it causes Utah teachers to leave their jobs. Last year, an article published by Pew asserted that the rise of parental rights legislation could push people out of the profession far earlier than expected.” (Lien, 2023). There are bills “that would give parents authorization to sue schools or education officials for any perceived infringement of their rights as a parent.” (Shott, 2023). To a bill proposing we amend the Utah Constitution, forever altering the way funding for education in Utah is allocated.
In last year’s legislative session, Utah passed its first voucher bill, the Utah Fits All Scholarship Program, which proponents of public education have long opposed simply because Utah still ranks second-to-last in per-pupil spending in the nation. At second-to-last, can anyone say that we truly have the money to offer government-funded alternatives to public education? Maybe if we were number 16 or 17 on the list, we could have that conversation. Can we aim our sights a little higher than second-to-last? (And by the way, thank you, Idaho, for funding education so poorly in 2021 that we finally got out of the last-place position).
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, The Education Law Center’s annual Making the Grade Study reviews public education spending in all 50 states and Washington DC. “The study found Utah to be a ‘low effort’ state, meaning its education spending is a small portion of its gross domestic product. The lesson we take from that is that, if Utah wanted to increase its funding to schools, it could enact fiscal policies that would generate more revenue to go into school systems, Farrie said.” (Nesbit, 2024).
Senator Lincoln Fillmore represents the senate district where I live. Each year, he sends out a survey to his constituents, asking them questions about various issues to see where they stand and to, hopefully, take our voices with him into the legislative session. It sounds great, and every year, I hopefully fill it out. This year, I was horrified to see that one question asks if the legislature should “put strict limits on what is acceptable for teachers to say regarding controversial subjects and strictly define what is allowed in the classroom” or if “the legislature should put the focus on appropriate punishments for the rare instances where teachers do cross the line.” Now, I can’t help but read those and look for secret option C: “none of the above.” To read the state of relations between the Utah State Government and Teachers from those two options, I would say it sounds like the only issue at debate is how much punishment these teachers deserve. Is this what the state who values “small government” envisions? The government determines every little thing that can and cannot be done, said, or displayed in a Utah classroom.
I am calling for strongly reconsidering the government's role in education.
I am calling for strongly reconsidering the government's role in education. Legislators should build bridges between parents and teachers, not casting doubt, aspersions, and undermining the good work that happens every day in every school in this state. In Utah, we do more with our second-to-last in the nation per pupil funding than any other state. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, “Despite its frugal approach to education funding, Utah has consistently outperformed higher-spending states in some academic areas.” Utah teachers do more with less. We still hold ourselves to the high moral and ethical mandate of educating every student who walks into the classroom. We don’t say, “Well, we would do more to educate these kids, but the legislature didn’t give us the funding.” The Salt Lake Tribune continues:
“In math, Utah excels, sharing the top spot with Massachusetts — which spends more than double on its students — for the highest percentage of eighth graders scoring above proficient in 2022, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Utah also secured the No. 5 spot for the percentage of fourth graders scoring above proficient in math.
"Utah’s fourth and eighth graders also outperform their counterparts in higher-spending states for reading proficiency, ranking No. 3 for eighth grade and No. 7 for fourth grade, according to NAEP."
According to a Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute report, the state has also documented fewer pandemic-related learning losses than other states. Notably, Utah was the only state where eighth-grade math didn’t see significant declines post-COVID.”
This is good news! Teachers and students are working hard in Utah’s schools. We are progressing in math, reading, and science proficiency, even under challenging circumstances. It doesn’t have to be an “us against them” mentality. Teachers and parents are on the same team. We all want the same thing, namely, an excellent education for all Utah kids. My simple request during this Utah legislative session is, if we are all on the same team, “can’t we all just get along? Legislators, please lead the way in building bridges and remind parents and teachers how amazing we can be when we work together, trusting one another’s intentions and bringing about great educational results for Utah’s students.
References
2024 Legislative Session. (n.d.). Utah Parents United. Retrieved January 28, 2024, from www.utahparentsunited.org/2022-196166.html
2024 Survey — . (n.d.). Lincoln Fillmore. Retrieved January 28, 2024, from www.lincolnfillmore.com/
Cortez, M. (2022, January 28). Teachers, parents rights group clash on bills seeking parent role in curriculum. www.deseret.com/utah/2022/1/27/22904667/teachers-parents-rights-group-disagree-bills-teachers-required-to-post-curriculum-utah-legislature
Lien, K. (n.d.). Lien: Stop Policing Utah Teachers - The Daily Utah Chronicle. The Daily Utah Chronicle - The University of Utah’s Independent Student Voice. Retrieved January 28, 2024, from dailyutahchronicle.com/2023/02/06/lien-utah-schools-parents-censorship-curriculum/
Nossel, S. (2022, September 20). Parents Should Have a Voice in Their Kids’ Education But We’ve Gone Too Far. TIME; Time. time.com/6215119/parents-rights-education-gone-too-far/
Resources | M4L National - USA | . (n.d.). Moms for Liberty. Retrieved January 28, 2024, from portal.momsforliberty.org/resources/
Teacher salaries, school choice scholarship to be linked in new bill. (n.d.). Retrieved January 28, 2024, from https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/utah-teacher-salaries-school-choice-scholarship-will-be-linked-in-new-bill
Utah has no plans to change lowest-in-nation education spending, officials say. (2024, January 8). www.sltrib.com/news/education/2024/01/08/utah-not-race-outspend-other/
Utah parents could sue education officials or teachers for almost any reason under the proposed bill. (2022, February 3). www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2022/02/03/utah-parents-could-sue/
