Parents Win: Radical Curriculum Pushed Out of Classrooms
School boards across the country are responding to a national grassroots movement to restore reading, writing, arithmetic — and common sense.
The story of K–12 education over the past decade is the story of an ideological apparatus that captured the personnel pipelines — schools of education, teachers' unions, district administrators, accreditors — and used the capture to push curricula that had no constituency among the parents whose children were being taught them. The story of the past two years is parents discovering, against decades of conditioning, that they have political power.
School-board elections that used to be sleepy off-year affairs have become contested races. Curriculum decisions that used to be made by administrators with no public input are being made in open meetings with cameras present. Teachers' unions that used to assume their political alignment was permanent have discovered that parents who feel betrayed are not natural Democrats. The realignment in K–12 politics is real, it is durable, and it is not finished.
What was being taught
The substance of what was being taught varied by district and changed by year, but the structural feature was constant: a vocabulary that treated traditional academic disciplines — reading instruction, mathematics, history — as either incidental or actively suspect, and that elevated identity-based frameworks as the primary lens through which everything else was filtered.
The reading-instruction story is the most damning. American elementary schools spent twenty years teaching children to read by guessing at words from context, in defiance of the cognitive-science research that shows children learn to read through systematic phonics instruction. The defenders of the guessing approach were the schools of education that had credentialed two generations of teachers in it. The cost of the error, measured in literacy outcomes, has been catastrophic, particularly for the children of parents without the resources to teach their children to read at home.
Parents are not, despite a decade of being told otherwise, a special-interest group. They are the constituency that determines what schools are for.
What is replacing it
The replacement is happening on three tracks. First, structured-literacy and phonics-based reading instruction is being mandated state by state — initially in red states, increasingly across the political spectrum, because the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore once parents demand it. Second, the math and science curricula that had been hollowed out in service of equity-framed pedagogy are being rebuilt around content. Third, the social-studies curricula that had become exercises in present-day political activism are being rebuilt around the actual historical record, which on examination is more interesting and more morally complex than the activist version it had displaced.
The institutional fight
The institutional resistance is real. The schools of education are still credentialing teachers in the failed pedagogies because the failed pedagogies are what the schools of education know how to teach. The teachers' unions are still defending the failed pedagogies because the alternative would require admitting their members had been trained badly. The accrediting bodies are still accrediting the schools of education because the accrediting bodies are themselves staffed by the schools of education's graduates.
The breakthrough strategy has been to bypass the institutional resistance through state legislation. State legislatures, accountable to voters, can mandate what is taught in public schools regardless of what the credentialing apparatus would prefer. The legislatures have, increasingly, used that authority. The results — measured in third-grade reading scores in states that have implemented structured literacy — are visible within two years.
What this means going forward
The fight over K–12 is not over. The institutional apparatus that captured the curricula remains, mostly, in place. What has changed is that parents have learned how to use the political tools available to them, and that the political coalition aligned with parents' interests has expanded beyond its traditional base. The schools of the next decade are going to look different from the schools of the past decade. The change is downstream of the political will to make it happen, and the political will is, for the first time in a generation, present.