It appears lawmakers are adamant to burrow their way into our public classrooms to decide what should be taught based on their own personal values, regardless of who shares them. It’s a marked shift from previous Montana Legislative Sessions in which the pet issues remained focused on making judicial races partisan, abortions less available and guns easier to carry.
This year the legislative measures making the most noise are those involving schools where, critics contend, overpaid and pro-indoctrination public employees are trying to brainwash your children.
What once was a relatively revered American institution – public education – is now viewed unfavorably by 55% of the population, according to a recent Gallup poll, tied for the highest rate in the last 20 years.
The question is, why? Why are parents skeptical of what is happening during the six hours or so their kids are at school? Why do they assume something nefarious is going on? And why has that perception changed since those skeptics were kids themselves learning U.S. history and social studies?
I have an idea. That old adage, “all news is local,” has flipped. It’s now, “all news is national.” Or, to take it a step further, “all the information flooding my internet stream, whether true or relevant, is probably happening here and I’m really mad about it.”
Sure, there are some bad public school teachers who should be weeded out of the profession. But that’s not the narrative at the Montana capitol or others across the country. Instead, lawmakers suggest there is a far larger conspiracy that should terrify all of us – one that involves local school boards, superintendents and teachers coordinating their efforts to do … what exactly? Well, that’s more difficult to discern, but I’m assuming it’s super “woke,” a word that somehow means nothing and everything all at the same time.
An example of that is so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is criticized on an endless loop of cable news segments as both anti-American and anti-white. It doesn’t matter that CRT has never been taught in any K-12 in this state or most others. That fact is drowned out by a drumbeat of individual examples of where it may or may not have infiltrated the curriculum in some far-off hamlet on the East Coast. That one anecdote spreads like wildfire, igniting rage from one media platform and one school district to the next. Eventually, we’re convinced it’s about to burn down our own backyard.
So, here we are. Montana has a housing crisis, fentanyl problem, a failing State Hospital and it desperately lacks longtime care for its rapidly aging population. It also has a $2 billion surplus to sort out. Meanwhile, our lawmakers are focused on how they think your children should act and what they should learn.
There’s a bill that seeks to open up public employees to prosecution if they show or provide children with material someone (not sure who, exactly) deems obscene. There’s one aimed at transgender youth that would allow their classmates to purposely misgender them. There’s another that would restrict public school science courses to “scientific fact” that is “observable and repeatable.”
It’s easier than ever for lawmakers to grab a pitchfork and head to the front lines of the latest culture war. But the local landscape is a far less scary place. In that same Gallup poll, where most respondents suggested K-12 educators are performing poorly, 80% said they were satisfied with their own child’s education. And the vast majority of those children attend public schools, just the latest in a long list of imaginary threats we pay politicians to grandstand about until they get distracted by the next new national narrative.