When You Know You Don't Know You Must Find Out
The argument that parents already have access to all the curriculum -- what is taught in the classroom -- is disingenuous at best. I explain below.
People who think the Parents’ Rights movement is just cover for fascist would-be-Nazis prevented from daily book-burning rallies only by the time requirements of work and child-rearing claim that the movement is a sham because parents already have access to the curriculum and teachers’ lesson plans.
That is patently false.
The Truth About Lesson Plans
First of all, most teachers don’t make lesson plans after the first or second year of teaching. They just throw their curriculum on loop for the next 28 years until they can collect their pension. In twenty years of teaching, I have never seen a teacher share lesson plans with anyone other than an administrator because nobody follows them and nobody cares what’s on them.
Here’s a lesson plan template pretty typical of what I’ve seen at the secondary level over the last 20 years.
Keep in mind that English teachers can spend months on a novel, with one lesson/unit plan for the entire thing, emphasizing only the standards and skills she deems “essential”. Do you really think a parent is going to get any meaningful information about their child’s day-to-day classroom experience from this form?
Certain words used within this form might set off my alarm, but I’m a PTSD-ridden survivor of tedious, repetitive teacher trainings pushing the corrupt praxis of Critical Race and Queer Theory in the K12 classroom, so my antenna for this garbage is fine-tuned. The only helpful thing here for parents would be in two places: the Essential Question and the box labeled Materials, where a teacher might list outside readings.
So you could certainly ask for these documents, and most teachers who could actually produce them (like I said, most secondary teachers don’t write these unless forced) probably would share them with you, but the information won’t be very useful.
A more helpful question would be to ask your child’s teachers which websites they recommend you visit to support your child’s success. They may not be willing to tell you the truth on this, especially if they’re aware that they’re pushing a particular set of beliefs.
Then again, some teachers may not even realize they’re pushing a particular viewpoint. They were young and they’ve been trained, sometimes obliquely, sometimes openly, in Freirean pedagogy. Many teachers then search for free lesson plans and materials with this pedagogical model as a baseline. There are plenty of nonprofits not only publishing full units to give away free, like the 1619 Project Education Materials Collections and the Zinn Education Project, they also pay Google to place these types of materials at the top of the search results for “free lesson plans”. The people running these non-profits understand the working conditions and incentive structures for teachers in public schools — they know getting their worldview into the classroom is as easy as offering free, easy to download materials to harried teachers with way too much on their plates who matriculated from training programs that taught them to view all children as oppressed and themselves as heroic freedom fighters.
If you have a teacher that doesn’t communicate openly, you can reverse search the titles of any reading material your kid brings home or accesses online with the words “ + lesson plan” added to gain insight into what your kid’s teacher may be bringing to the table.
Pedagogical Freedom Castrates State Standards
Second, while a parent does have access to all the standards teachers are supposed to teach, in many states teachers have enormous pedagogical freedom. This means they choose not only their teaching method, but how much time the class will spend on any particular academic standard.
As I’ve explained before, there’s no accountability for anyone in the system. Whether or not the full scope of the course gets covered doesn’t really matter. A U.S. History teacher can spend hours during a unit on the Gilded Age decrying the trusts and zero time on the enormous technological advances and improvements in standard of living for everyone. During the unit on Progressivism, she can speak wholly about the benefits of socialism and its heroes without covering the ills of the same ideology as they occurred in Bolshevik Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba or Venezuela under Maduro.
English teachers can spend an entire year inundating your kid with short pieces built around a social justice agenda,, completely ignoring the greats of Western civ. The Burbank school district removed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men from all English classes. Even if some of the great titles of Western civ remain in the District-mandated curriculum, a teacher can relegate them to at-home reading assignments that will not be discussed or tested, thereby giving students a de facto pass on reading any of those titles at all.
In any class, each assignment, every essay, every research paper could be forced into a narrow domain thrusting political activism ahead of understanding, usually requiring only that your child parrot back the teacher’s views.
What Are They Reading?
A teacher’s pedagogical choices will largely be based on her own education (or lack thereof), so without accountability for sticking to outlined curriculum, they will likely choose readings that support their worldview. Graduates of soft major disciplines frequently end up entering teacher training schools when they realize their degree is non-remunerative, so they may only have tangential knowledge of the subject they’re responsible for teaching. They only know what they know, and they’re going to bring that into your kid’s classroom. Given the fact that the system doesn’t specifically incentivize deep learning in your core teaching subject, many teachers don’t bother reading more challenging texts in their discipline once they have tenure.
Additionally, there is no requirement that a teacher balance her coverage of a time period, a country, an issue or a debate. My AP US History teacher spent nine weeks on the Civil War in a class that was supposed to span the 1400s through the 1990s. While his knowledge was deep and his lectures excellent, a lot of topics (WWI, the Depressions, WWII, Civil Rights Era, etc.) got short shrift. When I see the curricular choices some of my colleagues make, my only relief is that I know most kids are faking their way through all of it.
The good (?) news is that many teachers just don’t know all that much about their content, so they rely on the teacher’s manual. Unfortunately, textbooks often censor under the guise of succinctness and generally have a left bias — all the better to appeal to the Ed.D.s, who’ve had more Freirean training and who sign the purchase orders. If the textbook is an actual, physical book your kid can bring home and is the source material for most of his assignments, good. You’ll probably have a better gauge of what’s happening in class and you two can discuss it.
Having said that, the textbook generally ends up being an expensive doorstop these days. Teachers may use it to stay on a curricular timeline, but they lean on videos heavily now: reading is no longer necessary. While your kid can bring home the textbook and it won’t be too objectionable, a parent won’t have access to all the things the kid is seeing in class unless all the URLs are posted online.
I can’t say this enough: you must talk to your child about what he’s learning. You can’t send your kid to Rome 7 hours a day for 13 years and not expect he’ll return home a Roman. It’s up to you to propose alternate viewpoints. Church on Sunday isn’t enough either. 30 minutes at dinner probably isn’t enough. If your kid would rather be on her phone than talk to you, set up a non-negotiable, evening meeting where you look over her assignments, her readings, etc., ask her how she understands them, and offer an alternative evaluation or ask nuanced questions whenever necessary. If you’re committed to good grades and a high GPA, you can read my longer piece on how to go about this, a strategy I call Honest Abe. Full disclosure: It’s a lot of work.
I strongly advise that if you’re here reading this, you give up on a perfect GPA. It’s more important to teach your child to stand up for her beliefs, even if she only does so quietly. It’s increasingly difficult for a kid to do that and maintain a high GPA, but I’ve also given you some tips for sabotage here in The Sisyphus Gambit.
The bad news is that a teacher with an agenda and charisma can have your kid spending his free evenings browsing r/Communism with you none the wiser, earning grades so good by repeating the party line you may misread his achievement level and dump $150K on college and end up with a Bolshevik. (Good news: you can fix that by refusing to let him return home after he graduates and never, ever cosigning any loans. Economics: for the win!)
But Everything’s Posted Online!
In the old days, teachers had to make copies of all materials and hand them out to students,, so checking up on them was as easy as flipping through their binder. Now, the claim is that all parents have to do is log on to Google Classroom or check the Learning Management System (LMS) to see all assignments.
Often, the only direct parent interface is to the teacher’s gradebook. If the teacher doesn’t link all the materials to the assignments in the gradebook. In my LMS I can only add one link, but LMSs can differ wildly.
Most parents, unfortunately, use grades as a proxy for how well their child is doing. Please understand that if your teenager knows you’re doing that, she is going to do what she can to keep her grade up and you out of her hair, including echoing an activist teacher while keeping what she is learning and doing under wraps to minimize your interference. If you have a great relationship with your kid, she may open up the first time you ask. If you do not, the lie that parents can oversee everything their kid is seeing and doing at school becomes dangerous.
As I said, the LMS will not have a parent-facing screen that grants access to all the readings associated with a graded assignment. I’m sure it’s possible to give parents access, but I’ve never worked in a district that does. For a parent to check on their kids’ assignments, they have to access the system through their kid’s account. This can be difficult when you’re dealing with middle and high school students who can fake their way through school by regurgitating whatever the teacher wants them to while learning nothing that might call the teacher’s statements into question.
Enter Google Classroom, where — ostensibly — everything is posted.
Sure it is... if you have a Google for Education account. Again, as a rule, parents aren’t given accounts associated with the school. Anyone outside of the school organization has to have administrative permission to get into Google Classroom in the first place, and then has to be added by each teacher to each Classroom.
I’ve never seen that — which poses a real problem for parents who share custody.
If a parent went through a lawyer, I’m pretty sure they could eventually get full access, but I taught in my district, knew the EdTech guys at the District Office, and still couldn’t effectively monitor my eldest son’s Google Classroom or SORA — an online library with hundreds of thousands of titles, most of which were pablum, some of which were harmful — account. Full disclosure: I unenrolled him shortly thereafter because despite spending his days watching YouTube shorts on his school-issued tablet, he still got As in all his classes. What a colossal waste of his youth.
The difficulty for parents of adolescents and teenagers will be in getting them to spend the time with you every evening looking over the assignments posted to the student interface and discussing the readings and videos together. This is no small time commitment because you’re going to have to read and watch those things to respond effectively to them.
This process does come with an enormous bonus if you can pull it off: it will draw you closer to your child. You are still her primary and most important teacher and always will be. Ask her what she thinks, listen attentively and empathetically, remembering yourself at her age, then explain why you think what you do. Her education will be much more robust if you make time for this. I detailed this approach in Honest Abe, strategy 1 in my playbook for dealing with activist teachers.
Keep It Down, Child; Voices Carry
Finally, I’ll touch the third rail that none of these disingenuous public school apologists ever mention: teacher lecture.
What is said in class is paramount. Every kid playing the school game knows that the most important thing to the teacher is what she harps on most often. Teenagers are experts at ferreting out teachers’ political beliefs. It’s a lot easier now since most teachers have been given carte blanche to be loud and proud leftists — kids assume anyone who doesn’t constantly spout the leftie party line is conservative. Regardless, kids who want good grades know the most reliable tactic is to repeat what is said by the teacher during class.
Unless lecture notes are required, a parent will have absolutely no idea what is being spouted as fact to her child during class time. Activist teachers who primarily lecture use a slide deck carefully composed for ease of student transcription while also providing a springboard for their favorite political rants or the raising of critical consciousness through questioning that pushes kids down a path not directly prescribed by the standards or even related to the original material. (James Lindsay offers an excellent breakdown of what this looks like in schools here.) Teacher screeds are rarely bulleted on the slide deck, so your kid won’t write them down, but will be subject to them.
The only way to know what is being said to your child is to record it all, which is legal because there is no expectation of privacy in a public school classroom. Amazon sells quite a few keychain recording devices that you can clip to a backpack if you feel the need to hear for yourself what’s going on at school. Do not do this without letting your kid know. Ideally, she will come home and tell you which teacher is going way off-trail so you can review her statements together.
If you haven’t already, explicitly instruct your child never to be alone in a room with a teacher and only converse beside an open door which, again, would mean both parties have no real expectation of privacy. While I do not recommend using the recordings in a meeting or publishing them, technology and the legal system have made it possible to listen to what is being said in the classroom. You may find out that the teacher isn’t instructing much at all, which underscores the need to review provided materials.
Family Matters
I’ll end with this. If you must keep your child enrolled in public school, nurture an open, honest, respectful relationship with him. This requires dexterity in thought and speech, emotional control, fortitude, and patience, most of which are hard to come by at the end of a workday — at least, they are for me.
But unless you can control the curriculum and can monitor the teachers, you must outwork the school system, which employs a powerful incentive structure to teach children the less they share with their parents, the better. You love your kid though. He knows it. Hopefully, he will see you are on his side even if you do make his day-to-day life more laborious than it would otherwise be by insisting on talking through his schooling every night.
Start this process early. Begin afternoon or post-dinner check ins, and review of materials. Little kids will tell you exactly what they remember and what happened. Older kids may hold things back. Hold kind, compassionate, open conversations where you take the time to listen to how your child is being shaped at school, how he is developing as a person. Share why you believe what you do. It won’t always be easy, but they’ll know that time with you every night is safe harbor in turbulent seas.
What your kid needs most is you.
If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the like button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse things have become since they left school. The system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to serve mediocre adults and maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.
"What your kid needs most is you."
That's a pretty good take. I recently sat down with my nephew to help with math exam review, and he had trouble explaining to me what the class was even about.
Imagine studying the steps of a recipe, but not even realizing you're making a meal.
The advertised curriculum may "look good," but teachers don't have the same incentives / objectives as parents / guardians. I want him grow up with the ability to take care of himself and his future family.
What do his teachers want? There's clearly a perceptual mismatch.
Warning: this piece is clearly and severely biased with a right-wing sensibility.