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Opinion

What the Law Says About Parents’ Rights Over Schooling

December 9, 2021 • by Joshua Weishart- For Education Week

“Why would we let adults take away students’ freedom to learn to treat each other as equals?”

People hold signs and chant during a meeting of the North Allegheny School District school board regarding the district's mask policy, at at North Allegheny Senior High School in McCandless, Pa., on Aug. 25, 2021. A growing number of school board members across the U.S. are resigning or questioning their willingness to serve as meetings have devolved into shouting contests over contentious issues including masks in schools.
People at a school board meeting in late August protest the mask policy set by the North Allegheny school district in Western Pennsylvania. Alexandra Wimley/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP

It is the rallying cry heard in supermajority-controlled statehouses, contentious school board meetings, and the run-up to Virginia’s recent election of a Republican governor: parental freedom! A freedom that credulous, grievance-fueled parents claim they can exert in schools over the curriculum, the books in the library, even health measures during a deadly pandemic.

It’s a ruse. In our constitutional order, children’s freedoms take priority over parental freedoms. Given the overriding importance of schooling to democracy, our laws elevate and protect the rights of all children to learn and to grow as citizens.

That perspective has been lost amid the sound and fury of the education culture war over parental rights. Politicians and activists instead play to the fear that demands for equality and an honest reckoning of our nation’s past threaten parental freedom. We’ve heard that before.

READ the full article in Education Week

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Joshua Weishart is a law professor at West Virginia University. He studies education rights with an emphasis on state constitutional demands of equality, freedom, and democracy in public education. His article, “Separate But Free,” forthcoming in the Florida Law Review, examines constitutional protections against segregative school policies and practices.

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