The Daily Signal - What Do School Boards and Parents Want?

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Over 14,000 school boards, with about 100,000 members, set the course for instruction in classrooms across the country. To understand the views of parents and school board members in debates about K-12 content and policy, The Heritage Foundation commissioned a nationally representative survey. The survey covered views on civics education, school discipline, and character- and values-based instruction. Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss. We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden signs 17 executive orders, directives, or memorandums hours after being sworn into office Wednesday, aiming to undo much of Donald Trump's legacy as president.  The outgoing president and first lady depart the White House without meeting the Bidens, with Trump speaking to staff and other supporters at Joint Base Andrews before flying to Florida.  Recipients of Trump's dozens of pardons on his final day in office include former White House adviser Steve Bannon and two rappers, Lil Wayne and Kodak Black. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, January 21st. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Over 14,000 school boards and 100,000 school board members determine the shape and content of curriculum and instruction in classrooms across America. The Heritage Foundation recently commissioned a survey looking at what parents and school boards want when it comes to the education of their children. Lindsay Burke, Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, joins me on the Daily Signal podcast and walk us through the survey and share what she found out. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, onto our top news.

President Joe Biden signed 17 executive orders, directives, or memorandums after being sworn into office. Wednesday. Biden's executive actions directly aimed to undo the legacy of former president Donald Trump. Biden's executive actions stopped all funding to the southern border wall, reversed travel bans on several Middle Eastern and African nations, revoked a number of permits essentially bringing an end to the Keystone pipeline, and took steps to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, among other actions. Biden also made moves to re-enter the World Health Organization. During his inaugural address, Biden talked about unity. Here is one highlight via CNN.

Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. Once in a century virus that silently stalks the country, It's taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice, some 400 years in the making, moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.

The cry for survival comes from the planet itself. a cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. unity, unity.

In another January, on New Year's Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, and I quote, If my name ever goes down into history, it'll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. My whole soul is in it. Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation.

And I ask every American to join me in this cause. Biden also said he would work to represent those who did not support him via ABC News. I'm humbled by the faith you've placed in us. To all those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy.

That's America. The right to dissent peaceably within the guardrails of our republic is perhaps this nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly. Disagreement must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you. I will be a president for all. all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you, I will fight as hard for those who did not

support me as for those who did. Many centuries ago, St. Augustine, a saint in my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love, defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love that as Americans. I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor, and yes, the truth. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump departed from the White House early Wednesday morning. Trump gave final remarks to supporters and staff at Joint Base Andrews before departing for Florida. The president told the crowd gathered that we will be back, in some form per Fox News.

The future of this country has never been better. I wish the new administration, great luck and great success. I think they'll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular. And again, we put it in a position like it's never been before, despite the worst plague to hit since, I guess you'd say, 1917 over a hundred years ago. And despite that, despite that, the things that we've done have been just incredible. And I couldn't have done it without you. So just a goodbye. We love you. We will be back

in some form. Before leaving the White House on Wednesday morning, former President Donald Trump pardoned dozens of people, including former White House advisor Steve Bannon and two wrappers, Lowe Wayne and Kodak Black. In total, Trump gave 73 pardons and 70 sentence commutations, including the commuting of the sentence of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was serving an almost 30-year sentence. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Lindsay Burke on what school boards, school board members, and parents want in the education of their children. Conservative women. Conservative feminists. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen, and every Thursday morning on problematic women,

Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviews that are particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture

to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts. I'm joined today on. on the Daily Signal podcast by Lindsay Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Lindsay, it's great to have you back on the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks so much for having me back. Happy to be here. Well, it's great to have you with us. So the Heritage Foundation commissioned a nationally representative survey to understand the views of parents and school board members on current debates

about content and policy in K-12 schools. So Lindsay, can you just start off by telling us about the survey? Yeah, so we were really excited. it to do this survey to get a better sense of what both parents and school board members, which I think makes this unique in a lot of respects, think about the content and the policies that are being promulgated in K-12 public schools across the country today. So we partnered with Braun Research, which is an outside survey firm to conduct this nationally representative survey. and we had a 1,001 parent respondents to the survey, which is great.

We had a 22% response rate on the part of our parent participants. And then we did a sub-sample of school board members across the country, and we had 566 school board members participate in the survey. So we were able to get a really good sense of what families think about the content taught in public schools about what school board members think, and school board members are so instrumental in determining a lot of that content and a lot of those policies. And then we were also able to get a sense of where families and school board members' opinions might differ a little bit. Well, before we delve more into the survey, what did you find out just generally about

the kind of power school boards have overeducation? Yeah, that's a great question. School boards have a lot of power. over education, and I think that they are frequently overlooked. There are 14,000, roughly 14,000 school boards across the country, and about 100,000 school board members, and 95% of those school board members are elected to their positions. That's actually, they represent the largest group of elected officials in the country, those 100,000 school board members. So it's a huge group of elected officials and they determine the shape and the content of school curriculum in their districts and hold the key to how a lot of issues are handled within the borders of their districts.

They determine things like superintendent pay and school bus routes and school schedules in addition to those really important things like curriculum and textbook adoption. Well, the survey questions and findings were grouped into three overarching categories and the first one of those three categories was the 1619 projects and civics education. Lindsay, can you tell us about what you found there with that first category? Yeah, so this was, I think, one of the issues that really initially drove our desire to do this survey. The 1619 project, this is something that the New York Times published in 2019, really has gotten a lot of ink.

There have been just a lot of eyeballs on the 1619. project over the past year, two years almost now. And that is in part because the goal of that project is self-described was to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our country's foundational date. So moving away from this idea that America was really founded as we know it in 1776 and trying to change the sort of national dialogue around that to situate our founding year is 1619. And so that's something that has gained a lot of traction. 4,500 classrooms across the country have adopted the 1619 project. And so the extent to which this project is making its way into classrooms across the country,

and then an overall sense that we have, which we wanted to confirm in a way, that parents, families have some concern about the state of civics education in America in particular. Those two issues really drove our desire to do this survey. So we did, we grouped into three buckets, 1619 project. We also surveyed about character education and then other issues like sexual orientation and gender identities that are taught in school in the survey. So we grouped those three areas together. And so when we started off the survey, we asked, first we ask families about their feelings about the 1619 project and about civics education. And of course we asked these questions, same questions, to school board members as well.

And what we found was that parents are generally satisfied with the civics instruction delivered in K-12 schools. And that finding really held across demographic groups. What was notable was that school board members largely disagreed, nearly two-thirds of our school board member respondents believe that schools do not provide enough instruction in civics. So that was one of those areas where there was a disconnect between where parents are and where school board members are. And then parents and school board members really did have pretty mixed feelings about this sort of, those revisions of history that we're seeing with the 1619 project. And so that was another area that was of interest to us was to see how those families

and school board members felt about the 1619 project, 50% of all parents and 70% of all school board members in our survey said that they do not want schools to use instructional material that is based on the idea that slavery is the center of our national narrative, which the 1619 project does. So there were a lot of other findings on those particular areas on 1619 and civics education.

And so we, have a lot more of that in the survey, but those were a few of the things that really jumped out to me. And I'll say one more thing on that. Just 25% of parents, just a quarter of parents, and only 17% of school board members believe that students should be taught that the founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written and that American history should be reframed. And so that, I think, was another really important finding because what we see parents and school board members expressed in this survey, again, nationally representative survey, was very much in disagreement with some of the ideas that are espoused in these rewrites of history that we're

seeing. The second category, Lindsay, as you mentioned, was that of the success sequence and restorative justice. Can you talk about what was found here? So this, so character education and the success sequence were two of the really, really, I think, bright spots in the survey. This is where we saw a really positive responses on the part of both families and school board members. So a couple of examples there. Most parents believe that character and virtue should be cornerstones of education in America. And we see that because about 83 percent, so more than 8 in 10, parents want schools to instill character and virtue and children. And that was another one of those findings that held across demographic groups. and 89% right, nearly nine and ten school board members believe that schools should teach character and virtue education.

And so that was a really interesting finding. Some of the strongest levels of support for any of the policies that we surveyed was on something called the success sequence. And the success sequence, if you're not familiar with it, is the term that has been coined for the research that demonstrates that graduating high school, getting a job and getting married before having children significantly reduces the likelihood of an individual ending up in poverty. And so what we sought to do in the survey was basically ask about this idea, should schools explicitly teach the success sequence? And among parents, 72% believe that schools should do that, that they should explicitly teach children, that that success sequence, if you follow it likely means you will avoid poverty. And 60% of school board members agreed with that as well.

And so that was a really, I think, positive and notable finding and shows that there truly is an appetite among families for public schools to engage in character and virtue development and even things like the success sequence. Well, the third category was sexual orientation and gender identity and the life issues in schools. Can you talk about what was found in this category as well? Yeah, so this is another category that we wanted to look at because we do see a lot of policies promulgated or attempted to be promulgated in schools around these issues,

these SOGI issues. And so we wanted to ask some questions explicitly getting at how parents and school board members feel about this. And so parents, a couple of the big findings, there are 66% of parents, and 80% of school board members, 8 out of 10, do not believe that schools should teach young children in kindergarten and elementary school about sexual activity, sexual orientation, and gender identity issues. So these are younger students, certainly. The other thing that stood out was although public school districts, some, have policies that prevent school staff from disclosing information about a child's gender identity to families.

So the district will say to a school, you cannot disclose to a family information about your child's gender identity. Parents, 70% of parents and 60% of school boards believe that schools should indeed inform parents if their child identifies as transgender or has questions relating to his or her gender identity. So we got into other questions as well around life issues in this category. there was more support, 61% of parents, 68% of school board members for providing students with information about contraception for schools doing that. But both of these groups drew the line at abortion. 62% of parents and 70% of school board members do not believe that schools should provide students with information on how to access an abortion.

So that was a really important finding that, you know, while they may be okay, to some extent with information on contraception. They draw the line very clearly at giving students information about how to access an abortion. And I would just quickly say on the methodology for this survey, I think it's important to be certainly transparent on the respondents. While the parent portion was nationally representative, it was equal across, you know, all demographic groups aligned with all the census data that are out there, the school the school board member portion did skew a little older, and it skewed a little more southern.

And so I do think that's an important caveat to keep in the back of our minds as we're looking at some of these survey findings. Well, thank you for sharing that. So, Lindsay, from a broader perspective, given these three categories that we just discussed, can you talk about what your perspective is on how parents and school members are just viewing these current debates that are being discussed, right now in K-12 content and policy. Yeah, well, you know, I think first on some of the civics content, you know, like I said at the beginning, this is really on the hearts and minds of parents across the country and all Americans, I think, quite frankly, are interested in seeing genuine civics instruction

in schools and a real restoration of how we teach genuine civics education, love of country, you know, basic function ideas. about how the government functions, et cetera. And there does seem to be a sense that we've moved away from that and need to sort of get back to basics in terms of civics instruction. And I think a lot of our findings in this survey reinforced that idea. I also think what's really interesting is on some of these questions about values-based instruction and character development,

the findings from our survey suggests, I think, that public schools should not shy away from talking to students about these things, about talking about things like the success sequence. There is no such thing as a values-neutral school. Even the things that schools choose not to talk about signal some sort of value judgment on their part. And families want their children to know the data about different life choices that are out there. and schools can provide that data to students in a way that really does empower them. And I think that's important. I think that will equip students with a really critical information they need about the choices that they can make to help

or the choices they can make to impede their climb up that ladder of upward economic mobility. And so I think all of these survey findings really enforce that idea. And look, I mean, to me, I know I sound like a broken record. But I also think a lot of this reinforces the need for school choice. Like I said, schools are not values neutral institutions and families should have the ability and the option to select into learning environments that are the right fit for their children and that reflect their values and aspirations and hopes for their children. Well, Lindsay, can you talk a little bit about how policymakers can make it easier for parents

to select schools that reflect their values and goals for their goals for their. their children. I know you did mention school choice and so are you able to expound on how policy members can play a role on an expanding choice? Yeah, so choice to my mind is the number one goal that policymakers should be working toward, at least in the K-12 education policy space at the state level in particular. You know, states should be moving and the pandemic has made it more clear than ever toward funding students rather than systems. And the way that they can do that, there are lots of ways, right, vouchers, tax credit scholarships, but the way that has really provided the most flexibility to families is through education savings accounts. And we're saying

more and more states move in this direction. ESAs fund families directly. They give them a portion of the money that would have been spent on their child in the public school. And they can then use that at not only any school of choice, but any learning option of choice, any private tutor, online learning, they can buy curricula and special education services and therapies if they need it. So ESAs really provide that maximum level of flexibility to families, and that I think is the way to go. And as we're seeing more and more states adopt education choice measures, they're largely going the direction of education savings accounts. But I would also say It's not just a choice that needs to be a part of the conversation.

I think it's the most important part, but when we're talking about the content that's taught in schools across the country, and public schools in particular, there are other things that state policymakers can do. They should, state should require public school districts to be transparent about school curricula and textbooks and all of the related materials that they're using. state lawmakers should require public schools to make that curriculum material available for public review, immediately available to parents when they ask. So I think that curriculum transparency piece is really, really critical and a really important combination with school choice measures. And I guess last thing I would say on that, school board elections, you know, there's a role here for families to play as well with their school boards to, you know, show up at school board meetings. to talk to your school board members, to know what's in the budget, to craft questions for school board members, to ask them about the textbooks and curriculum that they're using. So being involved with your school board,

your PTA, you know, those local level governance entities is really important. Well, on that note, Lindsay, you kind of address this to the last part of the answer to your question, but are there any other ways parents in particular can make their voices heard at the local school board level? I know you mentioned getting involved in those elections, but are there any other ways you'd like to highlight where parents can be involved? I think parents can set up all kinds of different groups, right? We often maybe overlook things like setting up Facebook groups, but being involved on social media and setting up parent groups has been a really important way and a really great tool for families to communicate about lots of different education-related issues. not only the content that is taught in their schools, sharing information that they have on the textbooks

and sort of the found curriculum that teachers are using, but also look within school choice programs, right? Sharing best practices there within ESA options, talking about what tutors work really well for them. And of course right now, when we're in pandemic pod, the pandemic pod era, being able to share information about that as well. So setting up those local parent groups on Facebook, and other social media outlets is, I think, a really, really good way to get involved in addition to

identifying those local school board meetings to attend throughout the year and just sort of staying abreast of school board activities. All of that is really important. And then lastly, Lindsay, where do you see opportunities for reform in school boards across this country? There are a lot of opportunities there. You know, one, I think, of the ironies in education history, policy history, is that 100 years ago in the early 20th century, when progressive era reformers were trying to remove politics from education, they decided to move school board elections to make them off-year elections to not be aligned with general elections. I say that's ironic because that meant that turnout was really low.

Stanford's Terry Moe puts it around 10% in any given year, turnout for school board elections. And so what that has meant is that special interest groups, namely the teachers unions, are able to really dominate a lot of the narrative around those cycles. And so that's something else, I think, for families to be aware of. And I think underscores the need for families to really be involved with their school boards. Like I said, there are 100,000 school board members across the country. That's the largest group of elected officials in America. So there's a lot of opportunity there. I think to really get involved, understand the decision-making process, what your local school board is involved in, you know, everything from curricula to drawing your attendant zone boundaries, and really making your voice heard.

Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us today on the Daily Signal podcast. It's always great having you with us. Thank you for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop.

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