Journal Article

The New Parents' Rights Movement, Education, and Equality

Bowman, Kristine L.

2024

Overview

In previous decades, claims of parents' rights in education focused largely on parents opting their children out: out of newly integrated schools and into segregated ones, out of sex education, out of traditional public schools, and into charter schools, private schools, or homeschools. These opt-out educational policies are grounded in the idea that parents should have significant, if not complete, control over how their children are educated. There are substantial risks to society when this belief about educational decision-making becomes the dominant one, however. Most notably, although prioritizing parents as decision-makers fosters viewpoint diversity in the short term by enabling families to more easily pass along their worldviews to their children, it also feeds polarization because the state's interests in creating a shared civic identity, incorporating a range of worldviews, and creating citizens that perpetuate democracy, are not part of decisions about children's education (or if they are, it is coincidental that parents share these interests). This risk of exacerbating polarization is particularly dangerous at the present moment, when the United States has been designated a backsliding democracy.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Law Review,University of Chicago Law School,University of Chicago, acting on behalf of the University of Chicago Law Review
• Subject: Children & youth / Critical race theory / Decision making / Education / Education and state / Egalitarianism / Legal status, laws, etc / Parents / Racism in education / Segregation in education / Sex instruction / Symposium / U.S. states