Sue Lani Madsen: Train up a child in the way they should go

Everyone understands how to influence the future. Catch ’em while they’re young and malleable. It’s why Sparky the Fire Dog visits elementary schools during Fire Prevention Week to teach the importance of a home fire escape plan and working smoke detectors. It’s why Joe Camel was killed off by the Federal Trade Commission in 1997 as a shady character enticing young people into a lifetime smoking habit – preferably Camel brand cigarettes. It’s why passions run high over sex and sexuality curriculum.

And it’s why school boards and school board meetings have become battlefields in a diverse society where we lack a common narrative. Things are falling apart and we can’t seem to find the center.

Michael Cannon, school board member for the Mead School District, was hoping for more discussion among the board members this week on how to address parents’ concerns. He proposed a policy that would have banned curricula influenced by critical race theory in the district, as well as one that would have banned materials referencing gender studies or gender identity in elementary libraries as age-inappropriate. The board voted both down this week. “If not the policies I proposed, we still need to address these concerns in a meaningful way.”

Some parents see anarchy and a loss of childhood innocence in post-modern curricula influenced by social justice theories (like critical race theory) and ideas about gender fluidity. Some teachers and administrators see the parents as the source of anarchy.

“When parents bring up their concerns, too often we see teachers reacting with defensiveness,” said Cannon in an interview after Monday’s Mead School Board meeting. “And we don’t want an adversarial relationship between parents and teachers. Everyone has a role to play.”

For Cannon as a school board member, that means listening to all parents as well as teachers and administrators. Parents naturally want schools to pass on their values in addition to accurate and complete history instruction, and age-appropriate literature.

Curriculum development always has good intentions but is never values-neutral, and age appropriateness is always subject to debate. The state of Washington sets standards driven by who has the ears of the powerful. For the last three decades in a state locked under Democrat leadership, those ideas have been borrowed from an increasingly aggressive progressive wing pushing a secular theology at odds with many Washington family’s values.

But not all families are equally functional, and teachers have to deal with the parents who are engaged and parents who aren’t. School meals are a literal lifeline for some kids, and school may be the only place where caring adults listen to their serious questions about life.

Stepping in to meet a need for food or clothing is one thing, stepping in to fill a perceived vacuum in belief systems is problematic. “Where there’s a vacuum, teachers will want to fill that gap but need to be careful that just because there is a need maybe the school system isn’t the right party to fill that need,” said Cannon. School boards need to circumscribe the good intentions of educators lest they overstep into parental territory.

Elected local school boards have a duty to reflect their whole community, respecting the diversity of cultural backgrounds within their schools. While the SPS Board does have a policy recognizing that “family involvement in education has a positive effect on student achievement and is an important strategy in achieving their potential,” Policy No. 4129 does not recognize the family’s role as primary. Wendy Cossette is a local parent activist from Spokane who asked Spokane Public Schools board members to consider a resolution “recognizing parents as the primary stakeholders in their children’s upbringing.” More politically, the resolution asks SPS to request the Washington State School Directors Association withdraw its membership in the National School Board Association. The NSBA was widely criticized in 2021 for its letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland linking parents, threats to school boards and federal domestic terrorism statutes. The letter became a subject of intense debate on the right while it was minimized on the left.

Neither NSBA membership nor the topic of parents’ role as primary stakeholders has been added to the SPS board meeting agenda for discussion so far this year, according to Board President Mike Wiser. It’s frustrating for Cossette, who has attended school board meetings in several local districts. She was discouraged by some of the audience reactions in Mead this week. “There’s no place for the name-calling, calling people bigots is ridiculous.”

Cannon appreciates productively engaged parents and teachers but sees the problem as the minority that goes for headlines with gotcha statements and personal attacks. “After the last two years, there’s a chasm between parents and schools, along with a general distrust for institutions in general. Parents don’t feel like their concerns will be addressed but they need to stay engaged.”

School boards long accustomed to sleepily approving budgets and adopting whatever is proposed by the experts are now at the front lines in the culture wars. It is reminiscent of the situation in 1919 when the social fabric was fraying and trust in institutions dissolving in a post-war and post-pandemic world, as so beautifully captured by William Butler Yeats in the first stanza of “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com