Starting this fall, Minnesota public schools will be required to teach third-graders to use non-binary gender pronouns in their writing, reports Catrin Wigfall for The American Experiment.
How many parents want this? I'm guess not very many. But, unless they can afford to pay private-school tuition, they don't have a choice.
School choice options, notably parent-controlled Education Savings Accounts, are expanding rapidly in the U.S. But, in many other countries, "educational pluralism" is the norm, Ashley Rogers Berner tells Kevin Mahnken in a 74 interview.
Only 30 percent of Dutch children, attend a district-run school, notes Berner, director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins. The rest attend secular and religious schools supported by the state. Australia’s federal government helps to subsidize the private-school tuition of low-income students. Top-scoring Singapore funds a variety of private and religious schools.
"According to UNESCO, 171 out of 204 countries are pluralistic in some fashion," says Berner. The U.S. is an "outlier."
The culture war in the U.S. would be eased if parents could choose a school that fit their values, she argues in her book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy.
Education cannot be neutral. It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin. And interestingly, one of the big Progressive complaints about district schools is that — because they can’t answer some of the deeper questions with explicit moral frameworks — they unintentionally reinforce the baseline culture of the United States of individualism and utilitarianism. It’s just going to default to whatever the cultural majority is.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in April on whether Oklahoma's ban on religious charter schools is unconstitutional discrimination against religion. Berner doesn't think the case is critical to establishing a pluralistic system. "The funding is already happening, and there’s a wide array of state policies making it possible," she says. "You’ve got Iowa, where ESAs can be applied to any private school."
She worries about states like Arizona and Florida, which give parents ESAs with "a huge menu of options" and not much in the way of quality control. "What I’m hoping will happen is that the momentum to expand options will be met with a reasonable concern for academic quality."
In Illinois, the teachers' union killed bipartisan choice legislation that would have funded district schools, tax credits for low-income children to go to private schools and mandatory testing for students, she says. It would have been "a reasonable approach" to give families good options. "You have to test outcomes."
She's looking for a middle way between the dogmatism of the left, which argues that only the union-run district schools are legitimate, and the dogmatism of the right, which argues parental autonomy is "sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role."