What’s
Wrong Today:
Most of us have overdosed on New
Hampshire politics for the past few days, but the big story in the Granite State was not the primary.
It was the vote last Wednesday by the
NH House (255-112) and the NH Senate (17-5) to
override Governor John Lynch’s July veto of H.B. 542, a law which allows
parents to demand alternative school curricula for anything in the approved
school curriculum that they find objectionable.
Under H.B. 542, the “Parental Conscience
Act”, NH parents can reject everything from methodology to the topics or
content of assigned readings in individual classes. It allows them to direct
their school district to provide their preferred system, or text, or belief for
their little John or Jane to study.
So, What’s Wrong?
Though this may sound appealing at first
blush, the law is so broad that it makes public education essentially an a la
carte menu: HB 542 essentially forces a self-designed curriculum of
homeschooling into the public school system. Parents who object to use of
certain books or the teaching of certain ideas can in effect, make the school
system introduce home schooling in the public schools.
“Even though the law requires
the parent to pay the cost of the alternative, the school district will still
have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the
alternative,” Gov. Lynch
noted in his statement on his veto last summer. “Classrooms will
be disrupted by students coming and going, and lacking shared knowledge.”
Think of the grand time parents can
have squabbling about the content of specific subjects like evolution or sex education and
anything else that challenges their religious or political worldview with
teachers.Think about them bitching about how the incremental costs were determined.
The bill arose out of a
“squabble” between a student and his parents
and his high school for making him read Barbara Ehrenreich’s
“Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America,” for his personal
finance course.
The student’s father said: “We’ve
eliminated Christmas, we’ve eliminated all these things because we don’t want
to step on anyone’s toes but here we’re going to hand out this book? … This is
anti-God, anti-religion, it’s racial, I mean it crosses a wide spectrum of very
touchy and very insulting issues to most human beings and I think that even
with a parental consent it’s not enough. They need to boot that book out of
there.”
When the school refused to ban the
book, the family ultimately pulled their son out and are now homeschooling him.
And that’s only part of the wider
agenda of conservative legislators in New Hampshire. They are attempting to
systematically gut one of the oldest public school systems in the United
States.
- A
failed bill last
session would have let
parents reduce their property taxes by taking their children out of the public
school system; another would have lowered the age at which a child could
legally drop out to 16 from 18.
- Pending
bills seek to pull New Hampshire out of Federal funding for schools and to give
businesses tax credits for establishing scholarships at private schools.
- A
truly bizarre bill seeks to amend the state constitution to permit the state to
stop funding the public schools and shunt funds to religious schools.
- On
the curriculum level, check out HB
1148, requiring that the teaching of evolution include “the theorists’
political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of
atheism.”
There
will always be conflicts between parents and school districts over curriculum
and philosophy and quality of education. But these are attempts to create an
educational system where children simply will not be exposed to ideas that their
parents fear, or which challenge their thinking.
You can’t
make this stuff up. The point is that with the clown car called the NH
Legislature, apparently, you won’t have to. They are willing to do all the
heavy lifting for you.
This won’t
just stop the teaching of evolution. It will stop the students’ evolution.
These New Hampshire legislators are
simply WRONG!
