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- Christopher Rufo, who sparked a CRT debate in 2020, is promoting “curriculum transparency” bills.
- He and other conservatives say legislation will help parents hold school systems accountable.
- Others say the bills will chill teachers and further restrict talk of race and gender in schools.
A key instigator in the fights over the teaching of race in classrooms is now promoting the idea of “curriculum transparency,” an innocuous-sounding premise that’s become the latest battleground in education culture wars.
Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow who sparked the current political debate about critical race theory in 2020 on Fox News, set a goal in January of more than 10 state legislatures passing bills to make all teaching materials available to parents online.
Curriculum transparency bills introduced by conservative lawmakers mainly include requirements to post all classroom assignments and materials on a website, although some lawmakers have gone as far as calling for cameras in classes or allowing taxpayers to observe classroom instruction “at any time requested.”
Rufo and other conservatives say curriculum transparency bills would help parents hold school systems accountable. “We should be deeply skeptical of schools and teachers who would rather keep their curricula a secret,” he told Insider. “That’s the classic warning sign for incompetence, fanaticism, or abuse.”
But to civil liberties advocates, the bills are conservatives’ latest attempt to chill teacher innovation and restrict conversations about race and gender in schools by asking educators to publicize microscopic levels of detail about what they teach.
The idea is catching fire in state legislatures, with bills proposed in 19 states, by Rufo’s count. He sees “curriculum transparency” as a “political winner” and the “next phase” in the debate over public schools after Covid-19 school closures and critical race theory.
“The Left will expect that, after passing so-called ‘CRT bans’ last year, we will overplay our hand,” he tweeted in January. “By moving to curriculum transparency, we will deflate that argument and bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency,’ which will raise the question: what are they trying to hide?”
Courtesy of Christopher Rufo
‘Sort of a red flag’
Conservatives hoping to become the “party of parents” this election season are promoting the idea as they try to tap into parental frustrations over COVID-19 and what’s being taught in school, including masks, controversial books, and lessons on race and gender. “The fact that woke bureaucrats are this terrified by transparency proves exactly, exactly why parents deserve it,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said during a Senate floor speech,
House Republicans’ “Parents Bill of Rights Act” calls for school districts to post curriculum publicly. And some Republican governors included curriculum transparency in state-of-the-state addresses.
“Let’s require all that a child is taught, all curriculum and academic materials be put online and available to search and review by every parent, grandparent and interested citizen,” said Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who chairs the Republican Governors Association, during his address.
Civil liberties groups don’t dispute that parents should be involved in their children’s education. The concern, however, is that it chills teaching and creates an administrative burden for educators that will drive more from the profession.
In Utah, former history teacher Kathryn Prater said discussions of forthcoming curriculum transparency legislation was partly why she quit in July 2021. The idea of posting every single lesson plan and instructional material for approval “by people who do not have the professional training and knowledge to review lesson materials was crushing,” she said.
“I was unemployed for 5 months, living on my savings, instead of continuing in a profession where I felt so devalued,” she told Insider.
The legislation also makes it easier for angry parents to find additional conflicts with teachers, said Jeremy Young, of the free-expression organization PEN America.
“The problem is that this is a microscopic level of surveillance,” Young told Insider. “There has to be a basic level of trust here around what teachers are doing in five-minute increments.”
Curriculum transparency bills in general require all assignments be posted on a public website. But civil liberties groups point to one bill in Florida, however, that would go further, requiring cameras in classrooms and teachers to wear microphones.
“We can keep our communities informed without placing children and their teachers under a microscope,” said Emerson Sykes, staff attorney in the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, in a statement.
Bills in some states resemble policy ideas offered by the Goldwater Institute, which calls for requiring teachers to post online all materials used for instruction during the most recently completed school year, said Matt Beienburg, the group’s education policy director. Schools might say they’re transparent with their adopted curriculum, he said, but much of the controversial content is in the supplemental materials, such as the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which reframes the country’s history with a focus on slavery and Black contributions.
“If you’re concerned that the materials that are being presented to the kids are something that the parents are going to have concerns about, that’s sort of a red flag,” Beienburg said.
—Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 7, 2022
‘The biggest losers are children’
State legislatures in Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas took action in previous legislative sessions to restrict discussions about race, and race and gender in most cases, in the classroom, according to PEN America.
Rufo’s comments on Fox News in 2020, about critical race theory becoming the “default ideology of the federal bureaucracy,” led to then-President Donald Trump’s executive order — later rescinded by President Joe Biden — prohibiting certain diversity training in the federal government. The 37-year-old documentary filmmaker and writer also produced an 11-part series on “critical race theory in education” which he says “inspired a one-hour special on Tucker Carlson Tonight, and changed the national conversation on education.”
Rufo’s strategy for passing curriculum transparency legislation rests on using the “non-threatening, liberal value” of transparency to put conservatives in a “rhetorically-advantageous position,” he tweeted in January. His proposed ideas for legislation would require teachers to post curricular materials online before, or at the latest, seven days after instruction.
“Good teachers have an organized curriculum and provide parents with regular updates on what’s happening in the classroom,” Rufo told Insider. “During the pandemic, nearly every public school teacher in the country had to put all of their curriculum documents on digital platforms, such as Blackboard and Google Classroom. Curriculum transparency legislation would simply have them continue this process: providing open access to students, parents, and families.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said curriculum transparency is nothing new for good schools and school districts and it includes extensive communication between parents and educators.
“Pretending otherwise is just the latest attempt by Chris Rufo and others to exploit the frustration of COVID to chill teachers and create a toxic environment where the biggest losers are children and their recovery,” Weingarten said.
Rufo is responsible for the idea that this previously cross-partisan term “transparency” should be used “to advance bills that surveil teachers in a microscopic way,” Young said.
“His idea is that because the term seems so common-sense and so popular, that it’s a political winner for his team,” Young said. “And I think whether that’s true you know, remains to be determined. I think that people are smart enough to see through the intentional misuse and misdefinition of terms that’s going on here.”
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