Amendment 80 would give Colorado parents the right to direct their kid’s education. What does that mean for schools?

A Colorado ballot measure that seeks to constitutionally protect parents’ right to send their child to any school, including a private school, also aims to create the right for parents to direct their child’s education — raising questions about the ways parents could influence what and how students learn.

The provision within Amendment 80 follows a national movement that has seen parents across the country demand school libraries ban books they deem inappropriate for students and voice concerns about how teachers approach topics like gender and race in the classroom.

Leaders from conservative political nonprofit Advance Colorado Action, the organization behind the ballot measure, declined to comment on why they want to establish a right for Colorado parents to direct their kid’s education and how it would impact schools and educators. 

“There’s plenty of (information) out there on our position on that,” Advance Colorado Action president Michael Fields wrote in a text message to The Colorado Sun.

In an interview this month with conservative radio hosts Jeff Hunt and Bill Thorpe, the Advance Colorado Action’s executive vice president, Kristi Burton Brown, denied the provision would grant parents more authority over the kinds of lessons teachers present or the ways schools operate.

“Who (has) the final say-so over what kind of school choice is made? It’s the parent, not the government,” Burton Brown said. “And that doesn’t mean that parents are going to get to come in and say, ‘I don’t like this curriculum. I don’t like this book.’ It doesn’t give them the right to do that any more than they already have right now.”

But introducing a right for parents to direct their child’s education in the state constitution opens up the possibility for parents to sue schools to challenge homework assignments or the use of particular books, or potentially attempt to remove their child from the classroom of a gay teacher, said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.

“It’s easy to foresee a lot of troubling demands,” said Welner, who also is a professor in the CU School of Education in Boulder. “At what point can the school tell the parent to stop directing their child’s education?”

Welner noted that it’s impossible to know right now how courts would interpret the right for parents to direct their child’s education in litigation and what consequences it would bear for schools.

“I think it does open up those lawsuits,” he said. “Whether courts later close the door to those lawsuits is an open question, but I certainly expect those sorts of lawsuits.”

Parents and education advocates like Ami Prichard, president of the Colorado Parent Teacher Association, see parents as key partners in their child’s education who communicate with teachers and schools about what’s going on at home and help in making decisions about how to set their child up for success.

At the same time, parents must respect and trust the expertise of educators guiding students through classwork, said Prichard, whose organization opposes Amendment 80.

“When it comes down to how students are taught and assessed, those are the kinds of decisions that are made by people who have advanced degrees in education and child welfare,” Prichard said. “The parent is the expert on their child. The educator is the expert on the curriculum. And so being able to put those two things together can really make education work for every kid.”

Prichard said she worries about the ballot measure destabilizing classrooms and overwhelming teachers with input from outside the classroom.

“There are a lot of different ways that parents can make their voice heard and can advocate on behalf of not only their own student but on behalf of all students, but it’s a totally different situation when you’re having people who are untrained in education coming in making decisions about which curriculum is best,” she said. “For a teacher to have 150 kids with 150 different ideas about what they should be teaching, there’s just no way to make that work.”

Prichard, who described the language around giving parents the right to direct their child’s education as “vague,” sees a direct tie between Amendment 80 and the national parental rights movement. The conservative movement gained steam in recent years as culture wars divided teachers, parents and school board members in districts across the country over what kinds of books kids should be exposed to and how they should learn about race, history and gender.

Many of those involved in the movement have long advocated for voucher programs, and now see an opportunity to advance that cause, including by demonizing teachers and public education, said Jack Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the Center for Education Policy.

“You thought your kid’s school was doing a good job,” Schneider said. “You thought that you supported public education in your community, but actually what’s happening is Marxist educators have run wild and are now indoctrinating kids, teaching white kids to hate themselves, running gender reassignment camps and whatever other just total lies they can get away with peddling. Then you’ll possibly be able to get people to go along with a scheme like private school vouchers that … has historically been unpopular but which might be popular if you can convince people that public education is no longer worth the effort.”

That movement has lost much of its momentum across the U.S., in part because many parents are happy with the education their kids are receiving, Schneider said. He added that parents have “robust rights” in schools that have consistently been reaffirmed by courts, including the right to ensure that their children are not being discriminated against according to their race, gender or ability, he said.

Still, some parents like Yazmin Navarro, who is running for a State Board of Education seat in the highly competitive 8th Congressional District, claim that parents’ rights in schools are eroding with the lines of communication between schools and parents breaking down.

“To me, parental rights mean that I have the final say on anything that happens with my child educationally and anything that happens in school I should be notified about,” said Navarro, who has one young child enrolled in a charter school. “I don’t care if she scraped her knee. I need to know this information. To me, it’s very simple.”

Navarro, a Johnstown Republican, said she worries that some school districts are keeping critical information from parents, such as the specific pronouns kids want to use.

“It’s common sense,” she said. “It’s common courtesy. We are letting you borrow our children with the idea that you’re there to educate our children in academics. That’s it. And the fact that you’re doing more than that and especially when you’re not notifying parents, that’s a big problem.”

Navarro added that parents also need to be able to review curriculum before it comes across the desk of their student.

“I do believe that it is important that parents should be able to see ahead of time what’s going to be on the curriculum,” she said, “so they can make a decision for their family, what’s going to be best for their family.”

That approach stands to create major disruptions in schools, said Prichard, of Colorado PTA.

“It basically throws our entire system into chaos and it takes away school boards’ rights to be able to oversee curriculum and to be able to implement a guaranteed and viable curriculum,” Prichard said. “It takes away our State Board of Education’s rights to be able to pass and implement standards. It takes away all of the things, the pillars that our education system stands on and implements chaos. And chaos is just never good for schools. It’s never good for kids.”

Amendment 80 would need the support of 55% of voters to pass on Nov. 5.

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