Supreme Court weighs who should decide on the public school curriculum: judge or school board?
Parents of multiple faiths, even children, mobilized the school board to hear their views, and as many as 1,000 people gathered for a school board meeting. In one of the meetings, a boy who identified himself as Nick said he likes to have story books including LGBTQ characters.
“We have the right, too,” he said. “We should have books and things to teach in schools. It’s not about touching you, physically hurting you…I don’t know why you hate it so much.”
On Tuesday, parents who opposed the books made two important points. First, the Supreme Court has long ruled that parents are responsible for guiding their children’s values, and second, in public schools, they force their children to violate the constitutional guarantees that the freedom to exercise religion is guaranteed.
As Morrison, a mother of a young man with special needs, said: “It’s really heartbreaking, how many parents I feel they have to choose between educating their children and raising them with faith.”
When she left the job of a stomatologist to her daughter’s homeschool, she noted that many parents cannot do this and cannot afford private schools.
Eric Baxter, the Beckett Foundation’s attorney for the Religious Freedom Foundation, represented the Supreme Court’s opposition parents on Tuesday, and will tell the justice that the school has allowed withdrawal for decades due to religious reasons.
“Most people think that their children should have a time to not have to deal with these heavier topics,” he said. “It depends on the identity of the child, how to form a family, have a child. Most people think it is the most important decision you make in your life.”
So how should school districts draw a clear line? Should parents be able to remove their children from science lessons when discussing Darwin’s theory of evolution? Should they be able to withdraw from a history class that includes parts about the women’s movement and the struggle for equality in the workforce? Some religions oppose these two things.
Baxter solves the problem of teaching evolution: “What if a child wants to choose not to dissect frogs during biology? Many states actually have laws that allow opt-out.”
Posts on the school board
Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale University, notes Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, Supreme Court and American Thought Fight. He and Stanford law professor Eugene Volokh have written extensively about the First Amendment, and they submitted friends with the court summary, in which case he worked with the school board. They said in most cases that the court has deferred the court to the local school board unless there is evidence that students are forced to accept potential religious beliefs.
These two scholars believe that there is no evidence of coercion here. Instead, as the driver said, “In my opinion…this process [is] It should work. People raised objections, and the district heard these objections and revised their practice. ”
He believes that this is not a situation where children are forced to attribute to religious beliefs. Some cases are that some parents want to avoid having their children even exposed to various ideas in class, including a book, in which one of them attends an uncle’s wedding with another man.
“The purpose of public schools is for a broad group, and some will doubt the course decision,” the driver argues. “However, the tradition of allowing these people to carry a day is not the tradition of the court. … In a large, religiously diverse country like the United States, local public schools do not have to bear these exits due to the operational issues of public schools.”
Indeed, because the school board does reflect the views of its constituents, there are places like San Francisco that require some books with LBGTQ+ themes in the course.
“It is important to appreciate who is the right entity to make the course decisions,” the driver added. “Is it a public school, or a federal judge?”
That is, the chances of the Supreme Court using the case require a certain choice for religious opponents are high. The current court, led by very conservative judges (including three Trump appointments), is increasingly focused on the constitution’s assurance of separation between the church and the state, relying on the freedom to exercise the First Amendment assurance of religion.
