Who Are the Real Extremists in Our School Board Struggles?

Lately we’ve all seen reporting decrying an increase in “extremism” in our school boards. 

From articles telling us “It’s becoming increasingly clear that our state is going to need a new coalition committed to keeping extremists off our public school boards”, to our Governor declaring “This is about extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children” calling out parents and groups advocating for kids in their schools are now being labelled as “extremists.”

I’ve been to many school board meetings, and conflicts are certainly on the rise. But is it parents who are the extremists in these clashes?

Tagging your opposition with a label to generate a negative response is one of the most common tactics in politics.  It’s easier for one side to just throw “extremist” at the other than it is to engage in rational debate.  People know what the labels mean, simply accepting that avoids the need to actually think  through the merits of the arguments.

We recently saw the latest flare-up in Chino Valley Unified. The local school board decided the district should notify parents if their children were struggling with a mental health issue, in this case gender identity.  Our state superintendent of schools, Tony Thurmond, showed up at that meeting to speak in opposition. He was given his time to speak, exceeded that time, and his mic was cut off. When he attempted to continue speaking he was asked to be seated. Common practice in board meetings, I’ve seen that happen many times.

Thurmond did not say “we have a difference of opinion, I was allowed to speak and exceeded the allowed time.”  Instead he tweeted “”I don’t mind being thrown out of a board meeting by extremists. I can take the heat – it’s part of the job.”

For decades it has been expected that a teacher inform parents if their child appeared to be having mental health issues. That might be as innocuous as behavior issues or as serious as suicidal tendencies, but if a child was struggling with something it was the teacher’s duty to report it. This was completely accepted by the educational establishment.

That has apparently changed. Now there is supposed to be a carve-out for mental health issues related to gender identity. Those need to be kept secret. Particularly from the parents.

We’ve seen similar things happening in the “book banning” controversies. We used to expect school libraries to be curated in a way that kept materials inappropriate for kids off the shelves.  Now, at least for issues relating to gender and sexuality, that has been abandoned.

But parents advocating schools continue to report when children are experiencing mental health issues, or advocating for reasonable standards for school libraries as we’ve had in the past, are “extremists.” 

Those parents would more rightly be called “traditionalists.” They want to continue to follow a path that, in the past, lead to measurably better academic performance for kids in our schools. Many feel it is not coincidental that this focus on “things other than academics” in our schools has directly lead to the continual decline in academic performance. For some reason parents consider that important.

But we’re not going to call them traditionalists because there is no negative knee-jerk reaction to that word. People reading that might actually be willing to try to understand their position – and perhaps even agree with them. Better to call them extremists, because then we don’t have to think.

The true extremists are not these parents, but those who have taken our education system away from its focus on academics and instead promote such radical change, in ways that don’t appear to be working as well to educate our kids.

Mr. Thurmond apparently felt it was important enough to berate a local school board for it’s focus on parental involvement to take a day and fly to Southern California to do it. Has he ever visited a school district to berate them for doing an increasingly bad job of educating kids?

There are many districts that spent their recent vast increase in education funding on things that have nothing to do with improving education, including enormous bonus raises in adult pay and benefits. What if he spent his time at the podium pointing out a district’s failure to accomplish it’s core function of education, instead of trying to stifle parent involvement.

Let’s recognize who the extremists truly are here – they aren’t parents who just want better for their kids.