Here’s a simple fact of public education that is seldom, if ever, remarked upon: The vast majority of America’s 3.7 million classroom teachers are government employees. Obvious, you say? Perhaps, but then why have there been so many recent instances of teachers straying beyond their remit, second-guessing parents, and indulging often stridently ideological positions on race, gender, and other sensitive topics?
My cover story for the September issue of Commentary looks at the rising and unmistakable tendency of schools and teachers to test the limits on their authority as described by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, which unanimously recognized parents’ right to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” The Court’s opinion in Pierce famously held “the child is not the mere creature of the state,” an idea that has loomed large in education policy and practice for nearly a century. But the state seems recently inclined to say, “Oh, yeah? We’ll see about that.”
The most obvious challenge to parental prerogatives can be seen in guidance issued to schools on how to handle transgender students. Several states have declared there is no “affirmative duty” for school personnel to inform a student’s parents if a child adopts a different gender or identity in school. There are already at least a dozen court challenges over such policies. There have also been incidents of schools hiding sensitive lessons from parents, resisting curriculum transparency measures, and downplaying hot-button “culture war” topics like critical race theory as “just teaching honest history.”
But the far harder problem to solve is a professional culture that encourages teachers to see themselves as independent professionals, even activists and advocates. This elides entirely the power and influence teachers wield over impressionable children as agents of the state. Hardly a day goes by without a fresh example of a teacher courting controversy, immaturely making obscene gestures in response to parent complaints, calling them terrorists, or mocking them as bigots. As I note in the Commentary piece, we should not assume these incidents and videos are representative of teachers in American classrooms at large, but neither should it be quite so easy for Libs of Tik Tok and other outlets to find fresh examples almost daily of teachers so clearly exceeding their authority.
Watch enough of them and you cannot help but be struck by the unself-conscious, almost guileless nature of these videos, where teachers explain how to help students hide their gender identity from their parents, compare state and local control of education to a “fascist police state,” or describe how they bring their political views or social justice agendas to their teaching without any evident oversight or limiting principle. The performative nature of social media surely plays a role, but there’s something else at work. Simply stated, teachers are seldom encouraged to think of themselves as what they are in fact: agents of the state whose work demands sensitivity and humility.
Courts have tended to have a much more clear-eyed view, recognizing the power and influence teachers wield over a captive audience of students. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), for example, the Supreme Court held that a teacher’s classroom speech is the expression of a public employee conducting official duties, not protected speech. The law’s view of private teacher speech on social media is still evolving, but when a teacher takes to social media to criticize parents in profane language or boast about keeping secrets from parents it suggests that they see themselves as something other than public employees with a responsibility to be circumspect in their work and mindful of community sentiment.
A classroom teacher is obviously a different form of government service than operating a snowplow or working as a clerk at the DMV. But public-school teachers are nonetheless government employees. It’s worth pausing to reflect on how one of our largest and most important government services seems to be growing impatient with its role preparing children for productive adult life and self-government, and has determined instead to critique American life, our economic system, and other facets of civil society. In doing so, public education risks drifting into an oppositional relationship not just with parents but with the public at large. Unchecked, this impulse can only undermine the public’s trust and goodwill toward public education and teachers, and eventually threaten its legitimacy.
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