How Parents Are Freeing Their Kids From the Public School Monopoly

I have long said that the public school system is a form of child abuse. The Church's position is clear: 'parents have the original, primary and inalienable right to educate' their children. ~
Charter of the Rights of the Family, Presented by the Holy See to all persons, institutions and authorities concerned with the mission of the family in today's world October 22, 1983

From Catholic World Report

By John M. Grondesli, PhD

The Parent Revolution, by Corey A. De Angelis, PhD, details the fight for parents’ rights from 2020 through late 2023.

As I write this review, The New York Post reports that City Schools Chancellor David Banks cashiered an elected mother on a Manhattan Community Education Council (a parents’ advisory board). She got the boot ostensibly for criticizing a pro-Hamas editorial but really because—as she (and most observers) believe—she refused to pledge allegiance to gender ideology (on the Upper East Side, no less). It doesn’t matter that she was democratically elected: the self-anointed “guardians of democracy” will eliminate anybody whose notion of democracy is not theirs. Da, da tovarich! Happily, she’s suing Banks.

Meanwhile, a federal court just told parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who wanted to opt their kids out of the district’s “comprehensive” gender ideology program that they cannot, affirming the school board’s refusal.

The school lockdowns of 2020 opened many parents’ eyes to the ideological indoctrination being propagandized in American public schools. As parents and children shared the same quarters during online schooling, parents discovered what was “mainstream” in so many school systems. When they woke up, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department labeled them “domestic terrorists” (alongside those Catholics that go to Latin Mass). When a father whose girl was raped as a result of Loudon County, Virginia’s confusion about girl’s bathrooms being for girls, not boys, he was arrested–and is probably one reason why Democrats got kicked out of the Governor’s Mansion in Richmond.

Corey De Angelis speaks of these developments as the “parent revolution” because parents’ rights seem to have become the catalyst that finally brought school choice into prominence. The public school establishment has long arrogated a monopoly on school funds by claiming, in essence, that the proper recipients of educational funds are not students but schools. As long as students “choose” the schools approved by the establishment, you’re entitled to support. If you actually “choose” something different—tough luck.

Catholic parents have long argued about the injustice of tax dollars collected for education being steered only to certain schools (even when other schools nevertheless fulfilled the state’s educational and compulsory attendance requirements). The fact that it took until 2020 for the anti-Catholic Blaine amendments, enacted in many states in the mid-to-late 19^th century to preclude public support of parochial elementary and secondary schools, to be declared unconstitutional shows us that anti-Catholicism is alive and well in many parts of American life.

Catholic schools have always suffered a certain stigma: 2025 will be the centennial of the Supreme Court’s decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, invalidating an Oregon law that forbade parents from using parochial schools. “Parochial,” after all, has a certain pejorative connotation: it means narrow-minded or provincial, like those Catholics in their ghettos. (Never mind the changed demographics from increasing numbers of non-Catholic students have chosen to escape the government public school plantation to access a better educational environment in those “parochial” schools). Others who wanted school “choice” began turning to homeschooling or charter schools.

Few parents, however, felt capable, ready, or willing to replace schools, so homeschooling–despite its boom–would always likely remain a minority option. As for charter schools, the public school establishment, in tandem with rabid secularists, has long pursued all manner of legal handicaps for those institutions.

The COVID shutdown, however, gave parents insight into what really is going on in the average American public school–and the average American parent rightly said, “No way!” That exposure, more than all the abstract arguments about choice and justice and options, galvanized the “parental revolution.”

Catholics should, of course, be happy about this. It is a basic principle of Catholic social thought (the one part of Catholic theology that liberals sometimes applaud) that parents are the first educators of a child. The child is the parent’s, not the state’s, not the school’s, not the teacher’s, not the AFT’s, not the NEA’s, not the state or federal Department of Education’s. Schools do not “partner” with parents in educating their child: schools work for those parents. It’s time we get those lines straight and got the terminology clear.

It’s time we get the terminology clear because it’s vital. While the “moderate” spin on the question is the parent-teacher “partnership,” there’s no small number of those ready to say the state should intervene to take kids from parents who stand against its ideologies.

This usurpation of parents’ rights by the most extreme extensions of the parens patriae doctrine spreads across multiple domains. It is to be found in the nonsense of Planned Parenthood v. Danforth (still not explicitly overruled), which said Missouri could not make abortions contingent on paternal consent because, even though he is half this child’s parent, the state cannot “delegate” a “veto” to fathers. (Did you know, fathers, you are the “delegate” of your state?) It is to be found in the discriminatory exclusion of practicing Catholic parents from adoption and foster care unless they pledge allegiance to “affirming” radical transgenderism. It is to be found in the claims of politicians that call “censorship” parents’ efforts to remove books from school libraries (i.e., libraries targeted at minors) whose contents those same politicians dare not quote verbatim in public, being bleeped out when they are read aloud in the mainstream media. And it is to be found in the mindset of “educators” and politicians, like Virginia’s ex-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

DeAngelis’s book details the fight for parents’ rights from 2020 through late 2023, with a special focus on the 2021 Virginia Governor’s race as well as fights for school choice and control bills in places like West Virginia, Arizona, and Texas. The book goes into detail, listing the players, the machinations, the attempts to placate parents while conceding nothing, the losses and the gains–and how parents are fighting back. The multiple efforts of Governor Abbott in Texas to get his Legislature to do the right thing on school choice is ample proof of that. At the same time, DeAngelis also shows the forces arrayed against school choice and how they seek to sidetrack and ultimately defeat these initiatives. They recognize–as DeAngelis notes–that they can only be “dismissive” of parental concerns as long as your children are a “captive” audience. And they are going to do their level best to keep them in captivity because it is a question of power.

That was on display in 2021. By the fall of the year after the world shut down for COVID, Catholic schools were largely back in session, public schools weren’t. Current attempts at historical revisionism notwithstanding, the public school establishment back then was bleating that reopening schools would “endanger” the public health.

Back then, I’d occasionally go to noon Mass at my parish. I was dumbfounded. Despite the apocalyptic narratives of the public school establishment, I did not see multiple ambulances lined up in front of our parochial school. The pastor did not announce an uptick in young people’s funerals. And what I saw with my own eyes DeAngelis corroborates the experience of school districts across the country.

Catholic parents, heirs of social teaching that affirms their primacy in the educational enterprise, have a special mission to seize the moment and realign the misalignment of values operating in the American public school establishment. Children are parents’, not schools’. Parents, not schools, are the first and best educators of children. Schools work for parents and should not arrogate any more substantial “partnership.” Education exists for children, not for schools.

And, if education exists for children, then educational dollars also exist for children, not schools. Those dollars should enable a child’s education wherever a parent judges his child will best thrive. The community exists to educate its kids, not to promote its public schools monopoly.

2024 is an election year, that is, a year in which these principles also come down to concrete choices among candidates and in ballot questions. Catholic parents need to be sober-eyed about what stakes are at stake in this vote. De Angelis’s book is a good place to get quickly up-to-speed on the state of the question.

The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools
By Corey A. De Angelis
Center Street Books, 2024
Hardcover, 253 pages