A key issue underlying the 2023 Virginia election first drew statewide – and national – attention in a debate two years ago.

During a 2021 Virginia gubernatorial debate, Democratic candidate made a critical mistake that led to his defeat by GOP challenger Glenn Youngkin.

Instead of acknowledging concerns that parents were having over school curriculum, McAuliffe dismissed them.

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said during the debate. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

McAuliffe’s remarks sparked a backlash among white conservatives who were incensed that their children were being forced to read books that touched on contentious topics such as racism and sexuality.

In fact, one of Youngkin’s showed a white mother who was nearly brought to tears by her son’s anguish after reading about the horrors of slavery in Toni Morrison’s “.” She said the book should not have been required high school reading.

But while Youngkin and other campaigning for offices from to in the 2023 cycle have hitched their political success to parental rights and banning books deemed offensive, they do not own those issues.

In fact, the very thing that parental rights advocates are fighting to exclude is the very thing that parental rights groups of the 1960s fought to have included: an accurate reflection of the role that Black people played in the shaping of American history and culture.

I know this because a great deal of time studying one of the seminal parental rights movements in American public education for my book, “.”

In that book, I detailed the 1968 struggle over community control of public schools in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. There, as in Virginia, by the public education system demanded to have their voices heard in determining school curricula.

But at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, it was Black and Latino parents who demanded their right to have a say in the education of their children.

Inside the classrooms

For decades, Black history had been a neglected topic in New York City schools.

In the 1960s, only a handful of textbooks on the Board of Education-approved list discussed the history of African Americans in significant detail. The lack of such material was widely blamed for the disappointing academic performance of Black and Latino students.

In an effort to help those students and improve test scores, New York City school officials launched an experiment to give the mostly minority parents more say in school matters by appointing them to school governing boards. As I note in , the new governing boards immediately set out to move the history of Black Americans from the margins of the American experience to its epicenter.

Not everyone supported the changes to what was being taught in the classrooms. When the newly formed board composed of fired 13 teachers and six administrators for trying to block the changes, the United Federation of Teachers union organized several strikes to shut down the schools in a dispute over control of personnel, finances and curricula.

The strikes lasted for 36 school days and affected about 47,000 teachers and nearly 1 million students. The strike ended on Nov. 17 when the state took control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district.

Most of the jobs left vacant by striking union members were filled by a group of nonunionized “replacement” teachers sympathetic to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents.

In this racially charged atmosphere, local parents enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to assert their rights. In the words of one school board representative, they sought to “supply the missing pieces of Black culture,” which would be “the well-spring from which all areas will flow, and counter the total focus in today’s curriculum on the European Anglo-Saxon experience.”

During , Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents worked with the teachers who had defied the union and staffed the schools to help implement an ambitious Black history curriculum. It included lessons on Black revolutionary leaders , and .

Their recommendations would eventually influence the direction of curricula in the New York City public school system as a whole.

A constant struggle

This example of parental rights serves as a reminder to those who assume that white conservatives are the only active and involved parents trying to assert their rights.

Indeed, in Virginia itself, Black parents are still having an effect on what is taught in public schools. In one example, the proposed a set of revisions to the state’s Standards of Learning in history and social sciences that failed to mention Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Black politicians and parents as “white-washing,” and the changes were later .

In a further blow to conservatives, parental activists helped shepherd standards that were approved in April 2023.

The standards state unequivocally that “the institution of slavery was the cause of the Civil War.” In addition, they recognize “the indelible stain of slavery, segregation, and racism in the United States and around the world” and emphasize “the development of African American culture in America.”

Most important, at least to those who agree that parents should have an active role in the education of their children, the standards state that “parents should have access to all instructional materials utilized in any Virginia public school.”

The parental rights movement, then, in Virginia and elsewhere, is not solely the province of the right. As history has shown – and today’s debates over school curricula show – “parental rights” are for all parents.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

The poll released by gathered respondents’ views on ESAs, a program giving families access to state education funds to pay for approved services, such as private school tuition, instructional materials and tutoring.

From the 634 parents interviewed, 59.7% support ESAs, with 14.6% opposed and 25.7% undecided.

Similar splits were seen among parents along party lines, with 67.5% of Democrats, 61.3% of Republicans and 55.3% of Independents in favor of ESAs.

But ESAs are certainly controversial, with supporters, often Republicans, backing the program’s boon for family empowerment; and opponents, often Democrats, arguing how the program undermines public education.

“The momentum we are seeing, not just with the public but with parents, educators and those who are in some way touching education in America right now is very much inspiring,” said Erica Jedynak, chief operating officer of

According to the YouGov poll, support for ESAs is decisive among Black parents, with 70.3% in favor of the program. By comparison, 59.1% of white parents and 50.8% of Hispanic parents support ESAs.

The pattern is similar among teachers: From the 313 teachers interviewed, 58.8% support ESAs in contrast to 14.7% that oppose and 26.5% that are undecided.

Among Black teachers, however, 78.9% favor ESAs. By comparison, 56.2% of white teachers and 60.7% of Hispanic teachers favor the program.

ESAs also have broad support from teachers across the political spectrum, with 58.2% of Democrats, 63.8% of Republicans and 54% of Independents in favor.

Sadira Davis, a Black parent in Phoenix, Arizona, said that this comes to no surprise because public schools in Black communities are often considered incapable of providing a quality education.

“My daughter Eden was diagnosed with autism at four…and when I transferred her to a public school kindergarten it was honestly devastating,” Davis told �鶹��Ʒ.

Davis said the staff at her public school were ill-equipped to manage students with special needs. In one particularly painful memory, Davis recalled her daughter was tied down as she rode the school bus.

“It was a traumatizing experience…they had her harnessed and she had this face that looked like an animal chained to the bus,” Davis said. “At that point I needed something different for my kid.”

Davis’ daughter is now a 6th grade student at AZ Aspire Academy, a special education school, which Davis enrolled her by using funds from Arizona’s ESA program, the .

Black children are often the ones who “fall through the cracks in public school systems,” said Tiffany Dudley, a former charter elementary school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona.

As the student development coach for , Dudley said that ESAs give Black parents the choice to have their child taught by teachers who have “walked a mile in their shoes.”

“Parents can’t necessarily demand their teacher give directions to their child in a different way,  but they do have the choice to take them to another school that will better serve them,” Dudley said.

Janelle Wood, founder and chief executive officer of , is shocked by the overwhelming support among Black teachers for ESAs, as they are often perceived as devoted supporters of public schools.

“I always scratch my head because oftentimes they’re the ones that get overlooked for promotions and retaliated against when they speak up on some of the injustices they see,” Wood told �鶹��Ʒ.

ESAs offer Black teachers the opportunity to work in settings they may have never been exposed to, such as private schools, microschools and learning pods.

“Many of our educators feel limited in what they can teach and how they can go about administering the different educational models they learned when they went to school,” Wood said. “This gives them that flexibility and freedom, so I’m really pleased to hear their support.”

Disclosure: Yes. Every Kid. operates as part of the wider Stand Together Trust network. Stand Together Trust provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ.

“Our motivation for building outside of the system is because we saw our system crumbling in the midst of the pandemic,” said Lakisha Young, founder and CEO of The Oakland Reach in California, which in the early months of the pandemic launched a virtual hub for students who lacked internet access. Now, the nonprofit is training Black and Hispanic parents to work as math and literacy tutors —  “liberators,” they call them — to help students thrive in local schools. 

“Not only are we putting caring, committed people back into our communities,” Young said, “the system now has to re-engage with us in a different kind of power dynamic.” 

As they look to build a movement, however, leaders are grappling with some thorny questions. Are they contributing to school segregation? And to what extent do they want to remain connected to the very public schools their families left?

Young was among the leaders and researchers featured in a Monday webinar hosted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank studying the future of pods after most students have returned to traditional schools. The center’s showed that Blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to report that their children were happier in pods — 52% to 25% — and also that they had more trust in the educators leading them than they did teachers in public schools. 

The majority of Black children still attend traditional public schools — 85%, according to . But CRPE researchers wanted to see whether Black pods and microschools connected to broader trends, such as the increase in Black , the and the growth in legislation supporting such models.

Are such policies “paving the way for an explosion in self-determined alternatives to public schools?” asked Jennifer Poon, a fellow with the nonprofit Center for Innovation in Education, which contributed to the research. “And if so, what would that mean for the families in Black pods and microschools? On the flip side, what would that mean for the majority of families who are still served by public schools?”

Introducing a topic often debated in the first year of the pandemic, moderator Chris Stewart, CEO of Brightbeam, a nonprofit that focuses on improving educational opportunities, pitched another question to the panelists: Do pods and microschools contribute to ? 

Speakers rejected the idea. Janelle Woods, founder of the Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix, said Black students are already segregated within public schools because they are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students.  

Maxine McKinney de Royston, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, formed a small pod for middle school students in cooperation with the Madison school district. She said “it’s a particular form of gaslighting” to blame Black parents for resegregating schools, which she chalked up to  predominantly white, middle class communities from urban school districts.

What ‘schools aren’t delivering’

While homeschool families are used to patching together a variety of learning settings and programs for their children, that is becoming increasingly true of public school parents as well, according to recent research from Tyton Partners, a consulting firm. Its demonstrated growing interest in what researchers described as “multi-site schooling.”

Supplemental pods like those in Oakland are a part of that trend.

“In some cases, parents are looking actively and aggressively for something that schools aren’t delivering,” said Adam Newman, managing partner at Tyton. “It really increases opportunities and challenges for schools to be more creative [and to think] about how they can bridge some of these gaps, particularly around issues of equity.”

Historically, Black parents have always sought better opportunities for their children outside of mainstream schools, said Robert Harvey, former superintendent of a charter school network in East Harlem, New York, and now president of FoodCorps, a nonprofit that helps students access healthy food.

“The early pod school was the slave cabin,” he said.

And four years before the pandemic, Woods founded the Black Mothers Forum in Phoenix to support parents whose children were disproportionately disciplined in public schools.

“Our children were being criminalized and demonized for behavior that was normal for their age group,” she said. 

When schools shut down, the organization launched microschools to serve students whose parents had to work and couldn’t stay home to supervise remote learning. Parents who stayed with microschools are happier, she said, because their children aren’t being disciplined for minor infractions.

Economic options

Because they receive state education funds, the forum’s microschools are free for families. But Woods said foundations can help by supporting meal costs at microschools, which don’t qualify for the National School Lunch Program. It costs $6,000 to $7,000 per month to feed students, she said.

Pods and microschools serve as a “safe harbor” for some Black students, Stewart said. But in states where public funding isn’t available, many Black families can’t afford to form a pod or pay for a private microschool..

Harvey added that Congress opted not to increase the expanded child tax credit, which could have been an “economic option for … Black folks who live one check away from suffering and one check away from thriving.” 

Young said she wants to see more microschools, like those in Arizona.But The Oakland Reach “evolved and adapted” to offer enrichment and tutoring support rather than establish pods outside of the district.

“For better or for worse,” she said, “most of our families are going to be in these public school systems.”