Republicans use milquetoast phrases to dress up the same old attacks on public education

Don’t let the presentation of Wisconsin’s “curriculum transparency” bills fool you.

Republican-authored education bills hitting the Wisconsin legislature over the last year have had a new flavor. Instead of bald-faced attacks on sex and sexuality or critical race theory (even though CRT isn’t taught in K-12 classrooms), these new bills use the language of transparency to make their appeal seem more vanilla, more common-sense.

But these bills could have far-reaching negative effects for Wisconsin students and teachers.

In January, I covered Assembly Bill 638 for WORT News. That bill claims to increase the public’s access to what happens in K-12 classrooms by making not only textbooks but all instructional materials available to requesters within a very short window. It would require “a school board to comply with a school district resident’s written request to inspect a textbook, curriculum, or instructional material within 14 days.”

In a public hearing on January 4, some Democratic lawmakers questioned the necessity of the bill, its exclusion of private and charter schools, and the short timeline it gives for school districts to respond to requests. Early on, the School Administrators Alliance and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction registered in opposition to the bill. 

Then, on February 20, AB 638 passed in the State Assembly along partisan lines. The bill has now been referred to the Senate Committee on Education, but a public hearing has not been scheduled yet. The state Senate version of this bill—SB 606—has also been referred to the Senate Committee on Education.

Since 2021, conservative lawmakers have introduced a number of bills like AB 638, many of which featured enhanced curriculum inspection mechanisms. None have become law. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) lobbied for a few of these bills, including AB 488 and SB 463. SB 463 was ultimately vetoed by Governor Tony Evers in 2021. AB 488 was tabled by the Assembly and never taken up. 

AB 638 is moving quickly through the legislative process with little fanfare. No lobbying groups have registered in support. And even though seven additional educational advocacy groups registered against it before it passed through the Assembly, these groups aren’t doing much lobbying either.

Perhaps because the language of AB 638 is so unassuming, so vanilla, it’s easy to brush it aside in the face of much louder events and issues. Yet this bill becomes significant when we view it within a larger ecosystem in which attacks on public education take many forms and, sadly, become more and more mundane. 

Transparency matters

Increasing the transparency of government agencies, including public schools, is good for democracy. In Wisconsin, this ideal is the basis for the state’s open records law, which asserts that “all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those officers and employees who represent them.” Any person who is not incarcerated or involuntarily institutionalized can anonymously submit a request for documents with or without providing a reason for the request. 

This means that if someone wants to inspect the textbooks or curriculums of a public school, they can already do so under state law. 

There are other ways to gain access to textbooks and curricular materials. Anyone can go to a school district’s website where lists of textbooks and curriculums are posted. Parents can also talk to their child’s teacher or principal. 

In 2021, Priscilla Jones, a Black mother of a 6th-grader in Sun Prairie, noticed an inappropriate assignment asking students how they would punish a slave under ancient Mesopotamian law. She brought the assignment to the attention of other parents and the school district, stating it created an unsafe classroom environment that was especially harmful because it was assigned on the first day of Black History Month. 

This led to an apology from the school and a civil rights lawsuit with Attorney B’Ivory LaMarr stating, “I don’t see any educational value whatsoever in ever placing a sixth-grader in the position of a slave-owner, asking ‘How will you punish the slave?’”

This incident attests that parents could benefit from greater curriculum transparency to ensure their kids are receiving educationally sound and culturally sensitive instruction. However, I have not found the authors or advocates of AB 638 using this incident in Sun Prairie as evidence for why Wisconsin should pass a law enhancing curricular inspection mechanisms. 

In this light, it’s clear that the authors of AB 638 are using “transparency” as a rhetorical tool and not a sincere policy goal.

Yet the authors of AB 638 assert that Wisconsin residents need improved access to public school curriculums and instructional materials and claim the current methods for viewing these materials are inadequate.

Writing in support of AB 638, state Sen. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown) and Rep. Barbara Dittrich (R-Oconomowoc) say that the process for requesting curricular materials is onerous for parents. 

In a January public hearing, the two were asked by Rep. Kristina M. Shelton (D-Green Bay) for specific examples of how the current system is broken. They responded with vague personal and anecdotal experiences of long wait times and difficulty finding times to view requested materials. They did not point to specific failures of transparency and made no mention of the problem being widespread or systemic. 

Knodle gave a personal example of waiting two months to receive curricular materials from the Germantown School District. When questioned about this experience by Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay), Knodl put his foot in his mouth, saying he didn’t even look at the school district’s website where this information is published before he submitted his written request. None of this adds up to a convincing argument that there is a need for enhanced transparency mechanisms beyond the existing ones.

In her written testimony, Dittrich referred to vague concerns about protecting “societal decency.” Without concrete examples to back them up, these statements come across as conservative dog-whistles. 

Andraca, a former educator, responded to these comments, saying, “I’m just not seeing the need for this legislation because it puts a burden [on teachers], and it also gives the appearance that schools are hiding something when you can find out almost every single curriculum resource on websites.”

The bill’s focus on public school districts is key here. Supporters of AB 638 have a larger objective of dispelling general trust in the public education system. 

AB 638 would only apply to public schools, not private or charter schools. Shelton questioned the bill’s exclusion of religious and voucher schools, saying: “Why not put all Wisconsin schools in this if the point is really to increase engagement and transparency and accountability?”

Knodl responded that parents with kids in religious and voucher schools haven’t made complaints to him about their access to curriculum, therefore, he and the bill’s authors and sponsors did not include them. But private and charter schools aren’t covered by Wisconsin’s open records law; so whether there are complaints or not, the issue still stands that there are no legal mechanisms for curricular transparency in these schools.

In that January public hearing, Republican lawmakers were clear about what improved transparency would mean for parents. With improved knowledge of what is taught in their districts, parents can make the decision of whether they keep their kids in public schools or send them to voucher or religious schools that align with their beliefs. 

And it’s this jab that makes AB 638 squarely fit within a broader conservative-driven attack on public education.

By the conservative playbook

Betsy DeVos, who served as U.S. Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump and has a long history of vocally deriding public education, touts curricular transparency as a tool of parental choice. On her website, she issues this threat: “When robust curriculum transparency laws are enacted, parents themselves are equipped with the tools to hold schools accountable for their programming decisions. Schools will finally have an incentive to ensure prospective parents don’t feel alienated and chose [sic] to send their kids (and the substantial formula funding that comes with their kids’ enrollment) elsewhere.”

If schools don’t respond to parents’ complaints about curriculum that fails to match their values, then parents can and will take their kids elsewhere. They’ll take their resources elsewhere. It’s a threat that would expand the resource vacuum that post-desegregation white flight has already created in some public schools. 

DeVos’ threat syncs with those of other conservative groups who promote curriculum transparency, from national think tanks to state-level groups like the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). 

A 2021 report from WILL called “Opening the Schoolhouse Door” (perhaps a tongue-in-cheek call back to George Wallace’s 1963 protest against desegregation, “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”) promotes curriculum transparency so that parents can find out whether schools are teaching The 1619 Project and other “woke” topics like “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” 

WILL advocates that parents switch from public schools to charter schools if they find these topics in their school’s curriculums. And WILL’s report includes model legislation for lawmakers to use to reach this end. 

The WILL report even credits the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank based in Arizona, for introducing “curriculum transparency” as an “intriguing solution.” This indicates that WILL is actively sourcing the ideas it promotes (and the model legislation it published with the 2021 report) from conservative groups out of state. 

And like other groups, WILL supported bills like SB 463 and AB 488 with language that shifts away from explicit attacks on books about race or gender identity and toward more common-sense-sounding language about transparency.

We can track this shift in language from earlier bills put forward by conservative lawmakers. For instance, AB 411 from 2021 had two aims. First it would have banned what it called “race/sex stereotyping” in school curriculums or employee training at public and charter schools, a ban that also prohibits teaching “that systems based on meritocracy or traits such as hard work ethic are racist or sexist or are created by individuals of a particular race to oppress individuals of another race.” Second, the bill would have required all curricula to be made available on school districts’ websites. 

The language about race and sex stereotyping is entirely absent from the current bills before the Wisconsin legislature. What remains is the issue of curriculum access. 

Leaders of the far right’s renewed attacks on public education, like Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, are open about this shift. Rufo has said very publicly: “By moving to curriculum transparency, we will deflate that argument and bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency,’ which will raise the question: what are they trying to hide?”

Though bills like AB 638 and others contribute to this baiting, they are also sending a message to conservative residents of the state: there is nefarious indoctrination happening in Wisconsin schools that needs to be uprooted by vigilant citizens who may not even have kids in public schools to begin with. The language of “curriculum transparency” emboldens the public to scrutinize public schools’ curriculums with the effect of fomenting distrust in public education in order to promote a narrative of school choice and parental control. These narratives are torn from a well-orchestrated and well-funded conservative playbook. 

Educational intimidation

This playbook is having a chilling effect that PEN America, a non-profit freedom-of-expression group, calls “educational intimidation.”

I spoke with PEN America’s Director of Free Expression and Education Programs, Jonathan Friedman, about educational intimidation bills in January for WORT News. He argues that what we’re seeing in Wisconsin with bills like AB 638 is part of a national movement “to really either exert direct pressure or censorship on schools or find other ways to indirectly put teachers and librarians on notice that what they’re teaching they should be extremely nervous about or that they ought to censor what they’re teaching.” 

In January’s public hearing, Shelton picked up on the potential for intimidation and punishment. She pointed out that good teachers create lessons and instructional materials organically in response to students in real-time. But this might be a liability under bills like AB 638. 

She expressed concern that teachers like her would be afraid “that if I do create something organically to help my students understand [something] better, understand a concept, that if that isn’t correctly recorded, then I will be in violation of the law.”

As Friedman also attests, “There’s a degree of expertise in setting curriculum. Just because one parent objects to some aspect of science, does that mean that all students in a school shouldn’t be [taught] it, that a teacher should be forced to feel that if they’re teaching about that topic and using verified factual information that they should feel nervous about it.”

Curriculum transparency bills contribute to educational intimidation by expanding parents’ abilities to control the education of all students, not just their own. PEN America says that they “empower a vocal and censorship minded minority with greater opportunity to scrutinize public education and intimidate educators with threats of punishment.” 

The effects of educational intimidation and censorship are already being experienced by Wisconsin teachers. Teachers like Melissa Tempel, who taught elementary school in Waukesha before she was fired for tweeting that she couldn’t sing “Rainbowland” by Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus because administrators at her school considered it “controversial material.”

This kind of censorship goes hand-in-hand with other attacks on public education in the state from book bans, attacks on Pride events in Madison-area libraries, DEI cuts, and the lapses in funding for UW system schools.

Though Republicans seem to be changing the rhetoric of some of their attacks, they are still actively trying to undermine public education using the legislative process. 

PEN America tracked nearly 400 conservative education bills in statehouses across the country from July 2021 to February 2023. Nationally, many of these bills aren’t making it into law, and Republicans seem unfazed by this, says PEN America. A PEN report says that the active “spirit of experimentation” in state legislatures means that bills like these will likely be “reintroduced or recycled” until something sticks, as we can see is happening in Wisconsin. 

So if AB 638 fails to become law, we are likely to see another version of it, just as we have before.