While the public largely supports the ability of parents to opt their child out of lessons tied to religion or identity, support drops sharply across political lines when people hear about the burdens and learning losses opt-outs create, according to a report released in August by the Brookings Institution.
According to researchers, this would suggest that schools can shift opinion by clearly communicating the educational downsides of widespread opt-outs.
“Widespread opt-outs can create severe logistical difficulties for schools and districts, because teachers need to find alternative lessons for opted-out children. Therefore, in practice, the decision may lead districts to remove LGBTQ-inclusive books — or any texts that could engender parent opt-outs — from the curriculum altogether,” the report states. “This is concerning to those who see public schools as places where children should learn to consider and respectfully discuss multiple perspectives on complicated issues. Both opt-outs and the removal of texts to which any parents may voice disagreement will result in children being less exposed to perspectives that may differ from their own.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor held that the First Amendment required a district to provide parents with notice and the ability to opt their elementary school students out of instruction involving LGBTQ+ storybooks on the grounds that it violated their First Amendment rights by substantially interfering with their children’s religious development.
CSBA’s own legal experts have noted that, at a minimum, the Mahmoud decision likely requires that any “LGBTQ+ storybook” that is part of the elementary school curriculum be included in what parents/guardians can opt their students out of. “However, the Court’s reasoning may be interpreted to apply to other instructional content that parents/guardians could view as substantially interfering with the religious development of their children,” they determined.
Such concern isn’t without precedent — the inclusion of the theory of evolution as a topic of discussion in science courses has been challenged time and time again in state and national courts, including the Supreme Court.
Brookings researchers pointed to the topic of opt-outs having appeared on a number of high-quality national surveys in recent years. The organization’s research group at the University of Southern California found that a majority of Americans supported a parent requesting that teachers allow a child to leave the room during a lesson including content with which the parent disagreed.
Respondents were asked to read a vignette in which a parent requests to opt their child out of a lesson that includes “content that [the parent] disagrees with.” Half were randomly selected to then read the following short paragraph before responding about their support for opt-out:
The teacher believes that all students should participate, because learning about content they might not otherwise hear or learn about helps them. They might see a new perspective, learn to be a critical thinker, or simply learn an important new fact. And it can be hard for a teacher to accommodate every parent’s wishes for every lesson for every child.
“Reading these downsides to opting-out reduced support for the practice from 57 percent to 41 percent overall, with significant reductions among respondents across the political spectrum,” according to researchers. “School districts could share this sort of language — or language more tailored to local context and issues — with families as a way to ensure they are considering the issue from multiple angles. In fact, we imagine a carefully crafted message coming from a trusted local educator might have an even larger effect on opt-out support than the message in our survey experiment.”
Noting that recent polling also shows widespread bipartisan support for students learning about multiple perspectives in their public schooling, researchers concluded that “support for opt-outs may reflect a general sense that offering parents more options is a good thing,” but that “sharing just a few sentences about the downsides of opt-outs reduced its support in a lasting way, indicating many parents may not have fully considered the harms associated with the practice. Sharing a few sentences about the downsides of opt-outs could be a promising approach for schools and districts looking to combat normalization of the practice.”
