Reynolds’ latest idea to restrict school books would let the minority rule

A recent opinion poll found that three-quarters of Americans want congressmen to stop bickering and start making more compromises with their counterparts from the opposite party.

The poll was conducted in the United States by the Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion for National Public Radio and the PBS News Hour.

If such a poll were conducted in Iowa, I think pollsters would find that people here have similar views about the inability or unwillingness of senators and congressmen in Washington to engage in the thoughtful, give-and-take art of legislation to contribute.

I also feel that Iowans are at a similar point regarding the recent series of legislative proposals targeting our 327 public school districts.

That suspicion was already clear before Gov. Kim Reynolds signaled last week where she might go next in her bid to transform public schools. Their new goal should trouble liberty-loving mothers and fathers and others who understand what our Founding Fathers wanted when they founded the United States—you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Reynolds addressed a gathering of a few hundred people at a forum organized by a national group called Moms for Liberty. The group advocates changes to state laws to give parents more say in how K-12 public schools operate.

The governor said Iowa needs to “restore sanity to ensure our schools are a place of learning, not indoctrination.”

She brought up the idea of ​​changing Iowa law so that if one school district decided to remove a book from its libraries or classrooms, every other school district would remove the same book and allow students to read it only with their parents’ permission read .

The governor believes public school districts are dominated by “an extreme and extremely loud minority” who are hostile to parents’ values. She has criticized public schools for “demonizing our country” and “obsessing about race in the classroom.”

However, it is important to note that Reynolds did not cite any concrete examples to back up her claims. It’s also important to note that the demographics of Iowa school districts vary widely — from some populated almost exclusively by Caucasian children, to some where most students are non-Caucasian, to others where students are come from families who speak dozens of languages ​​spoken at home.

Reynolds did not share with her audience how the current Iowa schools book review process works when grievances are filed by people in the community or by students. This is important, because these decisions to keep, remove, or limit access to particular books involve committees of educators, students, and ordinary citizens, and school boards and voter-elected school boards are the ultimate arbiters.

School districts have also now introduced policies that allow parents to request that their child not receive certain books for classwork and not be allowed to borrow certain books from school libraries.

What’s disturbing about Reynolds’ latest proposal is that it would allow a handful of parents in one school to replace their judgment with the book decisions that should rightfully be made by tens of thousands of other parents across Iowa. And the logistics of complying with such an ill-conceived law could quickly overwhelm teachers and administrators.

The idea of ​​banning books goes against most people’s concept of freedom. It seems to be more of a practice in authoritarian countries than in the world’s leading democracy.

If there are books that some parents don’t want their own children to read, those parents already have a way of keeping those books out of the hands of their children at school. Nobody tries to take this role away from the parents. But these parents should not have veto power over the books that other parents are happy to allow their children to read.

Many of these “comfortable” parents recognize that the Internet offers content, accessible to everyone, including school children, that is far more graphic and offensive than anything students will find in their school library.

PEN America, a national nonprofit that champions free speech, released a report last fall stating that Texas schools have banned more books from their libraries than any other state — 801 books in 22 school districts. Most of the books dealt with race, racism, abortion and LGBTQ issues.

Throughout history, officials have attempted to ban access to such acclaimed titles as To Kill a Mockingbird, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s top executive, said in a statement released with the banned book report, “This censorship movement is turning our public schools into political battlegrounds, driving wedges into communities, forcing teachers and librarians off theirs Jobs and catches a cold over the spirit of open inquiry and intellectual freedom that underpins a thriving democracy.”