New Hampshire Lawmakers Pass Law Allowing Parental Objections To Curriculum

The Tea Party dominated New Hampshire Legislature on Wednesday overrode the governor's veto to enact a new law allowing parents to object to any part of the school curriculum.

The state House voted 255-112 and Senate 17-5 to enact H.B. 542, which will allow parents to request an alternative school curriculum for any subject to which they register an objection. Gov. John Lynch (D) vetoed the measure in July, saying the bill would harm education quality and give parents control over lesson plans.

"For example, under this bill, parents could object to a teacher's plan to: teach the history of France or the history of the civil or women's rights movements," Lynch wrote in his veto message. "Under this bill, a parent could find 'objectionable' how a teacher instructs on the basics of algebra. In each of those cases, the school district would have to develop an alternative educational plan for the student. Even though the law requires the parents to pay the cost of alternative, the school district will still have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the alternative. Classrooms will be disrupted by students coming and going, and lacking shared knowledge."

Under the terms of the bill, which was sponsored by state Rep. J.R. Hoell (R-Dunbarton), a parent could object to any curriculum or course material in the classroom. The parent and school district would then determine a new curriculum or texts for the child to meet any state educational requirements for the subject matter. The parent would be responsible for paying the cost of developing the new curriculum. The bill also allows for the parent's name and reason for objection to be sealed by the state.

Hoell stressed the new law could allow parents to address both moral and academic objections to parts of the curriculum. The lawmaker said he could imagine the provision being utilized by parents who disagree with the "whole language" approach to reading education or the Everyday Math program.

"What if a school chooses to use whole language and the parent likes phonics, which is a better long-term way to teach kids to read?" Hoell said to HuffPost.

The bill originally included provisions to end compulsory attendance that were taken out by fellow legislators, Hoell noted, saying he would work to address the compulsory attendance issue this year. He said he has seen research showing that non-compulsory attendance equaled better academic performance in Singapore before attendance was required. In addition he noted that it would all bring a market-based approach to education, noting that college and graduate students are not required to attend classes.

"If you can afford it, you go after it," he said.

"Instead of having a reasoned and dispassionate discussion about alternatives, when complaints were made, the parents were falsely accused of trying to ban the book," Hoell wrote. "Rather than find a solution, the parents were forced to remove their son from the public school and instruct him at home."

Hoell also said this bill would allow for parents to object to the distribution of condoms and lubricants in sex education classes. In his veto message, Lynch said that parents can have children opt out of sex education classes, which Hoell disputed in his writing, saying only parents with religious objections could opt out.

The law's passage comes as the New Hampshire legislature has taken a more conservative tone, fueled in part by the election of Tea Party-backed legislators in the 2010 election. Other issues pending before the state government include a bill to only allow legislature-approved candidates to run for the U.S. Senate, an end to the teaching of evolution in the schools and a provision to allow the legislature to dissolve the judiciary. Other bills pushed by Hoell include a provision establishing a committee to study the impact of compulsory school attendance on families, and a measure withdrawing the state from the federal No Child Left Behind law.

State Democratic Chairman Ray Buckley released a statement Wednesday afternoon calling the bill "reckless and irresponsible" and touting his agreement with the conservative-leaning Union Leader, which spoke against Republican lawmakers by objecting to the proposal.

"HB542 is an unprecedented attack on New Hampshire children's right to a quality education," he said. "In fact it will end education in New Hampshire as we know it, allowing children to be removed from any lessons their parents choose: algebra, English language arts, health education, American history, the civil or women's rights movement, science, absolutely anything."

This report has been updated to include comment from state Rep. J.R. Hoell.

Comments

[dlp7202]

05:53 AM on 03/03/2012

This type of irresponsible legislation will destroy education in NH, and will result in "teaparty children" being as ignorant as their parents. The rest of the children will be dragged backward with them.

I think that this is their plan.

[joanno]

08:57 PM on 02/20/2012

This is meant to do one thing and one thing only...shut down public education. It will lead to chaos. How could NH allow this to happen? I always thought they were a sane state but somehow they've gotten hoodwinked by the TP crowd. Wow.

[megjoanna]

07:49 AM on 01/18/2012

I live in NH and listened last night to a program on our local public radio station where the program was discussed. Much of the discussion revolved around teachers defending their rights to make professional decisions and a representative supporting the bill saying parents as "customers" have the right to decide. The most perceptive comments were by a parent who called in saying that it made the relationship between parents and teachers, between parents and schools, unnecessarily adversarial. Much of the discussion was about meeting the needs of individual learners, which was clearly not the intent of the law at all with its references to "objectionable" material, but the largest problem is the one the head of the School Administrators' Association pointed out. Public schools exist to promote a public good: an educated citizenry. This bill attempts to change that long-standing contract and change the relationship to one of a "customer" and a "business". This is by far the most destructive aspect of the law. If that were the relationship, then why would someone without children in the schools care about (and support through taxation) anything that goes on there. I find this deeply troubling. The issue is not about who knows best what any individual child needs--meeting every child's needs is a responsibility we all should feel for our common good.

[fightthegoodfight101]

11:48 AM on 01/16/2012

I have a problem with the homosexual agenda, the big bang theory, and evolution.

[SupportPublicEd]

10:26 PM on 01/12/2012

This bill is about ideology, not improving education.

[houstondemocrat]

06:58 PM on 01/12/2012

Stupid tea party.

[Darsimaj]

04:33 PM on 01/12/2012

Ok, so my question is; where do these parents who do not like the current curriculum expect the teachers to teach? Obviously different material cannot be taught at the same time in the same room by the same teacher, right? Or are these people expecting that very different material be taught to everyone at the same time and certain parts will only apply to certain students?

So the parent pays for the development of the new curriculum, which will take some time and then needs to go through an approval process, unless the parent gets to sign off on it, since they now are empowered with all this new knowledge.

So how many new classrooms will be needed to teach the new stuff? I guess the argument of class size can pretty much go away, right?

I truly do not believe I have ever heard of a more idiotic idea, concerning education, than this one. But most politicians give little to no thought on the "how" of getting something like this accomplished, just that they please their constituents.
How dumb can these people be? Sheesh

[Texas Aggie]

05:13 PM on 01/10/2012

Something that a lot of the commenters don't seem to realize is that the parent who wants the change pays for it. Teachers have spoken about how much more time it will take them to make up new curriculi, but why should they have to? The parent wants to have a change, so the school hires someone to write up the new curriculum and then hires new teachers to teach it, all on the parents' dime. I doubt greatly that once the consequences sink in that very many parents will want a new curriculum, especially if it doesn't prepare their kids for any of the standardized tests that they need to pass.

[Texas Aggie]

04:49 PM on 01/10/2012

"The parent would be responsible for paying the cost of developing the new curriculum."

Right here is why this law will have no effect. It would take a very deep pocketed parent to pay for a new curriculum when you consider salaries for the people involved along with the research material that they would require and contacts with various authorities in the given area that the parents object to. A parent that objects to anything is probably going to object to a lot of things, and paying for the new curriculi would be more expensive than just shipping the kid off to a right wing religious school somewhere.

[bradwindley]

06:47 AM on 01/09/2012

If that idea is not a train wreck on the track!!!!! I don't always agree with curriculum or instruction in our public schools, but one thing for sure is that parents have no idea what or how to educate their children in most cases. The organized effort of education is doing poor enough job, just let every zealot get in on the act and we have the same PC disaster that we do with celebrating holidays in schools and public places.

[ZeraLee]

06:23 PM on 01/08/2012

"Jefferson believed the elementary school was more important than the university in the plan because, as he said, it was "safer to have the whole people respectfully enlightened than a few in a high state of science and many in ignorance as in Europe". He had six objectives for primary education to bring about this enlightenment and which highlighted what he hoped would make every person into a productive and informed voter:

• "To give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business;
• To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing;
• To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties;
• To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either;
• To know his rights; to exercize with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment;
• And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.""
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/jefferson.html

Wrapping one's head in a pillow and ignoring the society around them, and passing that ignorance on to the next generation, fails many of Jefferson's objectives for public education.

[ZeraLee]

06:02 PM on 01/08/2012

"which will allow parents to request an alternative school curriculum for any subject to which they register an objection."

Are they going to raise taxes and school funding to pay for this?

[Texas Aggie]

04:50 PM on 01/10/2012

The article says the parent is responsible.

[ZeraLee]

05:55 PM on 01/10/2012

"Even though the law requires the parents to pay the cost of alternative, the school district will still have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the alternative."

[TeamSanity]

05:59 PM on 01/07/2012

I recall a parent (who had previously made clear her very conservative religious position) informing me that her daughter had failed the mythology final exam. Surprised, I told her she was surely mistaken, as her daughter was quite smart. She replied, "Oh no, I TOLD her not to study!" She told me she didn't want her daughter studying all that 'pagan nonsense'. I assured her that we weren't trying to religiously indoctrinate students into sacrificing bulls on Zeus' altar (joke) - I told her that the study of mythology was about cultural literacy. She said "But it's so hard just to know the stuff you WANT to know."

Hmmm... I know all sorts of stuff I'd rather not know (income tax laws come to mind) but I find that knowledge pretty helpful, nevertheless.

[MarvinM]

05:30 PM on 01/12/2012

This is precisely one of the problems I have with the evolution deniers. If it's being taught in the curriculum, there is nothing in the tests that requires you to believe it, you just have to demonstrate knowledge that you understand (to the appropriate degree for your grade) how it works (or the 'theory' of how it works), and some of the historical background about how, when, and who created it. Nothing wrong with that.

Also, I don't think parents really understand what creating a curriculum entails. It's easy to say what stuff you think the kids should study. It's much more difficult to manage it in a semester time frame, find classroom and outside-of-classroom resources, and figure out how to appropriately test the students on their knowledge of the subject.

[TeamSanity]

05:39 PM on 01/12/2012

Indeed! I've always told students that one mark of intelligence is the ability to entertain a thought without necessarily agreeing with it.

[10YearTeacher]

05:01 PM on 01/07/2012

So does this mean the state can garnish the wages of parents who do this and their kids don't pass the state tests?

[CatholicMOM]

10:56 AM on 01/07/2012

I live in NH and an alternative to the lousy math education they offer in our schools is EXACTLY what we NEED. Sorry, but our schools offer a LOUSY academic education and many students are already in outside tutoring. Students are already receiving outside help.

Now kids wont have to take time OUT of the classroom to learn quality academic content. They can now force the schools to provide it. Sadly at the parent's expense.

OUr Governor proved he's AGAINST parental involvement in our schools. He doesn't realize it's OUR children and OUR money paying for this lousy education.

IF educators were SO good at choosing quality curriculum in the schools, why are so many in private tutoring? Why are our students behind the top countries in the world?
Not only do we see problems in math education, there is a lot of political indoctrination in our schools.
The schools put themselves in this position because they are failing. Had they provided QUALITY, this law would NOT be needed.

[rrickarr]

05:09 PM on 01/09/2012

Schools and teachers do not choose curriculum. Curriculum is mandated SuperIntendant or some office even higher up the bureaucratic chain. And, most curriculums today are produced by huge companies that make their money off of turning all types of garbage.

[MarvinM]

05:53 PM on 01/12/2012

I've read several of your posts now, and you use the word 'lousy' a lot to describe specifically the math education in NH. Why? Why is it so lousy? Are there not enough classes? The right classes? Are the teachers 'teaching it wrong'? What would you do to improve the math education of the students in NH schools? Specifics, please.