Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Michael Torres. He's the deputy editor of Real Clear Pennsylvania, where he writes

about education, policy, politics, and other matters in the Keystone State. He's been writing

regularly for City Journal on all things Pennsylvania, and his work has also appeared

in National Review and Newsweek. Today, we're going to discuss his recent writing on K-12

education in Pennsylvania and in the country at large. So Michael, thanks very much for coming

on 10 Block. Thank you very much for having me, Brian.

So across the country, public school districts are putting in place policies, require faculty and staff members to conceal students' gender transitions or gender questioning from their parents.

These secrecy policies, I guess you could call them, enable school employees to basically

facilitate student gender transitions by using in the classroom or in personal exchanges with

the students their preferred pronouns and helping

them seek transgender medical consultation and treatment. All of this, I gather, without their

parents' knowledge or consent. So, you know, first off, how widespread in your view are these

policies and how would they differ from a

traditional public school approach to parental notification?

So they have spread very widely across the country very quickly. According to parents defending

education, the parental rights group, they put together a list of more than a school

districts across the country that comprise more than 10 million children. So almost all major cities,

most major suburban school districts, you'll find policies like this that require teachers or

administrators to withhold this information from parents.

And the policies are strikingly different from traditional policies that require the information, medical or otherwise, to be given to parents.

And that is something that I was very interested in looking at with this article to try and understand exactly how they were justifying such a striking contrast in approach to how school districts usually act as a facilitator of information between parents and teachers with regard to how their children are doing in school.

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