Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Recently, two Ohio state legislators proposed a parental rights bill.

It would require notification to parents for sexually explicit content in courses and of any change to services for, quote, the student's mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.

Now, a policy like this should be non-controversial, but it's already received significant backlash.

For example, one former teacher accused the bill of amounting to, quote, the infatilizing of teachers and as being

insulting that legislators who'd never been educators would presume to make such decisions.

Now, to be clear, these legislators were not mandating or making decisions about what the curriculum

should be, only that parents should have the right to request an alternative activity

for material that

involved depictions of sexual conduct and should remain informed of their child's well-being at

school. And of course, the student material was posted online for parents to see during COVID

lockdowns. But opponents now vehemently opposed school transparency bills that ask for continued access to course content.

For example, last March, a Florida school superintendent argued that legislation requiring transparency by posting materials online would, quote, be an incredible burden that I think would just send people over the edge.

A quick internet search reveal that

teachers in that county are already required to submit lesson plans to administrators in digital

form. So, as Matt Beinenberg from the Goldwater Institute insisted, the burden of making this

materials public should be extraordinarily modest. Other critics of these transparency bills say that parents already

have an opportunity to voice concerns when curriculum standards were publicly announced. But as

Bidenberg also noted, that's not a realistic expectation of parents, who of course consider

curriculum when enrolling their child in a school, but do not always know when standards are being

revised. Parents have

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