Poll: Overwhelming Majorities In Four States Want More Curriculum Transparency

Overwhelming majorities in four states want more transparency regarding children’s school curriculums, according to new polling provided exclusively to The Daily Wire.

Most registered voters in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Louisiana agreed that parents should be able to compare curriculums between schools prior to enrolling their children so they can find the best learning environment for their child, according to polling from the Goldwater Institute showed.

About 87% of Louisiana voters agreed that parents should be able to compare curriculums beforehand, along with 72% in Missouri, 71% in Iowa, and 64% in Kansas.

Notably, that includes hefty majorities in every state of adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, who are more likely than older adults to have school-aged children. Of adults from 35 to 44, 85% in Louisiana, 75% in Missouri, 78% in Iowa, and 74% in Kansas said they supported parental curriculum access before enrollment.

The polling surveyed between 500 and 768 voters in each state and was conducted in late March and early April by Sherpa Public Affairs. Each state’s survey had a 3.5% and 4.4% margin of error.

Curriculum transparency has become a hot-button issue for many parents across the country in the last year.

In March, the Iowa legislature considered several versions of a bill that would have required public schools to give parents access to their classroom materials and library catalogs.

Around the same time, Missouri considered a similar “parents’ bill of rights,” one version of which would have allowed parents to sue public school districts for violating parents’ rights to access school curriculums.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a curriculum transparency bill in late March, while bills in other states have stalled.

Some parents have found themselves in nightmare situations over this issue. When Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas asked her school district what her kindergartener would be learning, she got sued by a major teachers union.

“When I called the school and asked, they said that they don’t call children ‘boys’ and ‘girls,’” she said. “They said that they refrained from using gendered terminology in the classroom, and that they embed the values of gender identity into the classroom at every grade at an age-appropriate level. When I asked about Critical Race Theory, they said that they teach 5 year olds on the first Thanksgiving, this ridiculous question where they say, ‘What could have been done differently on the first Thanksgiving?’”

The school district informed Solas that the public records she requested on the curriculum would cost $74,000, and she was sued by the nation’s largest public-sector teachers union, the National Education Association.

Even public school teachers have spoken out about the transparency issues they have observed.

Kali Fontanilla was a high school English language teacher in the Salinas, California, school district when she blew the whistle on Critical Race Theory (CRT) content in her classroom.

During the pandemic lockdown, Fontanilla was sharing the online remote learning platform when her fellow teachers noticed that her students were failing their required ethnic studies course, including about 50% of the boys. When she looked at the curriculum, she was alarmed to find what she described as “Critical Race Theory 101 for my students,” including the definition of critical race theory, implicit bias, and inherent racism.

“I think what has happened is our public school systems and the curriculum makers have gone unchecked for so long,” Fontanilla told The Daily Wire. “And we just let it happen like that frog in a boiling pot and it’s slowly heating up. We didn’t even realize, and now the water is boiling and we’re like, our kids are being damaged currently. And so we need to do a lot of work to undo all of this garbage that’s in our schools right now, and on top of it, our kids are failing.”

Eventually, Fontanilla resigned from her teaching position and started her own fully accredited academy, the Exodus Institute, which includes a K-12 online school.

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