I understand the need and support the efforts to stop the influx of age-inappropriate, hypersexualized books and literature flowing into our public schools to indoctrinate the kids - but I still can't shake a nagging belief this is just another example of using government to do the job parents (or the culture) should be doing.
"Public" schools are not "public", they are government schools, part of a system owing its existence to 19th century communism and anti-Catholicism.
Unable to compete with private parochial schooling provided by the Catholic church, other denominational schools appealed to the government for funding and protection - thus began the idea of government funded schools, and education became an industry - and as common sense teaches, when something becomes "free" (i.e. collectively funded by taxes), when the link between payment and service is severed, the quality of the product declines - and in this case, education is the product.
Because the schools are allegedly “free", parents are not as interested in assuring their child’s attendance or performance. Because public schools are guaranteed the revenues associated with each pupil in their geographical districts; there is no need for them to strive for excellence, merely to assure a headcount.
The public schools systems then dance to the one who calls the tune - and the federal government, through the Department of Education and the funds it controls, calls the tune. Public schools become the tools of indoctrination controlled by teacher's unions, the goals of which place teaching children quite low on the list of priorities, all in the name of "equity".
Public schools are the best example of how "equity" is a failure.
The people should in no way be shocked that an institution funded by government would sooner or later become the tool of forces within that government. The permanent bureaucratic "Deep State" favors centralization and statism, so schools will naturally also favor those same things.
Great care is put into assuring standardized funding, inculcation, staffing and outcomes. The goals are not to promote excellence, it is to make sure to chop off every tall blade of grass so the shorter blades don't feel bad about themselves.
What is lost in the process is the effectiveness of actually educating students, the number one role of schools in the first place - and when education loses its status as the primary objective, schools become warehouses of social engineering that provide welfare, surrogate parentage, and indoctrination.
Let us not ignore that the facts reveal the contemporary public school has been transformed from a voluntary quest for learning into a coercive and doctrinal institution, with its wards being fed consciously selected information (and denied information inconvenient to certain agendas) in an attempt to produce acquiescence to the spirit of the age and obedience to the ideology of the bureaucratic ruling class.
Competing with government to regulate schools is a losing strategy because, as they say in Vegas, the house always wins. In this case, the “house” is the federal government.
The only way to change the output of schools is to change the nature of the school systems themselves, beginning with ending the influence of the federal government in them - and the first step to doing that is to eliminate the Department of Education.
That's the only way for parents to have real local control.
I also believe that to begin, that states take back the school system, and then the parents within the states utilize their voices and take back the schools through becoming members of the local school board and PTA's and use their voices. Without their involvement I'm afraid that things will continue to be as they are - or even worse.
The proof is in the pudding. These systems hold no moral or spiritual values. Poor parents are too hard working & busy and don't have enough money for nannies, tutors, personal assistants and nurses. Two parents always working = Children raised by The State, which means government, which means mostly corruption at present.