PARK: Getting control of what your kids are being taught

Do you know what your kids are learning in school? You might think you do, especially if you’ve looked at the official Alberta Curriculum, which is publicly available to all parents.But did you know the Alberta Curriculum is just a small part of what is taught in schools and the rest of what's taught doesn't have to be made available to parents at all?This is because school boards, principals and even individual teachers are allowed to bring in all sorts of extra content into classrooms that fall outside of the official curriculum. So, while you won't find anything too controversial in the Alberta Curriculum itself, the same cannot be said of the materials coming in from outside the curriculum.In fact, almost every time parents are upset about some content in the curriculum that's being taught in their kid's class, the content actually isn't in the curriculum at all. Rather, many teachers import full, pre-built lesson plans into their classrooms, that don't have to have their content disclosed to parents at all.Here are a few examples:The Alberta Teachers’ Association's library has a wide range of resources for teachers that are informed by Critical Race Theory.Saint Albert Public Schools quietly introduced a (sexual minority) course” without consulting parents.LesPlan, a company that sells pre-built lesson plans, provides material that tells Alberta kids that there are health and environmental benefits of eating crickets and puts an ideological spin on the events at the United States Capitol Building on January 6 2021.Teachers Pay Teachers, an online educator marketplace, has an entire section dedicated to 'Social Emotional Learning,' and touches on every hot-button political issue.The ATA also developed the PRISM toolkit, which gives specific lesson plans to teach about human sexuality while evading the requirement to inform parents under Alberta law.Principals can require teachers to include a climate action emphasis week for all classes in their school, sometimes without the parents ever being aware.None of the above classroom content is approved to be in the Alberta Curriculum, but none of it is explicitly banned either. Rather, it's left to individual school boards, principals and teachers to decide what to teach.And, crucially, this type of content almost always comes into classrooms without the parents’ knowledge.Parents are the real experts in their own kids and parents have the best sense of what is age appropriate for their kids.So, parents need to know what their kids are learning. After all, we expect transparency from every other service that caters primarily to children and every other order of government.So, why is the order of government that caters primarily to children the sole exception?The Alberta Curriculum will probably never contain a list of every single piece of content that is approved to be taught in schools, and maybe it shouldn't — that would be incredibly bureaucratic.But at an absolute minimum, school boards should be required to disclose all supplementary materials being used in their schools above and beyond the curriculum.Without this, how can there ever be public trust in our public schools?Jeff Park is the Executive Director of the Alberta Parents’ Union, an organization of Alberta parents advocating for the best possible education for all Alberta students — whether that be public, separate, francophone, alternative, charter, independent, or home education.

PARK: Getting control of what your kids are being taught

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