JEFFERSON CITY — Concerns both old and new were heard Wednesday at the latest of a series of hearings on Senate Bill 4, the broad education bill which includes language known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights.
SB 4 passed the Senate after lengthy debate and will have to be approved by the House to become law. If the House makes changes to the legislation, it will need to return to the Senate for consideration. The similar House bill has been sent to the Senate.
Consistent and vocal opposition to SB 4 has come from teachers and people of color, who say language in the bill which prohibits the teaching of “any idea, concept, position, or viewpoint” relating to the superiority or inferiority of any race would intimidate teachers from teaching about historic and current inequalities and atrocities.
”Are we going to talk about how we move forward in our public education, without being able to draw the bright line between slavery, to Jim Crow, to redlining, to the GI bill, to generational poverty because African-American people cannot get credit and buy houses?” said Dava-Leigh Brush of Missouri Equity Education Partnership. “All of those things matter, and it’s not just about history class.”
One witness, a lobbyist for conservative policy organization Opportunity Solutions Project, spoke in favor of the bill. Speakers in opposition represented groups including the NAACP, LGBTQ+ advocacy organization PROMO, and the Missouri National Education Association, the state teachers’ union.
Noelle Gilzow, president of the Columbia Missouri National Education Association, which represents Columbia teachers, told the Missourian in an interview that the legislation is a tool to discredit and defund public education.
“It’s a gateway for people who haven’t been trained to dictate what we teach,” Gilzow said.
SB 4 is part of a larger trend, both state and nationwide, of attempts at the legislative level to limit and regulate what can be taught or discussed in schools.
“It is a morale-killer,” Gilzow said. “We are being treated like we’re not professionals, highly trained in what we do. We’re already struggling with retention and recruitment. How are we supposed to be able to recruit quality teachers?”
The bill’s supporters frame it as a common-sense measure.
“We don’t want white kids being told that they’re the oppressors,” said Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, the bill’s sponsor, in describing what he sought to ban with the legislation. “We don’t want Black kids told they’re the oppressed.”
Democratic representatives on the House committee questioned whether the behavior Koenig described was happening in Missouri schools.
Koenig’s office provided the Missourian with a sheet depicting a ‘matrix of oppression’ it said was used by Rockwood School District in St. Louis County. The graphic uses an axis from ‘privileged’ to ‘targeted’ on subjects such as race, gender and class to describe various social inequalities, but makes no mention of inherent superiority or collective guilt.
Other provisions in the legislation that drew criticism include a prohibition on allowing students to access video-sharing apps, such as YouTube, on school-distributed devices. Witnesses in opposition noted that this would block access to a wide range of educational material.
Brush also expressed concern that the bill’s mandated statewide transparency portal would create an undue burden on teachers, who cannot always know exactly what teaching materials they will need to use to meet specific student needs.
“I don’t know what questions my middle school kids are going to ask,” Brush said. “No one knows what questions middle school kids are going to ask.”