Why Should Delaware Care?
Students within the Milford School District started the school year with a board policy that requires teachers to allow students to study multiple sides of a topic. One Milford Board of Education member has said the goal is to keep politics out of the classroom, but community members and advocates are against the policy.
Students in the Milford School District started their academic year earlier this month with a controversial new policy in place that backers say would bring political balance to school curriculum.
But how it will actually impact what students learn in the classroom is not clear.
Adopted during an August Milford school board meeting, the policy requires teachers and other educators to allow for “the equal and unbiased investigation of multiple sides of a topic” during a lesson.
When asked what specific views or politics were unfairly portrayed in classroom discussions, Milford Board of Education Vice President Matt Bucher, who advocated for the policy change, referred Spotlight Delaware to statements he made at the August meeting.
Bucher said then that the new language was designed to update an existing district policy, written in the 1970s, for what he described as the “new legal environment” today.
He also asserted that members of the community “don’t even know that their kids are being advocated to, politically,” and added that students have the right to a “perspective-neutral learning environment.”
Despite his pleas, not everyone was convinced during that August meeting.
Michael McCain, an area resident, said then that the policy could lead to “nefarious outcomes,” including defending slavery or justifying the Holocaust.
“When a policy requires that abhorrent views and actions be treated as equally valid as core principles such as equality, justice, and liberty, it is bad policy,” McCain said.
Also speaking against the policy last month was Gloria Ho, a Delaware educators union official, who said teachers already follow curriculum standards and work to teach students to think critically.
Requiring school administrators to approve the discussion of certain topics in a classroom “shifts trust away” from teachers, she said.
“And replaces it with fear and avoidance,” Ho said.
Aside from Bucher, the other Milford school board members did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
An echo of last year’s debate
The debate over the “multiple sides” policy is, in part, a rehash of a controversy from a year ago when the Milford School District considered a change to its curriculum that included a slew of new guidelines, including language that similarly called for “equal and unbiased investigation of multiple sides of a topic.”
In response to the controversy at the time, the ACLU of Delaware said the proposal threatened protected rights of expression and could compel certain other speech, according to reporting from the News Journal.
This month, the ACLU of Delaware told Spotlight Delaware in a statement that they are disappointed by the Milford school board’s decision to pass the policy, again stating that “freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment is a critical element of our democracy.”
While Bucher declined to answer questions about what politics he felt were entering the classroom, he did say during the August board meeting that the Milford School District would “continue to teach the state standards” and continue to teach the “state-mandated history programs.”
He also has said that his policy is one that “ no court in Delaware or the Third Circuit Court or the Supreme Court, or any other board would have any opposition to.”
While district boards determine school curricula, state law still requires schools to teach certain themes, such as how Black people were treated throughout the history of the United States, including topics of white supremacy, racism, and slavery.
There are similar curriculum requirements for LGBTQ history and the Holocaust.
