Nampa school board chases a teacher censorship policy that is completely unnecessary

The Nampa school board, following an example set by West Ada, is considering a policy that would limit what can be displayed in school classrooms, as Becca Savransky reported this week.

The school board should tread very carefully here and strongly consider the possibility that no policy is needed. Any action they take may very well make things worse than the status quo.

Importantly, the board should ask itself what happens in the absence of an explicit policy. The answer is that any complaints raised by parents or students are handled informally.

If there really is a teacher who’s trying to push a political ideology with what they display in their classroom — something that’s by no means common but is bound to happen from time to time, given the number of teachers there are — then a few words from the principal are likely to be enough to resolve the matter.

Teachers should not have to worry about an extensive policy book that outlines every minute aspect of their jobs. The risk of such micromanagement is that it will reduce how effective teachers are. It’s hard to teach effectively when you’re second-guessing your every word.

This is by now a very familiar dynamic in education. There’s broad agreement that excessive standardized testing, meant to evaluate teachers, actually undermined the quality of teaching in many cases by forcing teachers to teach to the test. If they’re also worried about every piece of paper they hang on the wall and every word they say in class, that will detract from effective education. Trusting teachers generally works better than micromanaging them.

There’s also the risk, raised by trustee Mandy Simpson, that adopting a policy requiring classroom neutrality risks codifying the single set of values that all kids have to be exposed to — those being the ones that are implicitly considered neutral.

For example, American flags are widely displayed in classrooms. So is patriotism a neutral, universal value?

Clearly not. Certain religious groups, for example, do not believe in pledging allegiance to the flag — this was the subject of early Supreme Court cases dealing with religious freedom in the context of schools. The most important of these was West Virginia v. Barnette, in which the court wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Nonetheless, there are flags in most classrooms, and that’s not a big problem. Kids are capable of being exposed to a wide variety of symbols and quotes and viewpoints, and sorting through it for themselves. Indeed, that’s a vital part of education.

And this is what a bad policy could endanger. The board of trustees should realize that merely signaling that this is an area of increased vigilance could have a chilling effect on education. That’s especially true because the proposed policy is quite vague — it doesn’t spell out what’s acceptable for display and what isn’t — and so teachers will be left guessing as to what may violate the policy.

And what information do they have that will help them guess?

Teachers know that conservatives are in control of the Nampa school board, as well as in political control of the state more broadly. So it’s easy to see how a teacher could be more worried about displaying a quote from economist John Maynard Keynes, generally liked by Democrats, than one from Friedrich Hayek, a favorite economist of Republicans.

If the signal is sent that this is a major area of scrutiny, it’s likely to introduce bias into teaching because of this general awareness of who is doing the watching.

So the best option is likely for the board to do nothing. That’s especially true because there’s no evidence that there’s a problem which needs solving.