‘It’s About Censorship, Erasure, and Control’: the GOP’s Push for Parental Rights

Adults in the committee hearing room spent hours discussing ways to affirm parental rights in Texas’ public school classrooms, but it was a teenager who wanted to school them on how some of the proposed legislation under consideration might do the opposite.

This wasn’t about empowering parents in their kids’ education, Marshall Romero, a sophomore at Alief Early College High School, told members of the Senate Committee on Education K-16 at the hearing in late February. “It’s about censorship, erasure, and control,” Romero said. “This will strip schools of the ability to foster inclusive environments under the guise of protecting parents. But let’s ask which parents, because they sure aren’t the ones with LGBTQ+ kids, children of color, or students who rely on schools as safe spaces.” 

The February hearing featured a litany of Republican-sponsored bills that—under the banner of “parental rights”—could ban LGBTQ+ curriculum and outlaw anything deemed to be “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), and allow districts to fire teachers or other employees who violate the law. 

Given the rhetoric from many conservative politicians, one could be forgiven for thinking Texas parents are disenfranchised when it comes to their kids’ education. But Texas law already grants parents “quite a lot of rights,”  said Monty Exter, the government relations director for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, which represents public school teachers. 

In fact, parents’ rights in education are outlined in Chapter 26 of the Texas Education Code, which include: access to records, including grades, disciplinary records, and counseling records; access to teaching materials; right to “full information” about school activities; and a right to temporarily exempt their child from instruction or activities that conflict with a parents’ religious or moral beliefs. 

Still, Republican legislators are clamoring to pass a slew of new laws that would ostensibly affirm and expand those rights. Over a dozen bills filed this session pertaining to K-12 education include the term “parental rights.” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has made two of those bills—Senate Bill 12 and Senate Bill 13—a top legislative priority. 

SB 12, dubbed the “Parental Bill of Rights,” would prohibit all “DEI duties,” which include influencing hiring decisions based on race or ethnicity and all policies, procedures, or training programs that “reference” race, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation (unless required by state or federal laws). Under the bill, authored by Republican Senator Brandon Creighton, these duties may not be assigned to or even taken up voluntarily by employees, contractors or volunteers. The bill also prohibits any “instruction, guidance, activities, or programming regarding sexual orientation or gender identity” in K-12 schools. It also establishes a number of new parental grievance procedures. 

“At its core, [SB 12] is about affirming what most of us believe to be common sense,” Creighton said on the Senate floor as the bill was up for vote. “Preventing political agendas from creeping into the classroom and ensuring that people who know what’s best for our kids, specifically their parents, have the strongest voice in their child’s education.” Creighton’s bill passed the Senate on a 20-11 party-line vote on March 19. The House has not acted on the bill yet. 

The Conroe senator has stressed these bills do not have a political motive—they merely aim to protect students from subjects that “divide students rather than educate them.” 

Yet, some of these bills would disproportionately impact certain communities, signaling more than just concern for parents. Ash Hall, policy and advocacy strategist for LGBTQ+ rights at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, called SB 12 a “costly disasterpiece.” They warned that many provisions would be “likely unconstitutional and harmful to students,” pointing to the parental notification requirements for a student’s emotional and mental well-being, the DEI ban, and curricular restrictions, and said the vaguely written language of the bill makes it hard to discern what would violate policy. 

During the floor debate, Senator Borris Miles, pressed Creighton on the bill’s purpose and the potential achievement gaps it would create. “I don’t know what your bill is trying to accomplish in K-12 education, but what I do know is what it will accomplish,” the Democrat from Houston said. “It will create an atmosphere where minorities are forced to conform. If achievement gaps for minority students widen, we can look back to this bill as the start. The state has demonized DEI. But I refuse to accept the narrative.” 

The push for bills like SB 12 didn’t come out of nowhere. In recent years, conservative groups like Moms for Liberty have gained clout in school districts across Texas by turning their seemingly innocuous call for “parental rights” into a political crusade.

Governor Greg Abbott signs his “Parental Bill of Rights” on January 20, 2022, in Lewisville. (via Twitter/@GregAbbott_TX)

Their activism began with fighting mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, but soon evolved into an expansive crusade against what they saw to be dangerous or inappropriate books, curriculum, and school policies—often related to the LGBTQ+ community and DEI. “Parental rights have been really contorted and used as a buzz phrase to push ideology that is really one sided, typically pretty right wing,” Emily Witt, a strategist for the Texas Freedom Network, a progressive advocacy group focused on individual liberties and education.

Moms for Liberty—a national group that has local chapters across Texas—claims its mission is all about “empowering parents” to defend their rights in the face of “woke indoctrination” in public schools, according to their website. As of 2024, the group—which the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “extremist”—claimed to have over 130,000 members. 

Witt says it’s been an effective strategy to draw political support, as parents are a vulnerable group that wants the best outcomes for their children but don’t necessarily have the time to look closely at policies.“[If you tell parents] that their education is being politicized, I think you can really control people’s fear,” Witt said. “People have a lot of fear around how their kids are growing up.” 

Exter said the pandemic exacerbated parental frustration with their kid’s school due to overall discontent with the education system. “You’ve got this very generalized and broad frustration out in the public,” Exter said. Some state level politicians were able to “recognize that general frustration, tap into it and channel it into much more specific conversations about things that [they] deem grievances with the public school system,” he said.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott signed four bills to “empower parents,” including House Bill 900, which prohibits schools from purchasing “educationally unsuitable” books. SB 13, another Patrick priority, is meant to expand upon HB 900’s crackdown on school libraries. The bill, authored by Senator Angela Paxton, would increase parental access to their children’s library materials and move decisions on new library materials from school librarians to elected school boards. New “Local School Library Advisory Councils,” composed of members appointed by each school board trustee, would be charged with “ensuring that local community values are reflected in each school library catalog in the district.” The Senate also passed SB 13 on March 19 on a 23-8 vote. 

Bills filed in the House also target LGBTQ+ identities at school in the name of parental rights, such as House Bill 1704, filed by Republican Representative Nate Schatzline. The bill would require teachers to report self harm to parents, which would include a student “altering one’s biological sex” or “expresses a desire to engage in an act of self-harm … including words or behavior expressing gender dysphoria or other distress relating to the child’s biological sex.” 

Jonathan Covey, the director of policy for Texas Values, a social conservative advocacy group, told the Observer the proposed legislation can “shore up the shortcomings” he sees with parental rights in some Texas school districts where he says “activist educators [are] using schools as a pipeline for sexualizing kids of all ages.” 

“We appreciate how [SB 12] constitutionally safeguards the rights of parents to educate their children and how to address such issues as sexual orientation and gender identity, which are divisive and politically controversial,” Covey said in his testimony. 

Another component of SB 12 is to amend the grievance process to better allow parents to hold districts accountable, Creighton said at the hearing. The Education Code currently requires each Board of Trustees to develop a grievance process to address parental complaints, though it doesn’t specify standard procedures. SB 12 lays out a more specific local grievance procedure, which would require the principal of a school to acknowledge and respond to the grievance within a certain time frame. If a parent feels the grievance isn’t adequately resolved locally, they can petition for a hearing with a designated examiner. If the examiner finds the district to be at fault five times within a school year, the district’s superintendent is required to go before the State Board of Education in a public hearing. 

Nancy Humphrey, board president of the Plano ISD Board of Trustees, told the Observer her district believes parents are “crucial” in a child’s education. Apart from some conversations around book bans, she said they haven’t seen that much contention over parental rights.

“It puzzles me that public input has become so political over the past few years,” Humphrey said. “I would rather focus on what we can do to be effective for an excellent education for all the students in our district, and what we can do to make our teachers successful in the classroom.” 

The push for parental rights laws at the Capitol has coincided with increasingly partisan school board politics. An Observer investigation from 2023 found that a network of right-wing PACs were funding a slate of ultraconservative school board candidates across the state. Between 2021 and 2023, 65 of those candidates won their races.

One of those is Misty Odenweller, the board president of the Conroe ISD Board of Trustees who was first elected in 2022 as part of a “Mama Bears” slate of Christian conservative women who were focused on restricting access to certain books—and backed by right-wing PACs.

Odenweller was featured as an invited witness in support of SB 12. She told the Senate committee that appreciates bill provisions granting more parental access to student records, ensuring parents are aware of “sensitive content” taught in classrooms, and prohibiting DEI, which she said prevents “ideological influence.” (The Conroe school board recently passed a resolution against “radical gender ideology”). 

“School boards and boards of trustees have been infiltrated by a lot of right-wing politicians,” said Witt, of the Texas Freedom Network. “By using the board of trustees to implement pieces of anti-LGBTQ and anti-DEI law, it makes it really clear that this bill is not about parental rights, but it’s about pushing forth a political agenda.” 

While Exter, the teachers group rep, said parental rights could be better clarified—the Texas Education Code is dense—the language of bills like SB 12 may have concerning consequences. Educators and parents alike agree on the importance of parental rights, Exter said, and pitting educators against parental rights is “intended to divide and cause strife.”

“You’re not going to find an educator who doesn’t fully acknowledge and, 99 times out of 100, embraces the concept that having parental involvement and an engaged and informed parent is one of the most important tools to ensuring that students are going to be learning,” Exter said.

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