Republicans in Iowa’s legislature want teachers to know they’re being watched, so they’re proposed a bill that would put cameras in every K-12 classroom throughout the state so that parents could peek into their child’s lessons, NBC News reports.
The bill to enable in-school helicopter parenting is being resisted by teachers unions and education groups as an unproductive intrusion into classrooms. Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest educators said, “Some politicians around the country want to limit not only what history our kids can learn about and what books they can read, censor the truth of our history in some cases, and, now in Iowa, they want to install classroom cameras for live monitoring of teachers.”
The current wave of paranoia regarding what’s being taught in classrooms stems from a program initiated by conservatives to demonize teaching anything about race for fear that it will educate children that white people in the South supported slavery while Blacks and other minorities experience racial injustice in the US. Also conservatives fear that if their children learn about LGBTQ people, they’ll want to try it themselves.