Southlake school board shouldn’t micromanage parent complaint about anti-racism book

The best school boards operate like corporate directors, overseeing the chief executive (the superintendent), setting policy and holding the CEO accountable for implementing it.

What they don’t do is micromanage.

The Carroll ISD board in Southlake appears to have done just that, voting Monday to override school administrators in a case of teacher discipline over a classroom book and treatment of a student. The vote undermines the leader the board hired less than a year ago.

Johnson Elementary fourth-grade teacher Rickie Farah had “This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work” in her classroom library. A student took it home, and her parents found it objectionable. After they complained, Farah admonished the child and told her not to take books home without asking first, the parents told the conservative news site The Texan.

The parents appealed to the board, as they have the right to do. Trustees asked that a letter of reprimand be placed in Farah’s personnel file.

That was a step Superintendent Lane Ledbetter and his leadership team apparently had declined to take. This kind of high-level interference in a matter of daily operations undermines his authority and could make for more chaos down the road.

Southlake and the Carroll ISD have, of course, been the focus of national attention as a conservative group has organized to win school board and City Council races in response to the district’s now-shelved “Cultural Competence Action Plan.” It was an early frontier in the battle over “critical race theory” now playing out in school boards far and wide.

That fight, though, is also over how much influence parents should have over school policy. This is a personnel decision. If Farah rebuked the student for involving her parents, that’s inappropriate. But Ledbetter’s team may have thought a verbal warning was enough. Farah was recently named a Teacher of the Year, so she must be doing something right.

Attracting and retaining such talented teachers has long been a priority for the Carroll district. Board meddling in individual cases will make it harder to do so.

Most discussion of the incident took place in a closed board session, so it’s unclear how much the decision was fueled by the book rather than the reprimand. In general, targeting books is dangerous business. Children should be exposed to a wide range of age-appropriate ideas, and giving individual parents veto power isn’t the answer.

Again, the board should set a broad policy for evaluating books and trust its trained professionals. Looking at books case by case invites inconsistency and distraction.

Progressive critics of the board’s decision, though, have suggested that the book in Farah’s classroom is anodyne and that anyone bothered by it must be OK with racism.

“Anti-racism” policies, as defined by their proponents, are not just opposition to racism. They put race at the center of every decision. In “This Book is Anti-Racist,” author Tiffany Jewell argues for collective guilt and equates race-blindness with white supremacy. She seems to want race-consciousness to be paramount in every aspect of life.

“Racism is so deep within us. It is all around us and we have to be constantly aware of it so we don’t get consumed by the smog,” Jewell writes. She also declares: “It is the job of white people to listen, learn and grow.”

Our point here is not to declare that the author is right or wrong or even say when children should learn to evaluate such ideas. It’s that they shouldn’t be presented in a one-sided manner or handled casually, especially in younger grades.

Southlake parents are expressing at the ballot box that they want more of a say in such matters. The board is right to listen to its voters, but the best way to govern the district is to set clear policy and hold the superintendent accountable.

Trying to run the district’s day-to-day operations from the boardroom won’t make Southlake schools better, attract better talent or provide a path to deal with contentious issues.