Make Teachers Teach, Let Parents Parent: Steve Hilton's Plan for California Schools

When the pandemic hit, the classroom came to the kitchen table and parents got a front-row seat. But it wasn’t the education they expected. What many saw included curriculum chaos and departures from the basics in favor of material most adults weren’t asking for, never mind children. The result was a deep questioning over who schools work for, what teachers are actually there to do, and where institutional authority over a child is supposed to end. Evidently, to some (as said in Mean Girls ), the limit does not exist. Although I’ve been out of homeroom for some time and don’t have kids (yet), I was floored by some of the stories. Between the audacity to raise certain topics in class and abandoning the once-sacred notion of letting kids be kids, I was alarmed not only by what this meant for the parent-teacher dynamic, but for us as a society. So I looked forward to sitting down with Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for California governor . It’s an important and personal issue for Hilton, who’s also a father of two kids. (Ditching the stiff-suit look in our interview for a T-shirt giving carpool energy brought the dad perspective into focus.) While all eyes are on California, I believe what Hilton has seen is indicative of what’s going on across the country. Fewer than half of the state’s students meet the standard for English language arts, while only around one-third meet it for math. First came the bureaucratic overreach that kept kids out of school during COVID. “There was no case whatsoever for closing schools,” he told me. To Hilton, it reflected a broader institutional instinct to treat families as problems to be controlled rather than people to be trusted. Moms shouldn’t need a permission slip to parent or a detective badge to find out what is happening inside their kids’ schools. They need the transparency and power to protect their children while holding schools accountable for the job they exist to do. Which isn’t exactly happening right now. Let’s let the numbers do the talking. California’s academic results understandably raise questions and eyebrows. Hilton pointed out that, shockingly, fewer than half of the state’s students meet the standard for English language arts, while only around one-third meet it for math . “That should be 100%, by the way,” he said adamantly. “This is not like getting all A’s. This is like basic proficiency.” Yet California taxpayers currently spend $28,000 per public-school student annually , one of the highest rates in the country. I’m not a math whiz, but no amount of girl math can make that make sense. If there was a silver lining of the pandemic, perhaps it was shining a light on what’s been replacing the fundamentals. “That’s when you had this dawning realization that this whole education system has been taken over by ideologues,” Hilton said. “Extremists who see our children as kind of captive targets for their ideology.” Politicization in schools has become a major hot-button topic. Hilton, with two teenagers coming of age in the middle of this chaos, said he’s “seen it all.” And it’s very real. Parents reasonably expect schools to focus on teaching children “how to read, do math, science, critical thinking, making arguments.” Yet he believes schools have increasingly concerned themselves with prescribing a political worldview. Hilton traced much of that shift to teachers unions, referencing information gathered by whistleblowers who attended union conferences. The workshops, he said, weren’t about “the best technique for teaching kids to read.” Instead, they focused on “colonialism and imperialism.” Schools have increasingly concerned themselves with prescribing a political worldview. Little Joey can’t read, but at least his teacher was present at the Colonialism 101 seminar. That’s not to say students shouldn’t learn difficult historical lessons and competing political ideas. Their education should give them enough knowledge to understand those subjects and enough intellectual freedom to reach their own conclusions. But maybe they should learn how to successfully read and write before reciting the imperialism blueprint. Hilton also recounted a case involving materials that allegedly encouraged teachers to hold gender workshops during lunch rather than after school so parents would be less likely to find out. “They specifically said to the teachers, ‘You should hold these workshops in lunch break,’” he told me. “Because if you have it after school, they’ll say, ‘Why are you staying later?’ … The parents don’t need to know.” “Oh, hell no,” I responded. “Exactly,” Hilton said. “Actively conspiring to keep parents in the dark about it.” These schools are lucky I’m not a parent yet. This blatant overstepping and lack of transparency is something Hilton believes parents, regardless of politics or backgrounds, can and should agree on. (And let’s be honest: if conservative teachers secretly conspired against progressive parents’ wishes, the same people defending “educator discretion” would lose their minds.) With that said, where is the line when it comes to empowering parents in this dynamic? What if Sarah’s mom is just unhinged? What if the school really does need to discipline Steven because he’s being a jerk? Hilton acknowledged that tension. “You send your kids to school in the expectation that it’s a well-run place with discipline and values, focusing on actual education,” he said. “What’s happened in our society generally is that we’ve ended up making rules as if everyone behaves like the worst person, and treats everybody with suspicion,” he explained, “rather than the truth, which is the vast majority of people are just regular, normal, decent people.” He doesn’t think parents should be doing teachers’ jobs. Why should they? “They go to school and I don’t know what happens, and then at home, the parents are the ones that have to sort of, ‘Have you learned this? Have you learned that?’” he said. “What are we paying for through our taxes?” But transparency cannot mean dumping test results on families and calling it a day. Hilton essentially wants to Yelp-ify the system with letter grades for schools and teachers. He also supports meaningful recourse for families trapped in perpetually failing schools. “Kids are graded,” he said. “Let’s grade the schools and the teachers so parents can see what is going on.” He also wants to make it easier to remove ineffective teachers. Hilton pointed to California’s short window for evaluating teachers before they receive permanent status and the difficulty of removing them afterward. “Just to give you an example of how insane it is, teachers now in the public school system get tenure,” he explained. “That’s lifetime job security after 16 months, basically. Like, what is that?” This brought me to the murkier question: What constitutes a “bad teacher”? One class with poor scores? A teacher whose politics parents dislike? If so, where do we draw the line? “You’ve got to have an objective standard. Results of the kids,” Hilton answered. “If you can see a pattern where systematically, the kids are just not learning, that’s what I mean by bad teacher.” As if the school system weren’t in enough disarray, parents have another teacher to contend with: social media. Because letting TikTok educate America’s youth is going swimmingly thus far. Hilton strongly supports the parent-led “Wait Until 8th” movement encouraging families to delay smartphones until approximately age 14, combined with bell-to-bell phone-free schools. Hilton reinforced that delaying smartphones would be voluntary, not the government dictating what parents must do. “Every school will be required to invite the parents to sign a contract,” he explained. “Most parents I know, I hear all the time they don’t positively want their kids to have smartphones,” he said. “They just think you have to because everyone else has one. It’s like a peer-pressure thing.” A collective agreement gives parents backup and prevents children from feeling like the only ones left out. “The point is not the individual apps,” he said. “It’s the screen. It’s the actual device, the smartphone. That’s the thing that’s addictive.” Hilton claims these restrictions can be “transformational.” As if the school system weren’t in enough disarray, parents have another teacher to contend with: social media. “The kids are happier. They talk to each other. They hang out. They play games.” Lunchrooms once filled with children silently staring at screens while shoveling food in their mouths look very different sans smartphones. “You walk in and it’s alive with chatter and laughing and humanity.” That may be the clearest picture of what parental empowerment should accomplish. Something fulfilling for everyone, but first and foremost, the kids. Not turning every mother into a teacher, every teacher into an enemy, or every classroom disagreement into a national culture-war spectacle. We’ve made a mess of this issue, but Hilton’s overall philosophy isn’t that complicated. Make teachers teach. Let parents parent. And instead of schools attempting to shape what children believe, make sure they actually know how to think. Giving America’s children the strongest possible launching pad into life shouldn’t be political. It should be common sense.