Progressives Against Transparency: The ACLU joins Democratic politicians in opposition to making school curricula available to parents.

As debates over school curricula have raged for the past year, progressives have openly expressed anti-democratic views about how the education system should operate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, progenitor of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, made her view clear during an NBC appearance. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” she said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area.” Meantime, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe arguably cost himself a second term in the governor’s mansion by admitting that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

So it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the Democrats are resisting public school transparency. What’s more surprising is that the American Civil Liberties Union decided to join them in taking this position. The ACLU wrote on Twitter that the curriculum transparency bills are “are just thinly veiled attempts at chilling teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools.”

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When the ACLU was demanding transparency about issues like religious instruction or sex education, it didn’t need to choose between government accountability and progressive social revolution. But the modern ACLU worries that greater government transparency may prevent “teachers and students from learning and talking about race and gender in schools”—by which it really means learning and talking about race and gender in a way that the new progressives approve.

By opposing transparency, progressives, the ACLU among them, may have made a tactical mistake. Public schools are government institutions paid for by taxpayers; with few alternatives, most parents are compelled to send their children there. It’s hard to argue that curricula should be kept secret. Some states, like Ohio, already have laws that allow parents to request instruction materials, reading lists, and curricula. To argue that schools can’t teach kids certain material unless it’s kept secret is to concede that the material wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.

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The ACLU of old would never have argued for government secrecy, especially when it comes to public schools. America still needs the commitment to government transparency that the ACLU once exemplified. One might even say that we need it more than ever.