The state House passed the "Academic Transparency" bill on Wednesday. It would require school districts and charter schools with 400 or more students to list online what instructional materials they used in the past school year.
Some GOP lawmakers say they feel the legislation is necessary because parents are concerned about what their children are learning.
"This will help the parents going to the next grade be able to look and see what that teacher taught the year before, and hopefully we're just going to teach the kids," Rep. Jeff McNeely, an Iredell County Republican, said at Tuesday's House Education Committee meeting.
"We're not going to try to indoctrinate them or teach them in a certain way to make them believe something other than the facts, the knowledge, the ability to write, the ability to read. So I like this bill."
House Bill 755 was passed on a 66-50 vote, with all but one Republican in support and all Democrats in opposition.
"We have to be very careful when trying to micromanage for no reason, because that's what this is," said Rep. Kandie Smith, a Pitt County Democrat. "We have teachers teaching in schools for years and all of a sudden for this to come up as an issue at the same time that we've had a lot of racial situations and people are trying to say now that we don't have any systematic racism and we don't want things to be taught."
The bill now goes to the Senate. The North Carolina Association of Educators called the legislation "teacher abuse" and urged people to sign a letter asking the Senate not to pass the bill.
"How does the NC General Assembly celebrate National Teacher Appreciation Week?" NCAE said in its action alert Wednesday. "They pass a bill that undermines academic freedom and punishes creative teaching, of course. Sounds about right to us."
The legislation comes at a time when conservatives have grown increasingly suspicious about what is being taught in public schools. Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson created a task force to collect complaints from parents, students and teachers in public schools across the state about "indoctrination" in the classroom, the News & Observer previously reported.
Under the legislation, schools would be required to post on their website what lesson plans were used by teachers. This would include any material used for instruction, including all textbooks, other reading materials, videos, digital materials, websites and other online applications.
Schools would also have to post information on each event and activity that took place outside individual teacher's classrooms during school hours. Required information would include a list of each person who spoke, what organization they represented and what instructional materials were presented.
Schools wouldn't be required to post copyrighted material online. But they'd be expected to post enough details that parents could see what was used and come in-person to review the materials.
Rep. Hugh Blackwell, a Burke County Republican and the bill's primary sponsor, said the bill will help promote parental involvement.
"The idea is to make a way for parents, without having to go to the schoolhouse, without having to go to school officials, to be able to go online and see what is being offered in their students' classes," Blackwell said Wednesday.
But Rep. Abe Jones, a Wake County Democrat, said parents can always contact the teacher about what's being used. He said that posting it online means teachers will have to input the material.
"I'm just concerned that this is another additional load on classroom teachers that perhaps the timing and the resources for it haven't been well thought out," Jones said.
Blackwell said that the state Department of Public Instruction can develop a template to help make it easier to input the material. He also said they made it easier on schools by not requiring them to list their current school year's materials.
"In an effort to do something good for parents and students that involves some effort on the part of the teacher and school, we have bent over backwards, I think, to try to make it as easy as it possibly can be," Blackwell said.
But NCAE called the legislation "meaningless mandates" that undermine the professionalism of educators.
"Teachers need more time to focus on helping their students recover from a pandemic, not bogged down logging materials into spreadsheets to accommodate the overreaching leadership of the General Assembly," NCAE said.
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