A big frustration with policy is that it can feel far removed from the real work of schooling. Why is that? What can we do about it? Such questions seem well worth digging into today, and I can’t think of anyone better to dig with than Andy Rotherham, the author of the Eduwonk blog, big-time education consultant, a member of Virginia’s board of education, and a former special assistant for education to President Bill Clinton. Andy and I occasionally try to make sense of the twists in education politics and policy. Today, we discuss whether some materials don’t belong in school or whether such claims are a dubious justification for book banning.

—Rick

Rick Hess: Andy, in the Mahmoud v. Taylor case that was recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the key issue is whether parents have a First Amendment right to opt their elementary school children out of instruction featuring books and content that offends their religious convictions. Now, we could focus on why Montgomery County is integrating sexualized content into elementary school reading instruction or why the Maryland district is so resistant to addressing parental concerns.

But you’ve raised another issue that I want to focus on: the tendency to conflate inoffensive books with those that are genuinely inappropriate. You’ve encountered this in your role on the Virginia state board of education. Over the past few years, we’ve repeatedly seen this come up regarding “banned” books, a phrase routinely used even when parents were merely arguing that elementary or middle schools shouldn’t have sexually explicit texts and graphic novels. You’ve noted that the failure to draw sensible distinctions is a big problem. Do you want to say a bit about your take on this?

Andy Rotherham: Rick, you’re touching on an aspect of this debate that I would argue leaves both sides exposed to some extent. Book “banning” and these content questions get the bases, left and right, all fired up. But most of these episodes conflate a few things. A big one is age appropriateness. Books that people would generally be comfortable with for older kids raise objections for younger readers. And sometimes, the authors themselves say, “That was written for older kids or adults.”

Another thing that gets conflated is the specific books in question. Both sides do this. So, for instance, some of these unreconstructed people who get upset about a historical book about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Bridges, or the Civil Rights Movement conflate those books with more explicitly political content as cover. Or, on the left, people conflate books with gay characters with more explicit books that school boards may prevent from being read at live meetings. This generally reveals how nakedly political this often is, rather than grounded in specifics or any consistent framework. And this is one reason we get so spun up on these questions despite a lot of agreement among people on the broad contours here.

In the case before the court, some of the specific books in question have gay characters but are not explicitly political. One book which featured prominently in Mahmoud’s oral arguments was, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, an age-old story where a young person worries that an older person’s decision to get married will mean less time for them. It’s just that, in this telling, the older person is an uncle who is marrying another man. That’s the background to the main action—that sense of jealousy or potential loss. And, I will remind you, it’s 2025. Gay marriage is the law of the land. If you’re really not comfortable with your kid knowing that’s a thing in our society, you have to consider private school.

On the other hand, Intersectional Allies, another book in that curriculum, is pretty explicitly political. Doubt me? Civil right activist and academic Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote the foreword. Though it should not be presented as “the” way of understanding the world, intersectionality is a fine concept for older students to learn about and discuss. But perhaps it’s a little much for the K-3 set or elementary schoolers?

Hess: I think acknowledging this distinction is useful even when we can’t agree exactly how the lines should be drawn. I’m wholeheartedly in favor of high schoolers reading challenging works, whether that means Huckleberry Finn, 1984, Beloved, or The Color Purple. I think any attempt to keep those out of schools is wrongheaded and I’m happy to say so. And you and I agree that no school should shy away from having students read about uncomfortable topics, whether those include the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, China’s “Great Leap Forward,” or New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty shilling for Stalinism.

But, to your point, we’ve seen instances where, when parents have raised concerns about some really inappropriate texts, school boards have refused to let parents show explicit images from school library books because they deemed them too incendiary for a public meeting. There have been cases where TV stations said they couldn’t run ads that included images lifted from school library books because they were too sexually explicit. I mean, c’mon! If something is too much for a school board meeting or to show on TV, I don’t think it belongs in a school library. While I don’t know anyone who has the precise formula for drawing this line, it shouldn’t be tough to acknowledge there is one.

School libraries don’t stock everything, and students aren’t asked to read everything. I’ve never known a school library to stock or an English teacher to assign Playboy or Hustler. It shouldn’t be controversial to ask whether certain highly sexualized works belong in classrooms or school libraries—at least for students under a certain age. Indeed, as Jay Greene and Max Eden wrote in 2023, the nation’s 10 “most-removed” books included stuff that seemed to offer reasonable cause for parental concern. As they observed, “This Book Is Gay provides a how-to guide to find strangers for sex on gay sex apps. Out of Darkness contains a rape. l8r g8r contains discussions of oral sex. All Boys Aren’t Blue contains underage incest. It’s Perfectly Normal contains drawings of children masturbating. Lawn Boy contains a passage about 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other.” And so on.

If we could agree that it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to voice concerns about works like these, and for some schools or systems to elect not to assign or shelve them, we’d be in a far better place. That would certainly help clarify the discussion about whether all students should be reading about Ruby Bridges (they should!). It would also make it far easier for us to coalesce around the stuff that obviously does belong in schools—and in 2nd grade classrooms.

I’m curious where we’re on the same page here and where we’re not.

Rotherham: Well, I think you and I might disagree on particular books, and that’s okay. Lawn Boy is a great example. In my view, it is a good book, yet the author himself has written that it’s not intended for young kids but rather for older adolescents and adults. So, again, we’re also back to this mangling of age appropriateness. We should also note that some of the same people who disregard age-appropriateness here suddenly get religion about it when we’re talking about making the curriculum more academically challenging. They argue that teaching the War of 1812 isn’t age-appropriate for young kids. Then they turn around and want to teach intersectionality to kindergartners. That’s politics, not pedagogy, and lousy politics for Democrats. In my view, the extreme cases championed by the far right and left are pretty easy. We probably, like most people, agree there with respect to curriculum. But the places we disagree would likely demonstrate there are some challenging judgment calls. The people saying almost everything goes or nothing goes have lost the plot—pluralism and public spaces.

When you talk to people, I find that you can quickly identify where they’re coming from. You can discern the parent who understandably doesn’t want their young kid seeing depictions of blowjobs from the person who just doesn’t accept gay people, or the modern interracial family that doesn’t want to have to explain whether mom is oppressed or an oppressor from the person who wants us to minimize the horror of slavery. It’s also important to parse out if we’re talking about books in the curriculum, a classroom library, a school library, or a public library. And I don’t have a big issue with opt-outs. They can serve as a useful signaling device. One of Montgomery County’s claims is that they had to stop opt-outs because too many families were doing it—though not just for religious reasons. The named plaintiff is a Muslim parent in the district. This is a classic instance of school officials being certain they know better than parents. Trouble often lies that way.

But, all that said, everything can’t be a la carte. Public schools need to balance a few things. One is being responsive to parents, who understandably want to know what’s going on, want a say, and want space for some issues to be the domain of families. Second is being open and welcoming for all kinds of people. And then finally, everyone, but especially the loudest voices on the right and left, need to realize we’re talking about public spaces. It’s not a Burger King—you can’t always have it your way.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.