The American Civil Liberties Union recently noted in a blog post that “the burden of confronting and remedying injustice falls on the shoulders of the oppressed.”

There is some truth to this: The oppressed are powerful voices in any battle for justice. But when it comes to defending the most vulnerable among us—our children—it is chiefly the responsibility of parents, teachers, school administrators, and lawmakers to defend their rights.

Yet the ACLU, rather than seeking justice, fairness, and privacy for every child, has chosen to privilege a select few while utterly disregarding the privacy rights of millions of other young students across the country.

In the growing conversation taking place about what privacy means in intimate facilities, and whether one’s biological sex is a relevant factor to consider in boys’ and girls’ athletics, we’ve heard a lot from certain students who are working through very sensitive issues pertaining to their sex and gender identity.

And that is a good thing. Their voices matter in this conversation.

But substantially missing from this national conversation are the indispensable voices of the vast majority of children, and particularly girls. Ignoring their voices results in a failure to advance true equality and justice and violates children’s fundamental rights. Indeed, not one child’s privacy should be compromised.

And yet, young girls across the country—including in Illinois and Ohio, as just two examples—have been subjected to anxiety and humiliation when their school administrators secretly decided to open the schools’ locker rooms, restrooms, or showers to the opposite sex.

In Texas, 10-year-old Shiloh Satterfield recently described to the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee how uncomfortable and anxious she feels now that her school has changed its policies to let boys into the school’s intimate facilities.

Her parents join thousands of other parents understandably concerned about what this means—not only for their children when changing clothes for gym class or showering after a swim meet, but also for overnight school trips where their daughters could be forced to share a bed with a biological boy (or vice versa).

And take the young boy in Pennsylvania who is not even able to change for the school’s mandatory gym class because the school is forcing boys and girls to undress together and to try “to act as natural as possible” while doing so. The boy is receiving a failing grade for each class he is unable to change for.

Young girls and boys across the country are trying to be heard—to share their discomfort and embarrassment at the thought of having to undress with a member of the opposite sex, or their frustration that they will no longer be able to compete in a fair environment if their sports teams allow boys and girls to play together.

These voices are not coming from a place of fear or social dislike. I’ve witnessed the love these students have for their friends who consider themselves transgender, while simultaneously pleading for their own rights, dignity, and privacy to be protected.

Just last week, a 15-year-old boy who identifies as a girl competed in a Connecticut high school girls’ track meet and won the 100- and 200-meter dashes.

Even a quick glance at the pictures from the meet reveal that this young man, who now identifies as a woman, is still very much built as a male and is already significantly larger than his female peers.

As a woman who loved playing sports in high school, it’s obvious to me and many others that allowing biological males to compete with females is fundamentally unfair to girls who are physically different than high school boys.

Allowing boys, regardless of how they identify, to play on girls’ sports teams creates an unequal playing field for girls to compete and deprives them of a fair chance to qualify for—let alone win—athletic competitions.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1972, women did not have the same athletic opportunities as men. In this emerging conversation, we cannot forget the ground women have gained for equal opportunities.

Permitting the definition of sex to be changed or ignored would undermine the very essence of what it means to be male and female, which is a particularly relevant factor when it comes to athletics.

This understanding of biological differences is precisely what led to the passage of federal laws that help ensure a fair playing field for women. And now, some in our society, ironically in the name of equality, are running roughshod over what women fought so hard to obtain.

Many would like to paint this as a one-sided story about one victim: the boy who thinks he’s a girl, or the girl who thinks she’s a boy. And these children absolutely deserve love, attention, and support.

But supporting and caring for them does not mean we should inflict injustice on other children. We owe every young person in America a better response—a compassionate and fair solution that ensures protection for every student’s privacy and well-being, such as the policy that Alliance Defending Freedom has recommended to schools since 2014.

This policy allows schools to respect student privacy by continuing to designate separate boys’ and girls’ showers, locker rooms, and restrooms while providing other facilities for any student uncomfortable with using areas that correspond to his or her biological sex.

Justice requires that we protect the privacy and dignity of every child. We as a society should pause before we tell some children that their voices and their privacy rights don’t matter. (For more from the author of “Dignity and Fairness Matter for Every Child in the Locker Room” please click HERE)

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Choice is a good thing, right, liberals? Not on schooling, you say? Betsy DeVos’s ideas for promoting school choice are disastrous?

That’s the new liberal position on choice, when it applies to schooling. Oh, they may say they’re worried about DeVos’s “inexperience” — but Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn’t have experience, either. They may believe that her policies that will — get this — “kill children,” in the literal, not figurative sense. They’ll say they’re offended that she’s sabotaging the public schools, as said so eloquently by Sen. Chuck Schumer:

The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefited from the public education system in this country.

What About Public Education?

What about the public education system in this country? Fox News’ Andrew Campanella, in an attempt at peacemaking, maintained that, “The concept of school choice isn’t about elevating one choice above another, or about demonizing any schools as ‘failures.’ It’s about recognizing the individual needs of individual students, and pairing students with the schools that best meet their needs.”

That’s true. But school choice is also about calling out the public schools that are failures and giving desperate parents good alternatives.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 35 countries outrank our students in Math, 27 outrank our students in Science and 23 outrank our students in reading. The Nation’s Report Card found in 2015 that, by grade 12, only 25 percent of students were at or above proficiency level in Math, 22 percent were at or above proficiency in Science and 37 percent were at or above proficiency in reading. Certain students, such as African Americans in urban areas, fare much worse.

Maybe liberals believe all the things they’re saying about DeVos and school choice. There’s another reason they don’t want school choice: loss of control over funding. With school choice, education dollars will flow to private, charter or possibly even homeschools, diverted from funding pools within their grasp.

Jeffrey Dorfman explains in Forbes that teachers’ unions receive money for each child enrolled in public schools. “Opponents of school choice are not worried about children, either the ones who want to leave or the ones that would stay. They only care about the teachers’ job security. So remember, the debate about school choice isn’t about education quality, it is really about jobs and union dues.”

Competition — Not Just for Businesses

Students enrolled in alternative education based on school choice consistently outperform public school counterparts. But school choice improves the public schools as well by providing them with competition. Even their students benefit from school choice.

A 2016 University of Arkansas study found that school choice encouraged public schools within the district to compete with the alternative school to perform better. A separate 2016 study on school choice also found that competition drives performance:

Thirty of the 42 evaluations of the effects of school-choice competition on the performance of affected public schools report that the test scores of all or some public school students increase when schools are faced with competition.
School choice, however, isn’t just about the numbers. Charter, private, Christian and homeschools are in large part value-driven — that is to say, they strive to build character and purposed values in a core-values model over and above what a student would receive in public school. For example, if a student is late in a Colorado charter school, they are required to apologize to their classmates for the disruption and late start.

Jamey Verrilli, co-founder of North Star Academy and Uncommon Schools, said that his charter school’s core values model is an integral part of the program. Uncommon Schools creates and runs urban charter public schools for low-income students. “You have to build a culture that’s going to enhance learning,” said Verrilli on a Fox News interview, “that’s going to strengthen core values, that’s going to build a sense of community for any child, particularly children in hard-pressed areas.” He added that the culture is a platform on which to build rigorous academics.

Support DeVos

Most of all, school choice is about empowering families to make the decision for themselves and taking back control over their children’s education. School choice allows students to attend the school of their family’s choosing, to excel in a school with high expectations and/or a core-values model and it propels public schools to think of these alternative schools as competition, pushing their programs to be better for students.

Amy Kelley, President of My School My Choice, a coalition of teachers, parents and non-public schools striving to give a voice to families for school choice, believes parents are in the best position to make the best educational decision for their children — not the government.

“A good education is important, it is the foundation of a successful future for our kids,” said Kelley. “So providing our children with an education in the learning environment where they can thrive is crucial. Finding that environment is not always as simple as sending your kid to the local public school building. But there is no one who can possibly determine the place where our children will learn better than us, the parents. We know our children the best and, we are the best advocates for them.” (For more from the author of “Choice Is a Good Thing, Right, Liberals? Oh, Not on Schools?” please click HERE)

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