Boys in Girls’ Bathrooms

Recent events in California and South Dakota illustrate perfectly the school gender conundrum.

Students at Buchanan High School in Fresno, California, are protesting the school’s dress code after the local school board voted against recommendations to allow boys to have long hair and earrings and against removing language in the code that says dresses and skirts are for girls. Students switched gender norms for a day following the school board’s decision.

Some students say that the dress codes are “sexist or non-inclusive to transgender students and those who don’t conform to one gender.” According to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network’s 2013 National School Climate Survey: “Nineteen percent of the 7,800 students surveyed in the middle and high schools across the country said they were prevented from wearing clothing deemed ‘inappropriate’ based on their gender.”

possibilities are endless. If parents don’t like the dress code at one school, they can enroll their children in another school. If parents don’t like the restroom policy at one school, they can enroll their children in another school. If parents don’t like the dress code or restroom policy at any school, then they can hire a tutor to educate their children or teach their children themselves. No protests, no lawsuits, no controversy, and no conundrum.

And the same goes for any other school-related issue: electronic devices, military recruiters, lunch menus, head coverings, discipline, shirts with offensive messages, Bible reading, prayer in classrooms and at football games, and the teaching of evolution, climate change, religion, and sex education.

But having schools that are privately owned and privately funded is not enough. The government (federal, state, and local, but especially federal) should have no control whatsoever over any school or the education of any child. No standards, regulations, mandates, rules, math and science initiatives, grants, loans, accreditation, breakfast or lunch programs, requirements, vouchers, or certification. And certainly no Common Core, Higher Education Act, Elementary, and Secondary Education Act, or even a Department of Education.

The solution to the school gender conundrum is educational freedom consistent with a private property society.

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