Absens Parentis (A Rodney Dangerfield Story)

Public school educators are bound by specific moral, professional, and legal duties. The one I want to focus on is in loco parentis. Meaning “in the place of a parent”, it’s a legal doctrine obligating schools and teachers to assume specific roles of responsibility, decision-making, discipline, and authority for students in their care. Essentially, it’s the notion that teachers and schools act in the place of parents when students are under their supervision.

In loco parentis isn’t merely a legal formality. It mandates teachers and schools to step into the shoes of a parent, wielding authority, offering protection, and instilling discipline. It was intended to create an unbroken chain of guidance from home to classroom, where expectations, boundaries, and accountability could seamlessly be upheld. But that venerable doctrine has been deliberately abandoned.

While teachers theoretically assume a surrogate parental role by law, the school system simultaneously absolves them of its toughest implications. We’ve all heard teachers complain about a lack of parental involvement or parental appreciation for education. But how can we point fingers at an absent parent or one that doesn’t value education like a teacher might when our own doctrine declares us to be precisely in their place? That hypocrisy unravels the notion of teacher accountability. If we stand in loco parentis, then surely the responsibility for a student's shortcomings, especially a student that lacks parental supervision at home and spends most of their waking hours with a teacher, rests with us. By failing to uphold in loco parentis, teachers are leaving students adrift, deprived of the very guidance, discipline, and accountability they need, specifically because their home lives cannot or will not provide it.

And so we see that social-emotional learning again betrays its purpose. Designed to bridge the chasm left by absent parents and address the insidious wounds of trauma and inequity, social-emotional learning promised to support and uplift every child, regardless of their starting point. Instead, the knowledge of student experiences gained from social-emotional indoctrination was perverted, weaponized into a convenient excuse. It has fueled an inappropriate empathy, a twisted compassion that dismisses academic failure and condones disruptive behavior. Educators, armed with insight into a child's difficult home life or past trauma, too often use this knowledge not as a lever for targeted intervention, but as a shameful justification for their own professional inaction.

This abdication has dire consequences. When a teacher, defying the prevailing current, attempts to enforce even the most basic standards of discipline or academic rigor, they are met with fierce, immediate resistance. Students lash out, parents erupt into fury, and school administrators, terrified of confrontation or legal reprisal, issue professional warnings, threats of termination, or even move for states to revoke teaching licenses. The system, in its misguided quest for universal comfort, actively punishes those who dare to fulfill the duties in loco parentis demands. It creates a vacuum of authority, a moral canyon where decisive leadership is replaced by fear, genuine education becomes an impossibility, and stakeholder respect for teachers is eliminated. Ultimately, the modern public education system operates under a chilling, unwritten doctrine of absens parentis. A child is absent not just of a parent at home, but of any parental figure at all.

Without the guidance, the boundaries, and the earned respect instilled by genuine authority – parental or in loco parentis – student pathways become unnecessarily precarious. The exact theory meant to prevent unjust or inequitable outcomes — social-emotional learning — has in fact become complicit in their creation. In the end, we leave our students bereft of the skills, the autonomy, and the genuine freedom necessary to pursue their own interests and thus the American Dream.

I’d like to leave you with this quick question and answer: If we refuse to step into the void of parental absence, if we will not provide the knowledge and behavioral accountability our students desperately need, then who will? The police.