House Republicans on Wednesday pushed forward with their plan to empower parents to take on “woke” and dysfunctional school systems by arming them with a proposed Parents Bill of Rights.
The legislation is lawmakers’ answer to the rift between parents and school administrators that began with COVID-19 restrictions and grew into a backlash against left-wing politicization of curriculum, which has also become a top issue for Republicans.
The bill would force state education agencies to post curriculum for all grade levels on a publicly accessible website, and make widely available a list of parents’ rights regarding their children’s education.
It declares that “parents have a First Amendment right to express their opinions on decisions made by State and local education leaders.”
The rights listed in the bill are:
· The right to review the curriculum of their child’s school.
· The right to know if the state alters academic standards.
· The right to meet with each teacher of their child not less than twice during each school year.
· The right to review the budget, including all revenues and expenditures, of their child’s school.
· The right to a list of the books and other reading materials in the library of their child’s school.
· The right to address the local school board.
· The right to information about violence in their child’s school.
· The right to information about any plans to eliminate gifted and talented programs in the child’s school.
“So many times across this nation, we found that parents were attacked and called terrorists, because they simply wanted to go to a school board meeting to be heard about what’s going on,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said during a presentation of the bill.
“The right to see the school budgets and how they spend their money, the right to protect your child’s privacy and the right to be updated on any violent activity at the school,” he said. “We think these are pretty basic things that everybody and every parent should have a right to.”
The measure is unlikely to move forward in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
No longer seen as third-rail politics for Republicans that the GOP ceded to Democrats, public school education curriculum is now a hotly contested issue since schools were closed in 2020 during the pandemic, and teachers taught students through online instruction.
Many parents, however, could catch a glimpse of the subject matter being taught to their children at home and became concerned that the topics were too polarizing or explicit. Parents and school officials also fought over vaccine and mask mandates as schools reopened.
Parents took their frustrations to school board officials, which became a successful campaign issue for Republican Glenn Youngkin in winning the governor’s office of Virginia in 2021. Among the issues were banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 Virginia schools.
Republicans have cited issues ranging from school officials and teachers who hid school curriculum and sexually explicit school library books from parents, to coercing students to change their gender pronouns and hide the change from their parents.
The bill also says that education officials, lawmakers and other stakeholders should never “seek to criminalize the lawfully expressed concerns of parents about their children’s education.”
In 2021, a memo sent to Justice Department officials by Attorney General Merrick Garland suggesting that federal law enforcement should step in after a “spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school board officials by parents who protested public school policies.
The legislation would amend the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to ban educational agencies or institutions acting as an “agent” of a parent.
Other measures include mandated parental notification and consent for administering medical examinations or screenings that the school or agency may give a student.
This includes the required notification procedures for school officials in case of a medical emergency so parents can be contacted promptly after an incident.
The Parents Bill of Rights legislation was authored by Education and Workforce Committee member Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana.
The bill was applauded by co-founders of Moms for Liberty, Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice.
“We are thankful that Speaker McCarthy and Rep. Letlow are focused in on the important issue at the federal level. Parental rights are fundamental rights that the government doesn’t give and can’t take away,” they said.
“Parental rights are not being respected by government entities from school boards all the way up to the federal government and Moms for Liberty will continue to fight at the most local level where the most egregious violations are currently happening,” they said. “This is one big step for parents rights across the U.S.”
Ms. Letlow introduced similar legislation last year, but it failed to advance in the Democrat-run Congress. Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, also introduced a Senate version of the bill in the previous Congress.
