GOP preps for debates on parents rights, school vouchers, transgender athletes

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans laid the groundwork for some top legislative priorities during a hearing that examined public funding for charter schools and voucher programs, as well as increasing parents’ oversight of school curriculum.

The Republican chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, provided a forum for a discussion of legislation that would prioritize tax incentives for private or alternative schooling over public schools, allow parental access to public school curriculum and bar many transgender athletes from competing in school sports.

Public education has become a major cause for the GOP, mainly in Republican-controlled state legislatures and at local school board meetings at which conservatives target books, often with themes or characters centering on LGBTQ individuals or people of color. The results have been the banning of thousands of books as well as a culture war over school curriculum that centers on diversity, gender identity and inclusion.

Now with Republicans in control of the U.S. House, the battle has made its way to the federal stage, though progress may be difficult for the GOP given a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Democratic president. Education policy also has traditionally largely remained in the hands of states and local school bodies.

A proposed measure specifies that parents are allowed to review curriculum and instructional materials.

“It is time for the education complex to understand that children belong to their parents, not the state,” Foxx said in her opening statement.

Democrats pushed back, arguing that Republicans were not addressing the real issues in education such as low teacher pay and school shootings.

They criticized Republicans for instead focusing on advancing and passing “educational gag orders” — a term used by ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia — such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, book bans and restrictions on how educators can teach topics related to race and gender.

“Many of these attacks have been launched under the guise of transparency and expanding parents’ rights,” Scott said in his opening statement. “While parental engagement is critical for a student’s success, the bills introduced have been crafted to give a vocal minority the power to impose personal beliefs over all students.”

The spotlight on public education has increased since 2020, when schools were shut down by the pandemic and parents and educators fought over mask mandates when schools re-opened.

Targeting education is a strategy that worked for Youngkin in 2021, when he campaigned on his opposition to critical race theory, though it did not prove as successful for Republican candidates across the country in 2022.

Democratic Rep. Suzanne Marie Bonamici of Oregon said the solution to addressing problems in America’s education system is not “to funnel taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools and for-profit charter schools,” because it undermines the effectiveness of public schools and education.

“A real crisis in American education is that many of my colleagues, in Congress and in state legislatures, are applying a divisive strategy rooted in discrimination toward and exclusion of LGBTQ students and students with disabilities, trying to censor and silence content that does not fit their political ideology and agenda, defunding public schools and failing to address gun violence,” Bonamici said.

She asked the witness tapped by Democrats, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, about how his state’s public schools were working with parents to involve them in their children’s education while also supporting the well-being of LGBTQ students.

Polis said that a critical part of a school system’s success is how much it includes parents.

Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida pushed for support of her legislation, which would establish a minimum salary for teachers of $60,000, arguing that “low teacher pay is one of the many factors contributing to teacher shortages across the nation.”

And Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia said that the five-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., is next week, and said the committee needed to address the epidemic of school shootings.

Gentles also brought up her support for a bill introduced in the last Congress by Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida titled The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. According to a summary, it would “make it a violation of federal law for a recipient of federal funds who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls.”

It says that for purposes of the bill, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.