One big problem with Republicans’ ‘Parents Bill of Rights’
Brad Polumbo
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House Republicans just passed a “Parents Bill of Rights” with nearly all members of their caucus on board. While this legislation is dead on arrival in a Democratic-controlled Senate, it stakes out a savvy political position through which the GOP can tout itself as the party of parents. But there’s one huge flaw with the legislation on its policy merits.
First, here’s what this bill actually does.
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For one, it requires that schools publicly post the types of books available, the curriculum being taught, how school money is being allocated, and other information so that parents can access it at will. It also requires that teachers meet with parents upon request and that the school notify parents when there’s a violent incident on campus. So, too, amendments to the legislation require that parents be notified if a transgender-identifying student is going to be competing on sports teams or using bathrooms that correspond to the opposite of their birth sex.
These requirements are essentially all just transparency measures meant to keep parents in the loop on what’s going on with their children’s education.
https://twitter.com/SpeakerMcCarthy/status/1639353625766944782
“You have a Parents Bill of Rights. … This says the parents can now know what’s being taught in the school,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said of the bill, which he championed. “But unfortunately, the Democrats are too extreme to believe that parents should have a say in their kids’ education.”
McCarthy is not wrong that Democrats are taking some extreme stances in this debate. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for her part, absurdly decried these basic transparency measures as “fascist.” But while it’s a far cry from the fascist censorship effort Democrats are whining about, the Parents Bill of Rights still has some serious problems.
Namely, while its actual provisions are commonsensical and reasonable, Republicans have long maintained that there is no constitutional authority for the federal government to regulate education at all; it is a state and local issue. Indeed, many of the Republican lawmakers who voted for this legislation have elsewhere voted to abolish the entire Department of Education!
A handful of Republicans voted against the bill for exactly this reason.
“The measure has a fatal flaw,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) wrote in an op-ed. “While seemingly reinforcing parents’ rights, it undermines the critical principle for conservatives: federalism, the bedrock of our liberty. The Constitution provides a limited list of federal powers. As conservatives have rightly pointed out for decades, education is not on that list. My fellow Republicans in the House, confusing themselves with a national school board, believe the federal government should step in to protect parents.”
“The proposed legislation, if enacted, would take local control and parents’ discretion out of so many aspects of education — and, more alarmingly, pave the way for Democrats to use these new federal powers over education to advance a woke agenda,” Buck concluded.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who also voted against the legislation, made a similar argument. He tweeted, “From Wokeness to funding to bathrooms to Critical Race Theory, the federal government SHOULD NOT be involved in education. I don’t want to strengthen the federal Department of Education. I want to abolish it. I don’t want Congress more involved in decisions that are best made in local school districts. I want the Congress less involved.”
These critics have a good point. Conservatives should be working to roll back the federal government’s meddling in education, not further cement it. And it undermines the credibility of Republicans’ push to achieve noble goals, such as restoring the proper constitutional scope of the federal government by ending the Department of Education, when they’re so blatantly inconsistent.
Still, a Parents Bill of Rights with these kinds of reasonable transparency measures absolutely should become law. But it should happen at the state and local level, not through federal overreach.
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Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the co-founder of BASEDPolitics.