{"id":14590,"date":"2024-01-25T13:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/25\/sen-tuberville-says-trump-understands-school-choice-will-be-a-focal-point-of-2024-election\/"},"modified":"2024-01-25T13:00:15","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T13:00:15","slug":"sen-tuberville-says-trump-understands-school-choice-will-be-a-focal-point-of-2024-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/25\/sen-tuberville-says-trump-understands-school-choice-will-be-a-focal-point-of-2024-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Sen Tuberville says \u2018Trump understands\u2019 school choice will be a \u2018focal point\u2019 of 2024 election"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
Join Fox News for access to this content<\/div>\n
Plus get unlimited access to thousands of articles, videos and more with your free account!<\/div>\n
Please enter a valid email address.<\/span><\/div>\n
By entering your email, you are agreeing to Fox News Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which includes our Notice of Financial Incentive. To access the content, check your email and follow the instructions provided.\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

FIRST ON FOX:<\/strong> Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has been in talks with former President Trump about the issue of school choice and parental rights, he told Fox News Digital in an interview Wednesday night.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tuberville said the former president \u2018understands\u2019 how big of an issue school choice for parents will be in this year\u2019s presidential election as public schools continue to \u2018fail\u2019 students, despite the U.S. spending more money per student than most countries in the world.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve talked to President Trump about it, and I think it should be a big focal point in the election,\u2019 Tuberville\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

\u2018He knows it, and that it\u2019ll be a big factor,\u2019 he continued. \u2018And I think parents resonate with that. The last thing I told the parents was: Voices need to be heard. And this needs to be spread, it can\u2019t be a dozen parents, and it\u2019s got to be parents all over the country.\u2019<\/p>\n

Tuberville, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Children and Families, hosted a roundtable Wednesday afternoon with GOP Sens. Katie Britt of Alabama, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Ted Budd of North Carolina and Eric Schmitt of Missouri, along with a dozen parents from across the country.<\/p>\n

Topics like ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT), boys and girls sports, and how test scores have plummeted after the COVID-19 pandemic were discussed during the roundtable that also marked National School Choice Week.<\/p>\n

School choice, which provides all families with alternatives to the public schools for which they\u2019re zoned, can be expanded through multiple avenues at the state level, including school voucher programs, tax-credit scholarship programs, individual tuition tax credit programs and deductions, and education savings accounts. These programs can be limited to certain households based on an income threshold or other factors, or they can be expanded universally to all children.<\/p>\n

Tuberville said that despite significant federal funding for public schools, it \u2018goes into buildings and teachers\u2019 unions\u2019 but not into \u2018the minds of the students.\u2019 According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2019-2020 school year, the U.S. spent $870 billion on public elementary and secondary schools.<\/p>\n

\u2018Basically, this is about parents in charge of their kids,\u2019 Tuberville said. \u2018We\u2019re not teaching reading, science and history as much as we should be. They\u2019re more concerned about a social justice agenda in the school.\u2019<\/p>\n

One of the attendees, Sonja Shaw, the president of Chino Valley Unified School Board in Southern California and a mother of three, agreed that school choice will be a big ballot issue for parents casting a vote this year.<\/p>\n

\u2018I do because CRT is still a huge issue, and this ties into CRT, it\u2019s just packaged differently,\u2019 Shaw told Fox News Digital. \u2018I think the more awareness that we bring, it\u2019s going to bring light, and then just like you\u2019ve seen with parental rights, I just think it\u2019s a matter of parents exposing it.\u2019<\/p>\n

California became a battleground state for parental rights and school choice issues in local politics last year. Shaw said this is because California is the blue \u2018pilot\u2019 for what other state school programs will inevitably follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Whatever\u2019s in California, they\u2019re going to put it everywhere else, it\u2019s just a matter of time,\u2019 she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the biggest issues that swept several school boards across the Golden State last year was the parental notification policy that requires schools to disclose to parents if their child identifies as transgender. Shaw\u2019s district was one of the few to implement the policy, and they received backlash from the governor\u2019s office for it.<\/p>\n

Following Chino Valley\u2019s adoption of the policy, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into the district for \u2018potential legal violations.\u2019 Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom also threatened to sue another Southern California school district for refusing to teach a social studies course that included controversial gay rights activist Harvey Milk.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s not just California in the education fight. Dozens of bills have been introduced in other states \u2014 including Arizona, Indiana, Arkansas and others \u2014 to establish stronger parental rights policies in public schools.<\/p>\n

Popularity for school choice is also on the rise. According to ACE Scholarships, a nonprofit committed to helping parents access better education options for their school-age children through private school partnerships, a record 14,090 scholarships were awarded to K-12 children across the country through its program for the 2023-2024 school year.<\/p>\n

Recently, Republican governors made significant inroads in pushing universal school choice legislation, which did not exist anywhere in the country a few years ago.<\/p>\n

Nine states have enacted universal school choice, with state Republicans leading the effort.<\/p>\n

Trump routinely touted school choice during his presidency, once calling it the civil rights issue of \u2018all-time in this country,\u2019 and he signed an executive order on Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School Choice toward the end of his term.<\/p>\n

Fox News Digital reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.<\/p>\n

Fox News\u2019 Brandon Gillespie and Joshua Q. Nelson contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Join Fox News for access to this content Plus get unlimited access to thousands of articles, videos and more with your free account! Please enter a valid email address. By entering your email, you are agreeing to Fox News Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which includes our Notice of Financial Incentive. To access the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14590","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}