Parents Bill of Rights Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KILEY. Madam Chair, as we speak, a half million California students are locked out of school. Los Angeles Unified, America's second largest district, has shut down for the week. Taxpaying parents in this district have no place to send their kids to school.

Sadly, they have had to get used to it. This dysfunctional district and its union have lurched from one strike, one shutdown to the next, and seized on COVID-19 as a golden opportunity to close schools indefinitely. Kids in LA were without in-person instruction longer than anywhere in the country, a year and a half for most students.

Even when some high schools resumed, students walked into a Kafkaesque Zoom in the room setup where there were a few students and a teacher there instructing from a laptop sitting on a desk in the classroom. The eventual resumption of classes was anything but normal. You had kids who were forced to eat lunch on gymnasium floors or outside, even when it was raining. They would have to wear masks all day every day without any public health rationale. The district then imposed an illegal student vaccine mandate that the California courts had to intervene and strike down.

By the way, this was a failing school district even before COVID--on the brink of bankruptcy, with students testing several years behind grade level.

The hundreds of thousands of parents in this school district have been subjected to one abuse after another. Their experience is shared by many parents across the country who have lost the right to control their child's education at the hands of a corrupt education establishment driven less by student success than by special interests and social agendas.

Today's Parents Bill of Rights Act is a desperately needed course correction, shifting the paradigm of public education in this country back toward one that is student-centered and parent-directed.

My addition to this legislation is the school choice amendment.

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Mr. KILEY. The only parents in Los Angeles whose kids are not at home right now are those who have the resources for private school or the time and wherewithal to seek out a charter school or limited interdistrict transfer options.

My amendments will enable more parents to do the same, providing a clear path to find a school that better serves their child.

This will not only increase the educational outcomes of particular students but induce the sort of systemic change that we need to benefit all students.

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