Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Thursday that the Parents Bill of Rights being considered in Congress is all about "transparency" when it comes to what children are being taught in public schools.
"This is something that originated in the last Congress," Fitzgerald said during an appearance on Newsmax's "American Agenda." "As a member of the Judiciary Committee, one of the things that Chairman Jim Jordan [R-Ohio] and a lot of the members suddenly were made aware of was that Merrick Garland, the attorney general, was part of a conversation that happened between the National Teachers Union, the White House and then, ultimately, the AG's office.
"They laid out the premise to not only brand parents as terrorists, but to begin a process to try and, I would say, intimidate or interrogate, eventually, the situations that existed.
"It's something that's been driven by, I think, kind of the back and forth that's happened at a lot of these school board meetings when parents find out that things like critical race theory are being taught in the classroom and yet are not part of what has been published as the full curriculum," he continued.
"I had conversations with administrators in my own congressional district, asking them if they, in fact, made public the curriculum, which I think all of us expected would be a document that would be certainly readily available to anybody that wanted to just peruse it or take a look at it and yet, that wasn't happening."
According to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Biden administration colluded with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to develop the language of the NSBA's Sept. 29, 2021, letter to President Joe Biden urging the use of federal law enforcement and counterterrorism tools, including the Patriot Act, against parents.
Released Tuesday, the committee's report concluded the administration's overall goal was to silence critics of its education policies in the run-up to the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.
Fitzgerald said that reasons school administrators in his district gave for not making the curriculum public included "they thought it was too costly or it would be something that would be a burden on the district."
"They all offered to sit down with parents and have that discussion, but that's one of the pillars, I guess you could say, of the Parents Bill of Rights, is this transparency," the Wisconsin Republican said.
"I think, ultimately, if anyone that is involved in education would simply make some of this material available, it may actually result in less people being upset and scrutinizing some of the school boards the way they have, because they're just outraged that you can't have an open discussion about some of these topics."
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