Supporters and members of a conservative women‘s organization touted the importance of parental rights as the group launched a new policy center to advocate school choice.
The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit organization, announced the launch of its Education Freedom Center at the Capitol Hill Club on Thursday, touting the center’s work advocating school choice as an important measure to protect parental rights in education.
“When [parents] look at what’s going on in schools, they are very concerned about what’s happening,” Education Freedom Center Director Ginny Gentles told the Washington Examiner. “They want education freedom. They want the ability to either take their child out or to tell the school, ‘If you don’t shape up, I’m going to take my child out.'”
The center’s launch event at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., included remarks from Gentles and senior policy analyst Inez Feltscher Stepman, who told the Washington Examiner that school choice provides parents with leverage to enact change in their schools.
“Parents already know what is going wrong in the schools,” Stepman said. “But we want to equip them with the leverage so that when they go into that meeting with the superintendent or the principal, or they show up to a school board meeting, they can walk, with a lot of money … The only thing that’s going to shift the dial with our school districts is the ability to leave.”
The launch event included comments from former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Labor, both of whom took aim at the Biden administration’s education policies.
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“[The] reforms we want to see in education that put parents and students first won’t come about through osmosis,” Foxx said. “It’s time to stop the Left’s efforts to redefine basic truths and strip families of their God-given rights.”
On its newly launched website, the Education Freedom Center says it aims to “encourage the creation of educational options that focus on academic achievement and create healthy environments for students to learn and thrive.”
The center counts a who’s who of conservative education experts and reform advocates among its advisory board, including Corey DeAngelis of the school choice advocacy organization the American Federation for Children, Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, and Erika Sanzi of the parent activist organization Parents Defending Education.
In a press release, IWF President Carrie Lukas said that the center “will build on the momentum created by parents throughout the last two years who are seeking transparency, leverage, and a voice in their children’s education” and “will be a resource that connects families to policies that empower parents and address the egregious power imbalance between parents and unresponsive school districts.”
School choice policies, which allow families to use public funds to pay for education costs including private school tuition, have seen a significant increase in support after many school districts nationwide failed to open their doors to in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nineteen states enacted some form of school choice program in 2021, and recent polling indicates the policy enjoys widespread public support.
