Pregnancy Centers

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, America's students are failing. Reading and math scores are at historic lows nationwide. In places like Baltimore, 40 percent of high schools don't even have a single math-proficient student--not a single one. Forty percent of the schools in Baltimore can't find a single math-proficient student.

This must be a wake-up call because those school districts aren't alone. There are others that are failing. And yes, there is a wide array of performance outcomes in school districts across the country, but this kind of trend is being seen more and more seemingly every day. So it has to be a wake-up call, and it is proof that our education system has lost its way. It has betrayed its charge and lost our trust.

Now, to be clear--to be perfectly clear--our students' failures are not of their own making. Those failures are the unintended yet undeniable consequences and the students the innocent victims of a one- size-fits-all education system that has ventured into the business of ideological conformity, forsaking our children's literacy for the pursuit of social engineering.

American classrooms have become arenas where history is rewritten, and parents--the rightful stewards of their children's futures--are marginalized or in some instances labeled as ``domestic terrorists'' just for questioning this new order. It comes as no surprise that parents are seeking alternative ways to educate their children.

In fact, the Washington Post found that since 2018, homeschooling has increased by 51 percent while public school enrollment is decreasing year after year.

So these parents are making a different decision. Who can blame them? Who can blame parents for wanting to shield their children from inappropriate school materials--inappropriate school materials that parents, understandably, are outraged upon discovering that these things are being shared with their students.

Sometimes they are sufficiently upset about it that they will show up to a school board meeting. And sometimes within that school board meeting they will just read the materials that are being given to their children in a public school and then be told that they have to stop; that they have to stop reading it because it is too inappropriate. It is making too many people uncomfortable.

Well, if it is inappropriate to be read at a school board meeting because it makes the school board or spectators uncomfortable, then it is inappropriate to be taught in the schools. In any event, it is the parents' decision as to whether it is inappropriate. And a parent who decides that their child is being subjected to this kind of material ought to have the opportunity, without excessive difficulty created by the government, to choose a different educational option for the parents' children.

Who can blame parents for taking education into their own hands when year after year they are not seeing improvement in their children's learning? Parents, you see, and not school boards and certainly not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats are the fundamental drivers of their children's education. This is the way it always should be.

Now, I introduced a bill, a bill that I call the ACE Act. It is an acronym that stands for Achieving Choice in Education. I introduced the ACE Act because I believe that parents, endowed with innate and instinctive wisdom and an unbreakable bond with their children, are the rightful navigators of their children's educational journey. The ACE Act would deliver on this belief by fortifying the rule of section 529 education savings accounts as vital tools for parents. Traditionally focused on college expenses, the ACE Act expands these boundaries to include homeschooling and a broader array of private school expenses, allowing families with students in public, private, religious, and at- home schools to spend their hard-earned money on materials, books, online resources, and therapies for students with disabilities.

Moreover, the ACE Act enriches these accounts by enhancing Federal tax exemptions for distributions, effectively doubling the annual distribution cap from $10,000 to $20,000 and introducing tax-exempt gifting provisions. These changes ensure that families can allocate more of their hard-earned money or even a generous gift toward their children's educational journeys and to do so without the unnecessary strain of an excessive tax burden to go along with it.

You have to remember that these are things parents are concerned about when they decide they need to do something different for their child's education, including these inappropriate materials to which they are being exposed in many instances. These are paid for by money that already came from the parents. It is built into their tax bill. They pay it. They are already paying for it. So they shouldn't be told again and again that they have no choice in it--that it is not their choice--and then be penalized with no recourse at all within the tax system when they decide a different educational approach is appropriate and necessary for their child. This ought to be their choice, and governments ought to do as little as possible to interfere with that. Governments shouldn't be punishing parents for making that choice.

So the ACE Act would encourage States to embrace more school choice policies and laws. Under the ACE Act, if States don't have qualifying school choice laws already enacted, they would lose the Federal income tax exemption on municipal bonds. This would encourage States to do the right thing, encourage more States to do what many States already have wisely done, which is to give parents more choice in public education.

The guardians of our future are not, in fact, distant bureaucrats but rather the parents and families who live, breathe, and dream of a better tomorrow for their children.

The ACE Act provides a rallying call to embrace school choice, to honor individual freedom, and to give the most responsibility to the ones who have the most at stake in it, which is families, to be driven primarily by parents. The lamentable state of our education system is a stark indication that America's educational status quo has faltered. To correct course, we have got to trust parents to discern what is best for their children. They know what is best for the children, better than any government bureaucracy ever could or ever will. They care infinitely for their children. Their love for them knows no boundaries. We need to respect that and understand that parents are very much inclined and incentivized in so many ways that the government never could be to look out for the best educational interests of their children, to plot a brighter course for them, one that would inure to their benefit and not to their detriment.

So as they continue to be taxed by the State and then told by the State that they have got to send their child only to a particular institution, they need alternatives. Some of those alternatives we could make less burdensome, less onerous, and less punitive to the extent they are chosen by the parents.

By championing the principles of choice and freedom in education and ensuring that government doesn't stand in the way of this endeavor, we can foster an environment in which America's students can thrive, powered by an education system that truly serves them.

Opponents of efforts like these will sometimes build a rallying cry-- a rallying cry--that talks about the importance of the public education system. Yes, the public education system is important, and this is part of it. This is not distinct from the public education system. School choice options are part of the public education system because when you take money from someone through the tax system with the understanding that you will educate their children with it, you owe it to them to give them options and to not pigeonhole them into one school, one approach, dictated in many instances by a teachers union that may or may not have the best interests of their children at heart.

Sometimes this is an issue, sometimes it is not. For many parents, they are happy with their existing public school options, but more often than not it is not options, it is an option. It is just take it or leave it. Some parents can afford just fine making a different choice, but they need to be given more options that are less punitive because it is, after all, up to the parents to make sure that their children are educated, that they are treated well, are cared for well, and that they are not being fed things that the parents find abhorrent.

That is why this is about so much more than just the education system. This is about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom within a family for parents to look out for the best interests of their children without having the State or the Federal Government unreasonably, unfairly intruding on them.

It is time to foster more school choice options, and it is time to pass the ACE Act.

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