Dive Brief:
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Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, will not seek another term as chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Foxx said during remarks at the Community College National Legislative Summit last week.
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Foxx chaired the committee between 2017 and 2019 and returned to the role in 2023 when Republicans reclaimed control of the House. Foxx is stepping down as chair due to the expiration of a waiver that allowed her to circumvent GOP conference rules limiting the consecutive terms a chair can serve to three.
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Her current term ends January 2025, and although she will not seek another term as committee chair, she is running for re-election to the House in 2024. She has served on the committee since joining Congress in 2005.
Dive Insight:
In her speech to community college leaders on Wednesday, Foxx told attendees her "work is not quite finished," according to a transcript. “While steering the committee can sometimes be frustrating and often messy, it’s always been rewarding to work with education advocates like yourselves."
Foxx spent most of her career in teaching and administration in North Carolina's higher education system. She began her career in public service on the school board in Watauga County, North Carolina, between 1976 and 1988 and later served a decade in the North Carolina Senate, from 1994 to 2004.
She voted against recent key measures impacting K-12, such as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which sought to curb gun violence in schools, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which provided schools a third pot of federal pandemic relief funding amounting to $121.9 billion.
On the K-12 front, she's been a staunch advocate for school choice.
"Get involved with your children's education. Learn what's happening in the classroom," she told Fox News during an interview last week on the state of education in America. "Homeschooling is a great choice for parents."
She's also made good on her promise to scrutinize the Biden administration through oversight inquiries.
Last year, for example, she pressed the U.S. Education Department on its role in pandemic relief spending and questioned equity-related expenses like staff training for culturally responsive teaching. She said “equity-based allocations” of funds — which were often used by districts and states to focus spending on the schools and students most impacted by the pandemic — "are a waste and misuse of taxpayer-funded COVID-19 relief programs.”
She's also been critical of the department's Title IX regulatory efforts, which have been a major priority for the Biden administration. Last November, she coauthored a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona calling for an investigation into the department's interpretation of the federal rights law as also protecting LGBTQ+ students and staff from sex discrimination in education programs.
Foxx's announcement that she will not seek another term as head of the committee comes just days after she called for Cardona's resignation after he failed to denounce as antisemitic the pro-Palestinian chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."
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