(The Center Square) – Mandatory consent from parents for several medical treatments is poised to reach a floor vote in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

As lawmakers return from the weekend Monday evening, the Committee on Rules, Calendar and Operations has a 21-bill agenda awaiting. Parents’ Medical Bill of Rights, known also as House Bill 519, is included.

The legislation would make it necessary for children to receive diagnosis, treatment or prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse, emotional disturbances, and prevention of pregnancy. Access to medical records of minor children by parents is in the bill.

Rep. Jennifer Balkcom, R-Henderson, authored the proposal. In an introductory press conference, she spoke of the legal, moral and emotional responsibilities of parents running up against laws that exclude them from medical records, pharmacy reports and mental health information controlled by a consent of a minor.

Critics’ rebuttal is that children may not seek counsel and help if parents are involved.

North Carolina law says a child becomes a legal adult at age 18. Until then, responsibility including financial support is the law. At age 16 or older, a child can petition a court for emancipation.

Another reason cited by proponents is parents’ insurance paying for their children’s health care and knowing for what they are paying.

“The bill doesn’t take away a child’s right to care,” Balkcom said. “It restores the parents’ right to be involved in that care.”

In the last session of the Legislature, Democrats inclusive of then- Gov. Roy Cooper tried to stop Parents’ Bill of Rights – Senate Bill 49 – that involved K-12 education. Notification if health services were offered at school was included, as was language related to pronoun requests and an ability to know what books were checked out from the school library. Classroom instruction about sexual activity was in the new law that overcame a gubernatorial veto.

(The Center Square) – Top of mind for American taxpayers is the efficacy of their children’s schooling.

At 25%, preparing students for college or the workforce was the number one issue for respondents to The Center Square’s Voters’ Voice poll, including 28% of Republicans and 22% of Democrats.

Analyst David Byler of Noble Predictive Insights says that he expects “bread and butter” issues like this to top the list. What’s surprising is that the number isn’t higher, he added.

That’s because concern around the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education pulled focus from everyday concerns, taking the top spot for 20% of voters including 15% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats.

“What people really want more than anything else from the education system is for it to function,” said Byler.

Concerns that it hasn’t been functioning efficiently have largely fueled the criticism of the Department of Education that Republican officials point to in gutting the agency.

On March 11, Education Secretary and professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon announced the department would be letting go of about 50% of its employees.

“I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Department. This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system,” said McMahon.

Proponents of the department’s work, however, say the system’s weak points need more, not less, support.

A group of 11 Democratic U.S. senators headed by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts responded to the reduction in force with a letter calling for Acting Inspector General of the Office of Education, René L. Rocque, to investigate the issue.

“Decimating the Department of Education’s abilities to administer financial aid, investigate civil rights violations, conduct research on educational outcomes, and oversee the use of federal education grants threatens to have disastrous consequences for American students, teachers, and families,” they wrote.

About 14% of respondents, including 12% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats, said that a top priority was “making sure federal dollars go directly to schools,” indicating concern around how the federal government is currently allocating its education funds.

While McMahon says the change “reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” 44% of respondents said that the balance between federal, state, and parental power in education was getting worse.

Culture war issues like participation of trans athletes in school sports proved less important to voters, despite outsized media attention.

Byler said that when it comes to the question of gender in sports, Republicans are in step with public opinion, making it a politically attractive talking point, even if it doesn’t rank high among taxpayer priorities.

Issues of school choice and homeschooling, on the other hand, put up lower numbers, but those numbers include people with a lot of “skin in the game,” said Byler.

When it comes to families for whom public school options aren’t a good fit, the freedom to seek out or create affordable alternatives is paramount. That’s why Byler says “you get a very concentrated, very intense debate.”

For most on both ends of the political spectrum, a functioning education system should be able to handle the higher order concern of preparing a majority of students for their futures while maintaining the capacity to look out for the minority of students who may need special consideration to receive a fair education.

It’s a matter of “walking and chewing gum at the same time,” said Byler.

The poll was conducted April 15-18 by Noble Predictive Insights, surveyed 1,187 Democrats; 1,089 Republicans; and 251 non-leaning Independents. The poll has a +/- 2.0% margin of error. It is one of only six national tracking polls in the United States.

(The Center Square) – Through more than 140 executive orders, President Donald Trump in his first 100-plus days in office has used his signing pen like a battering ram to undo sometimes decades-old policies and practices that have shaped the federal government, including in public and higher education.

On day one, the administration banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs from federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funding, targeting schools like Harvard University that refuse to comply with his policies. But Trump also is attempting to move schools away from such practices by requiring them to hire for “viewpoint” or “intellectual” diversity – a move that has been met with varying degrees of skepticism and support. 

The administration included such terms in both its list of demands to Harvard and in an executive order on reforming accreditation in higher education.

Among the 10 demands outlined in a letter from the administration to Harvard in April, it directed the university to facilitate an audit of the “student body, faculty, staff and leadership” for “viewpoint diversity” and to submit that audit to the federal government.

“Each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse,” the letter reads.

The university is to hire or admit for viewpoint diversity until a “critical mass” is reached in each arena.

Within a handful of recent executive orders on education was one meant to hold accreditors accountable for “unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives.”

“A group of higher education accreditors are the gatekeepers that decide which colleges and universities American students can spend the more than $100 billion in Federal student loans and Pell Grants dispersed each year,” the order reads. 

The order accuses accreditors of prioritizing “discriminatory ideology” in accreditation standards over strong graduation rates, return on investment and other important criteria. As an antidote, the order commissions the secretary of education with devising new accreditation standards, including one that requires institutions to “prioritize intellectual diversity among faculty in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.”

Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at The Manhattan Institute who’s written on a number of topics over the years, including higher education, is supportive of the goal but thinks the means are “problematic.” Mac Donald authored “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture” in 2018.

“I agree with the substantive critique entirely. I think universities are the enemy of Western civilization,” Mac Donald told The Center Square. “They are perpetuating an ideology of hatred and of ignorance. They are betraying their fundamental obligation, which is the pursuit of truth, by embracing a one-sided, ignorant understanding of the West’s contributions and its relative position regarding other civilizations.”

In addition, Mac Donald believes universities have discriminated against certain racial groups for years. 

“The universities have been blatantly discriminating against whites, white males, Asians, Asian males. They’ve introduced grotesque double standards for admissions and hiring,” she said.

Despite her numerous and serious critiques of contemporary American universities, she thinks a mandate from the federal government for intellectual diversity represents bureaucratic overreach. The administration’s demands to Harvard were provided mostly on the basis that the university has violated discrimination laws through expressions of and responses to anti-semitism on campus, she said.

“We are a government of limited powers. It’s true that the government does oversee civil rights violations under Title VI, but it’s a stretch to say that what’s going on with the left-wing bias in academia constitutes a civil rights violation that the Trump administration has the authority to correct by withholding funds,” she said.

“As necessary as it is to make a course correction, I don’t think that we should be doing so in a way that will justify further left-wing incursions,” she added.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has also been critical of how the administration has gone after Harvard, saying it has flouted the lawful procedure for resolving such issues, despite also being critical of Harvard at times. But Tyler Coward, the foundation’s lead counsel on government affairs, isn’t as quick to oppose the administration’s mandate in the executive order on accreditation.

“We’re still thinking of what it looks like in practice for accreditors to have some sort of mandate for institutions to show ideological diversity. We at FIRE think that ideological diversity is a good thing. In its best form, it helps foster a true learning environment, a true marketplace of ideas that we expect our universities to be,” Coward told The Center Square.

While the executive order may appear heavy-handed, Coward said the government’s relationship with accrediting institutions has already occupied a kind of gray space for a long time. 

“The government is the one empowering these accreditors in the first place. The reason these accreditors exist is because the government licenses them to exist. So it’s this weird thing where the government is involved sort of but not really, and so what is the appropriate response from the government if things aren’t going well. These are age-old tensions,” Coward said.

Scott Yenor, a scholar with California-based think tank The Claremont Institute, thinks, like Mac Donald, that American universities have strayed far from their original purpose and need correcting. 

“This is a classical liberal solution with kind of non-classical liberal means,” Yenor told The Center Square. 

Yenor agrees that universities need to be a marketplace of ideas but believes most no longer are, and he thinks the administration’s attempt at requiring it might be a step in the right direction.

“I don’t know that there’s any other way of actually achieving intellectual diversity besides a demand that you achieve it,” Yenor said. “The government has been doing that when it comes to racial diversity, and always with the justification that increasing racial diversity will actually increase the intellectual diversity on campus.”

“What the Trump administration is doing is what has been done for a long time already, which is making explicit demands for ideological diversity but more direct than the indirect way it’s been done on racial stuff.”