In Case You Missed It, Politico profiled Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx’s (R-NC) journey to Capitol Hill and her work on behalf of students, parents, workers, and job creators.
Fifty years ago, Virginia Foxx attended a school board meeting in Watauga County, N.C., that would change the course of her life.
“The board was being particularly incompetent,” Foxx recalled in an interview.
Then a man sitting next to her encouraged her to run for one of the seats. A parent and a teacher in Appalachia who earned a master’s degree in sociology, Foxx initially dismissed her qualifications. But the man pressed his case: “You mean, you’re not as qualified as those turkeys are?”
Foxx jumped into the 1974 school board race — and lost. Instead of wallowing in the defeat, however, she came to appreciate her abilities, going on to earn a doctorate in education, rise through the ranks of academia and serve a decade in the North Carolina state Senate. Now in her 18th year as a member of Congress, she is the rare Republican to score an exception from her party’s term limits on committee chairships in Congress, entrusting her to lead on hot-button education and labor issues going into 2024.
…
Since taking the helm of the House Education and Workforce Committee, she’s secured House passage for the GOP’s cornerstone education plan for a “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” a bill restricting transgender student athletes, and helped build the conservative case against President Joe Biden’s Labor secretary nominee, Julie Su.
“She’s just a bull, and she just charges in every day, nonstop, from sun up until way after the sun goes down,” former House Speaker John Boehner said in an interview.
In more than a dozen interviews, Boehner and others describe why Foxx’s leadership style made her the GOP’s top choice for shepherding some of its core priorities as families and presidential candidates stake a claim about what should happen in the classroom and on the job.
…
When Foxx first wielded the House Education and Workforce gavel in 2017, she devoted herself to shredding the Obama administration’s education and labor policies under the Trump presidency. Now, she’s set about doing the same with the Biden administration.
Foxx has cleared several bills out of her committee and passed her party’s “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” which outlines how parents can participate in their children’s education, with minor internal pushback in the House.
She also passed a measure to nullify Biden’s debt cancellation program before the Supreme Court ultimately blocked it.
She has simultaneously led efforts against Su, a former California labor commissioner Biden installed as acting Labor secretary: from a confrontational House hearing to a GAO inquiry that precipitated the demise of her confirmation process, and legislation that would prevent her from serving in an acting capacity.
…
Foxx grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia with no power or running water and parents with a 9th grade education. After working as a janitor through high school, she became the first in her family to graduate high school.
“Growing up, my goal was to survive,” Foxx said in an interview.
…
That experience showed her “I can help people in the county I grew up in — and help people who didn’t have the opportunity when they were younger, perhaps especially women, to go on to college,” she said.
Her early years in politics revealed the kind of chair she would go on to become.
