Two of the nation’s leading education experts ponder the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Espinoza decision. Bruce D. Baker of Rutgers University is a school finance expert. Preston C. Green III of the University of Connecticut specializes in education law.
I confess that I was relieved that the Espinoza decision was limited in scope. I was afraid that the religious zealots on the Court might sweep away all barriers to public funding of religious schools. It did not. But Baker and Green persuade me that I was wrong, that Espinoza was another step towards breaking down the Wall of Separation between church and state and should be viewed with alarm.
I urge you to read their analysis of where we are going, how it involves not only vouchers but charter schools, and what states must do to protect public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I could not get to the link because of my own technology,
In any case, Espinosa seems to me to be yet another example of the slow movement of American jurisprudence to the right, re-defining where the middle is. The justices are slowing walking back almost all the freedoms that were attained by the previous generations. Are they going to re-enshrine slavery? Or just sanction wage slavery?
I, too, took no hope from the Espinoza decision. The Republicans have long known that they have their finger in a dyke that could burst at any moment. Why? For many decades, if you polled young people, you would find that they mostly opposed Republican policies. This is increasingly so today. However, the Republicans have long had this going for them: Since Reagan and Karl Rove, they’ve known that they could use social issues like gay rights and abortion to galvanize the fundamentalist Christian right and get them to the polls and so continue to win elections. And what better way to shore up that support than to create fundy Christian madrasas to train the next generation of poor people willing to vote against their own interests? And, of course, the Republicans have ALEC to craft legislation that falls within the Espinoza framework.
However, I’m not convinced that this strategy will be successful. Insular fundamentalist schools teach such utter nonsense that many of the graduates of these will encounter, when they go out into the larger world, clear counterexamples to and mockery of the nonsense that they’ve been taught–that Cain and Abel rode around on dinosaurs, that their own doubts are the voices of demons working on them, that babies are born with Original Sin, and other such superstitious claptrap. And converted zealots tend to become zealots for the opposing team.
Everybody knows that was Fred and Barney
I have penchant, as many of you know, of being close to perniciously picky about the uses of language and how people allow destructive language to unknowingly creep into their own discourse–thanks a lot Victor Klemperer!! As cogent as the argument they make is, I couldn’t help but be tripped up by this sentence: “Although state statutes define charter schools as ‘public schools,’ a significant body of case law finds that charter schools are more the equivalent of publicly subsidized private entities than directly operated government schools.” I have not problem with them putting public schools in quotes here, but to fall into the trap of using the term “government schools” is surely–I hope–an innocent mistake, but if not corrected, avoided and derided for the what the words actually mean and intend, it’s the proverbial slippery slope that, if used again, threatens to cloud the argument.
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(in my best Scarlett voice) Why, do blubber on… 🙃
Thar you go, makin’ fun
“…charter schools are more the equivalent of publicly subsidized private entities than directly operated government schools.” ”
There is so much in language that is subtle. Government schools has a different ring than “schools run by a duly elected school board”. The former is a reference that is decidedly in the wheelhouse of those who wish to disparage schools that are required by law to serve the entire public. There are a thousand other such phrases, and these phrases pass from acceptable to unacceptable based on who has co-opted it in normal usage. Consider “colored” as a use in the dialogue on race for example.
We have been on a slippery slope that sends public funds to private and religious schools for many years. When I first started teaching in New York, the public schools had nothing to do with private religious schools. That policy changed from a court case that required the public schools to provide transportation and all special services to religious schools within their boundaries. My school district sent psychologists, a part-time speech, reading,and ESL teacher to the neighboring Roman Catholic school, but the teachers worked in a van that the school district leased.
Today we find ourselves in privatization mode which has resulted in an ever increasing entanglement with religious and private schools funded by public funds. I tend to agree with Baker. We need to cut the cord. Public and private should not commingle. The line between public and private needs clear borders. Blurring the public-private relationship has led to expensive and wasteful confusion. Public schools were far better off when the line between public and private did not intersect. Now privatization has captured our national policy without any evidence that it offers superior results. Public schools have few advocates in power now that the charter lobby pulls the politicians’ strings. Public schools can thrive with investment, and the only way to ensure that public schools can get support is the disallow the squandering of public funds on private entities. The question is how do we put the genie back into the bottle?
Public education is part of the public trust. It is a public service that should have nothing to do with funneling public money to private companies. When homeowners hire a private security firm, does the money come out of the local police budget? If someone never has a fire in their home are they exempt from paying for the fire department? We should not be requiring public services to cater to the whims of particular groups of people. The common good should be a tax supported institution that benefits all. If someone opts to do something different, taxpayers should not be responsible for an individual’s choice that is different from the common good. Privatization of public education has been a disaster that has weakened and underfunded public schools for no public benefit.
cx: If someone never has had a fire in their home are they exempt from paying……
retired teacher Yes, but if the quieter forces-that-be are draining public education of its resources FOR DECADES . . . so that so many, rightly in many cases, are unhappy with it, . . . persistently badmouthing it and its teachers, and offering scammer bells and whistles, and what looks like real dollars to parents, their main question: What’s best for my child? becomes easier and easier to answer.
Even if some understand the political dimension of privatization, it can seem remote when my child’s education is at stake. CBK
The under funding of urban public education is systemic and chronic. Teachers have nothing to do with funding education, but they have borne the all the blame and criticism. That is what started the whole zip code argument for privatization. The mostly minority schools districts have been underfunded by political design. Now all public schools are under an assault that seeks to move public funds into private pockets.
Here’s Diane in the New York Review of Books this morning:
retired teacher asks the question of the day: “. . . how do we put the genie back into the bottle?”
It’s difficult because, if they are not just robotic-minded and paid well, so many who are charter/private school supporters are living in and asking the wrong question. That is, they ask “which school can provide the best education for my child?” RATHER THAN
Which kind of school system, public or private, serves the democratic principles they want to continue to live by, and, more importantly, which does not?
At the core of it, a shift away from public education is not a shift away, but a BREAK away from democracy that, on principle, serves ALL. Instead of ALL, it privatization adds arbitrariness to the political climate, making terms of selection . . . of who gets served . . . into a governing principle that no one will enjoy being the victim of.
That’s a hard argument to make because most well-meaning people are “thinking locally” and are not in the habit of thinking in terms of their own political foundations–which in fact are about as “local” as you can get, in the long-term if not the short.
But in fact, through the whole privatization movement, the people of the United States are slowly being scammed out of their freedoms and of the democracy they live in and claim to love, but apparently know little or nothing about as it’s disappearing before their eyes.
Look back to the last 50+ years–ALEC has been around a long time making dupes out of our state legislators. But the people who are so ignorant of the political air they live in are the ones who are Trump followers now and who, earlier, were slowly ‘educated’ out of their own political awareness . . . by omission of a qualified political, social science, history, philosophy and arts education. What’s going on now didn’t happen in a vacuum. I would say to ALEC, to remember FDR and to be careful what you wish for.
The greater “WE” who grew up just after WWII were politically aware by our experience; but WE seemed to think those who came later would just learn the importance of democracy by osmosis, I guess; regardless of what happened in their formal PUBLIC schooling.
And so what we now call neo-liberal forces, a re-emergence of Jim Crow, and rampant Randian individualism, coupled with the capitalist-only game-show consciousness, easily foxed-up the chicken house and became the normative threads of what we loosely call American culture.
How do we put the genie back in the bottle? By a long term, well-funded, publicly aired educational campaign, using the massive communications tools we have, to SHOW the central issue: how democracy differs from oligarchy (the un-elected Zuckerbergs or Gates in control of everything?), and how we already enjoy it; and how privatization of education, and the post office, and so many other institutions, constitutes not a shift, but a massive BREAK with basic democratic norms that we ALL now enjoy. (Think of the power of the recent Lincoln Project.)
Other than that, advise everyone you know to make friends with their favorite oligarch, who, if they follow Zuckerberg’s migration of moral mentality, will soon turn into a power-mongering monster, and then be sure to say good luck to everyone else. CBK
You are right, Catherine. Governance matters! Public Schools are democracy in action that supports local control of a local public asset. In Florida DeSantis wants to marginalize the local boards of education, and he wants to appoint superintendents. His objective is to further undermine public schools while promoting more private charter schools and vouchers. Democracy matters at all levels of government.
. . . and the undermining of the ALL is the most important thing about it. CBK
The authors say: “By extension, this would suggest that government must also fund and operate religious tribunals (as alternative to government court systems), religious libraries, police, parks and so on, for each and every religion that wishes to have their own taxpayer funded services, from Catholicism and Islam to Jedi and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is an extreme and unfortunate end game. But the time may soon come where states wishing to reign in public financing of discriminatory behavior and extremist curricula have little other choice than to cancel non-public school choice.”
I gather from this statement that public funding for education is a sin to be corrected by any scheme that can be conjured for financing.
At the extreme, parents/caregivers become financially responsible for education with no regulations and no subsidies except from private sources. So, is home schooling the endgame?
It highlights the absurdity of opening up the flood gates of sending public funds to religious institutions. It is opening Pandora’s box to get public schools to pay for just about anything.
Laura and retired: Yes . . . by patient design, It’s REALLY a rescinding of choice . . . so that SOME get to choose between which corporation owns the curriculum . . . once they get rid of regulations about curriculum, who will parents complain to about THAT?; not to mention the school’s very existence . . at the corporation’s or owner’s whim and who identity with other principles, like capitalistic, and not with providing a good education for its students; and others get to “choose” what’s left over for those who have been de-selected.
I am still hitting my head over what it must feel like for children when a private/corporate school closes overnight, teachers and all. It makes my heart hurt.
And do let me remind everyone here that “lumping” is ignorant and won’t do. Catholic educational institutions, and Montessori and some others, were around and working well with broad and exceptional curriculum, regulations, and parent-funding long before the present situation . . . where neo-liberals banded together with the right-wing protestant evangelicals and even some Catholic power-holders.
And again, this is a complicated and changing situation. For all the problem of secular-democratic culture, way too many, even in the religious communities among us, fail to understand the diminishing of the good that surely occurs with the collapse of the wall between politics and religion in a democracy. That collapse is equivalent to the collapse of democracy itself. Let what is Caesar’s be Caesar’s and, though there are few “nevers” in this life, we CAN say with some certainty that force never brought about religious conversion. CBK