Katherine Stewart, a scholar of rightwing evangelicals, writes in The New Republic about Betsy DeVos’s brazen transfer of public funds to private schools during the pandemic. Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart surveys the generous distribution of federal funds to private and religious schools, far more generous than the federal money for public schools. As you have read in numerous posts and in a study by the Network for Public Education, charter schools, which enroll about 6% of American students collected $1 billion to $2 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program. Stewart shows that private and religious schools collected even more. This was no accident. It is part of DeVos’s long-term goal of destroying public education.
She writes:
How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools? We can answer the question with some hard numbers. Public school students merit something like $266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding. Kids attending the right private schools are worth $5,000 each or possibly much more.
That $266, by the way, is an overestimate. It’s what you get when you take the $13.5 billion allocated for K-12 education in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of this past March and divide it up among the nation’s 50.8 million public school students. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made sure to siphon some of that money for private and religious schools, which she has long favored, although she did receive pushback: On July 22, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), joined by school districts in California, Connecticut, and Colorado, sued DeVos and her department over the policy, calling it “as immoral as it is illegal…”
The $5,000 per student figure for some private schools cited above comes out of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was established by the CARES Act and implemented by the Small Business Administration. Public schools aren’t eligible for PPP money, which is technically a loan but will be forgiven if the funds are used for expenses that meet certain criteria. Although the SBA does not disclose exact loan amounts, it does make public the recipients receiving more than $150,000 and identifies amounts within broad ranges.
With this information, we know that Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private pre-K–12 school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a $75 million endowment and a student body of around 1,013, where annual tuition runs up to $52,300, collected a loan of between $5 and $10 million—or roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per student. (The school did not respond to multiple requests to confirm the exact amount.)…
Georgetown Preparatory School, which serves about 500 students on 93 acres in North Bethesda, Maryland, and whose notable alumni include Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, collected a $2.7 million PPP loan, which works out to $5,440 per student. According to an analysis by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the total amount of large PPP loans given to private and religious schools was at least $2.67 billion and as much as $6.47 billion—or about half as much as the total for all schools under the CARES Act, even though private and religious schools educate only 10 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren.
And these schools could potentially receive even more. DeVos stuffed a provision in the CARES Act for “equitable services” that may send another $1.35 billion, which might otherwise have gone to public schools, to private schools. She’s also giving them a cut of the $3 billion Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund…
The religious school beneficiaries remain free, as they always have been, of the anti-discrimination laws that apply to public schools. For example, Cathedral High School in Indiana took in a PPP loan of between $2 and $5 million ($1,700 to $4,200 per student), but it fired a teacher for having a same-sex spouse. The Foundation Academy in Winter Garden, Florida, whose 2016-17 handbook informs school families that the husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family” while “a wife is to submit herself graciously” and which groups “homosexuality, lesbianism bisexuality” along with “bestiality” as grounds for expulsion, took in between $1 and $2 million in PPP money. Americans United estimates that at least 4,006 religious schools, or about 70 percent of private school recipients, received large PPP loans.
There is no indication, however, that the private schools receiving PPP money are under anything like the pressure the Trump administration is applying to public schools to fully reopen in the coming school year. When Fairfax County public schools offered parents a choice between in-person and remote learning, DeVos denounced the move in vehement terms. (The district has since announced that the 2020-21 school year will be fully remote.) But the Fairmont Preparatory Academy of Anaheim, California, which took in a minimum of $5 million, or $7,700 per student in PPP money, is offering families the same choice, so far with no criticism from the Department of Education…
Betsy DeVos did not take over the Department of Education in order to improve public education as we know it but to degrade it. She came to office with an ideology as simple as it is destructive: Government should get out of the business of education, she has consistently maintained. DeVos brought with her two powerful interest groups. On the one hand are the privatizers, on the other are the proselytizers, and both paws are reaching for the same pot of taxpayer money.
In a May radio interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos whether she was trying to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done.” “Yes, absolutely,” she replied. Alluding to her longstanding efforts to divert taxpayer money to sectarian schools, DeVos said, “For more than three decades that has been something that I’m passionate about.”
The public has consistently underestimated the extremity of the agenda against public schooling. Listen more carefully to what DeVos and her backers are actually saying. For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have denounced public schools as hotbeds of secularism. For just as long, reactionary economic ideologues have condemned them as breeding grounds for socialism. DeVos’s boss simply repeats the message at a louder volume: During his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump said public schools are teaching kids to “hate our country” with a “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” They all understand at some level that a robust public school system is one of the pillars of a modern, progressive, pluralistic, and democratic society. That’s why they want to destroy it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My new name for Batsy is Ms. Prision.
I’ll be glad to see Ms. Prision in prison someday soon.
Two new words I learned today —
Defalcation & Peculation
(e.g. of public funds)
I am really concerned about the apparent lack of job descriptions with specific qualifications in cabinet posts. There are very specific descriptions and qualifications to be a teacher. My principal can’t just pick her friend off the street and put them in the classroom (unless the friend meets the qualifications). It’s confusing why teachers are held to a higher hiring standard than the head of the education for the country. There should be minimum qualifications such as: 1. Master’s or Ph.D in Education 2. served a role in public education for at least 10 years 3. Worked in an administrative capacity . . . . …. etc. While this may not guarantee perfect choice…. at the very least there is some minimum standard which would avoid a president appointing an heiress who mentored a few students and formed an opinion about all schools – in this vital role.
After this administration, we are going to need a lot of changes and rules about those that assume responsibility for governance. We can no longer assume that those that aspire to be commander in chief have positive motives. We know that to the “victor belong the spoils,” but the current level of profiteering, incompetence and nepotism is mind boggling. The CARES Act is a symptom of what is wrong with our government that largely serves special interests, not the people.
Yes! Every presidential candidate should be a vetted public servant in a major role (governor, mayor of a major city, senator or held a cabinet positions….). Running a business is not the same as civil service. The idea that people who make lots of money as “businessmen” know all…. is problematic. Our country is not a factory with profits going to the owners. If a business person aspires to be president should first spend at least 2 years in one of these roles to be vetted.
Unfortunately, beachteach, business has been pushing their way into public service for close to 50 years. All of a sudden we are all customers and we are never first. Profits are. I spent four hours the other day, trying to arrange a routine test at my local hospital. I gave up. The bean counters have made it so efficient that talking to an actual human is nigh on impossible.
I would like to see the Senate rules for approval of any cabinet level or SCOTUS nominee must be more than a mere 50 percent. It should be 60% or 67%… a clear majority.
“modern, progressive, pluralistic and democratic”- the exact things that Catholic Bishop Dolan, head of the USCCB and his fellow bishops don’t want- the exact things that Charles Koch doesn’t want- the exact things the richest 0.1% don’t want. It’s the great hunger in Ireland all over again, when 1,000,000 Irish died of starvation and the church guaranteed civil obedience for the tyranny of economic libertarians and social Darwinism.
The Catholic bishops’ political arm, state Catholic Conferences and the Catholic Action Network.
Linda: I could not help thinking of your posts when I came across a video on the Glorious Revolution, the English replacement of Catholic James II by the duo of William of Orange and his throne-eligible wife Mary.
Apparently made for Virginia Catholics, it was a utube video that began with the assertion that the good king, James II, was essentially persecuted because he was catholic in a protestant England. His only crime was that he wanted to have his child baptized inn a catholic service, according to this video.
I did not have time to see what else was said since I was looking for a good video for class, and that one was so blatant in its lack of objectivity that is could not possibly be considered. It was so blatant that it was fascinating.
and therein lies the true modern danger: it was so blatant that it was fascinating
Money too often supersedes integrity.
DIANE: I have forwarded this note to a list-serve I belong to that is not Catholic in nature, but that has many followers who ARE Catholic.
I include my preface to that note with some commentary to the Catholics on the list which I want to share here FWIW.
Let me also qualify this: where I refer to moral and religious conversions in this note: these are technical terms that have specific meaning for those on that list and that are related to philosophical notions rather than to any specific religious ideology.
For us on this site, you can read them as basic developmental issues of education, of which they do not refer to any specific religious ideology, but rather to the questions of ultimacy that we all harbor; or concretely, they refer to human existence in history and what happen to me when I die . . . kinds of questions that all children have. Below is my note to then en total/ALL QUOTED BELOW: CBK
To all: Make no mistake about it . . . unlike most posts here, THIS communication is for POLITICAL information for the Catholics on this site, and, for me, it was a call to at least inform you of this issue.
With that in mind, I forward below a blog-note from the Diane Ravitch blog (several million readers). Most bloggers there are avid supporters of public education; and most recognize the essential foundational relationship between public institutions, including education, and the fostering of democracy ideals (small d).
My point to you is to inform you that many powerful Catholic leaders are in league with many (1) right-wing evangelical groups, who are looking to make the US into a their-group theocracy (see my highlight in the blog-note below) and (2) corporate reformers whose idea of “reform” is to rid the United States of all public institutions for the benefit of private and Wall-Street corporate concerns. Both movements foster huge “hits” on democracy and its public institutions as we know them.
But for corporate privatizers, the “good business” mentality saturates everything. With that in mind, I blogged the following response note to Diane:
” . . . this is what we get when we change our political foundations from PUBLIC SERVICE to PRIVATE/Corporate/Capitalist-only. . . . It’s the same with the US Post Office. Watch that . . . GOP contributor-leader of the USPO in Congressional hearings next week. Their claim is that the PO is not making money. HUH? From a private/corporate/capitalist-only political foundation, the PO IS in financial crisis.
“Whereas, from an idea of PUBLIC SERVICE linked to the democratic political foundations, WE fund the PO and other public institutions with public funds regardless–as much as WE think they need to provide service well and do so. . . . For a capitalist-only mindset, however, if it doesn’t make money, it’s not worth keeping.”
The other problem that I see with many Catholic leaders is that they seem to confuse the idea of (1) a SECULAR political order with (2) their take on what SECULARISM means.
But a secular-democratic political order is, by definition, NOT a theocracy. Rather, a SECULAR political order houses religious freedom which we all take for granted, including the Catholic Church and Catholicism.
Whereas, the evils that are ascribed to secularism exist in both (a) personal freedoms and a lack of moral and religious conversion, AND (b) errant from-above ideological power, whether internally or externally applied, that only foster an abdication of authentic thought and totalitarian truth-be-damned personalities.
In either case, the conversions, which are the basic point, are not guaranteed. To remove a secular political base, however, is to remove the very freedoms that foster a dynamic civilization that can, in turn, and WITH its religious components operating diligently in the overall culture, foster what is good about religious movements in the first place, mainly, the broader cultural import of religious consciousness on the public at large.
This, I argue, is the more difficult part of religious intentionality–whereas the destruction of the secular political order is self-destructive, first and foremost, of authentic religious intentionality.
Confusions of this sort in our Catholic powers-that-be are bound to lead to either a DESIRED totalitarian theocracy OR to “oooops, we didn’t mean to destroy the democracy, or to find ourselves in-league with Fallwell-type religious ideologues.”
Here are snips from the below blog-note if you don’t want to read the whole post; and I’ll sign off here with a “thank you” for your attention to what I think is the single-most important issue and crisis of our time. Catherine
SNIPS from Diane’s Blog: ALL QUOTED BELOW from the blog:
“Betsy DeVos did not take over the Department of Education in order to improve public education as we know it but to degrade it. She came to office with an ideology as simple as it is destructive: Government should get out of the business of education, she has consistently maintained. DeVos brought with her two powerful interest groups. On the one hand are the privatizers, on the other are the proselytizers, and both paws are reaching for the same pot of taxpayer money.
“In a May radio interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos whether she was trying to ‘utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done.’ ‘Yes, absolutely,’ she replied. Alluding to her longstanding efforts to divert taxpayer money to sectarian schools, DeVos said, ‘For more than three decades that has been something that I’m passionate about.’
“The public has consistently underestimated the extremity of the agenda against public schooling. Listen more carefully to what DeVos and her backers are actually saying. For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have denounced public schools as hotbeds of secularism. For just as long, reactionary economic ideologues have condemned them as breeding grounds for socialism. DeVos’s boss simply repeats the message at a louder volume: During his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump said public schools are teaching kids to ‘hate our country’ with a ‘far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.’ They all understand at some level that a robust public school system is one of the pillars of a modern, progressive, pluralistic, and democratic society. That’s why they want to destroy it.”
END QUOTE/see whole note below.
Thank you, CBK.
Diane FYI: Below is my follow-up note to the list-serve I wrote to earlier, posted here on your site: CBK
ALL COPIED BELOW:
“To all: As a Catholic myself, and with great consternation of spirit, I ask the following three questions of Cardinal Dolan:
“With my previous note in mind, I ask:
“(1) How much of your political position is about the mixture of your own and/or Catholic monies in corporate/Wall Street finances?
“(2) Is your rhetoric against secularism also against maintaining a secular political order–the one that sustains our religious freedoms? Or are you trashing both? ONE overtly, the other covertly?
“(3) Are you identified and concerned with serving the poor as Jesus mandated for Christians . . or how does your present stance with DeVos square with Catholic social teachings that go straight back to the guidance of Jesus?
“You on this list have my encouragement to pass this correspondence along if you wish. I hope you do. (my previous note is copied below) Stay well,
Catherine” END QUOTE
CBK: you do not need a reader of this blog to send a compliment. I am sure you know your prose is succinct and well-thought. Thanks
ROY: I appreciate your response. CBK
OK, I’ll bite. How many “Catholics” does this message reach? How many responded? Does the advocacy a few absolve the hypocrisy of the many? Where is the accountability? Where is the sincere exhortation to defy the Dolans and his acolytes? This is legalistic at best, not a direct, simple appeal get to the point. Has it changed one thing? I suspect the Dolans of the world, if they pay attention to this at all, are chuckling their rear ends off.
Greg I do what I can and hope for the best . . . CBK
I respect that, CBK. We can only do what we try to do. I hope you will understand (accept?) that this is my intent when I criticize. I don’t expect wholesale conversions just as I don’t indict in a wholesale manner. I condemn the minority that claims to speak for the majority and also the segment of the majority who will not contradict and oppose that minority. Doing what one can to change that, whatever the results or consequences may be, is noble and meaningful. It is the best we can do as fallible human beings.
“what we try to do”
I hate WordPress–despite the good it facilitates.
You see this sort of things going on throughout all the Departments, yet nothing is being done! The rest of Government just turn their heads! Trump’s DepRtments are “raping” America from within.
Father Frank Pavone’s Twitter feed comes with a photo of Trump and, Pavone in clerical garb. Father Pavone ‘s tweets express the same talking points that Fox delivers, e.g. a Biden Harris election will result in persecution of the church, national economic debt, criminals in our neighborhoods, usher in violent criminals across the border, taxes.
He “can’t wait” to see “Dems concoct another impeachment hoax and delusional fantasies”. (Alternet)
Father Pavone’s mention of taxes is particularly galling since the church doesn’t pay taxes. We can speculate that he really doesn’t want taxes collected for the common good and, he doesn’t want men like Charles Koch to help pay the freight for living in a civilized society.
Interesting essay in today’s NYT on Father Serra. Linda, I think you and I agree there are significant gradations l among any believers of any religion. I have championed, for example, the German resistors of the Third Reich–they fascinate me, I think they are the best of humanity–but I would never claim their resistance absolves the great majority of Germans during the Third Reich from either being supporters or indifferent, acquiescent drones. These people were guilty, which is why the reckoning they never experienced under the Adenauer government still rankles and upsets me, more than 50 years later. But the resistors, who conceived the idea of united Europe, who were much more of the Lincolnian model than the blanket absolution school, were an exceptional example of humanity. As are those of any religion who resist with actions, not hollow rhetoric, who confess their sins, try to change the status quo, and devote their lives to making amends. These are people to admire. Those who won’t go that far or find solace in equivocation are not.
On a completely different note, without the fawning audience, this is the first Democratic convention I’ll likely watch in real time in its entirety.
American democracy will gain traction when self-identifying evangelical and/or Catholic politicians sponsor legislation that takes away the churches’ tax exemptions …
especially, the bishops’ state conferences.
Theocracy will be dealt a blow when self-identifying Catholic and/or evangelical politicians
call out clerics and religious organizations like the Knights of Columbus for their anti-democracy, anti modernism, and anti- pluralism assault on the American majority.