The state Attorney General in Oklahoma just obliterated the distinction between charters and vouchers by ruling that the state law requiring charters to be non-sectarian was invalid. His decision won plaudits, not surprisingly, from far-right Governor Kevin Stitt, the state’s Catholic Conference, and the state’s American Federation for Children, which is part of Betsy DeVos’s voucher-advocating national group of the same name.
This is the breakthrough that Betsy DeVos has counted on for years: that charter schools would be the stepping stone to vouchers.
Think of all the “liberals” and “progressives” who have supported charters, abetting the eventual and inevitable public funding of religious schools: Senator Cory Booker, Senator Michael Bennett, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, former Governor Jerry Brown, the Center for American Policy (CAP), DFER, the Obama Education Department, and many more. CAP is supposedly the Democratic Party think tank, but it has resolutely supported charter schools. And now it’s on the same side as Betsy DeVos.
In a 15-page opinion released today, outgoing Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor advised charter school authorizers that the aspects of the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act requiring school operators to be non-religious and non-sectarian likely violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and should not be enforced.
Primarily citing three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings regarding religious liberties in public education — Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (2017); Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020); and Carson v. Makin (2022) — O’Connor argued that religiously affiliated private organizations should be allowed to apply to operate charter schools.
“In sum, we do not believe the U.S. Supreme Court would accept the argument that, because charter schools are considered public for various purposes, that a state should be allowed to discriminate against religiously affiliated private participants who wish to establish and operate charter schools in accordance with their faith alongside other private participants,” O’Connor wrote in the opinion which is embedded below.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools that can be governed and operated outside of traditional school districts. The schools can run by private management companies. Currently, Oklahoma statute requires operators of the state’s approximately 30 charter schools to be “non-sectarian” and “non-religious.”
Among the entities allowed to authorizer a charter school in Oklahoma is the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. Executive director Rebecca Wilkinson originally asked the formal question that resulted in O’Connor’s office issuing an opinion on whether the board may “continue to enforce the nonsectarian requirements set forth” in Oklahoma statute.
Reached for comment Thursday, Wilkinson said she didn’t know the opinion had been released.
“I have not seen it,” Wilkinson said. “I can’t comment on it today, but when we hang up I guarantee you I will be going out to search for it.”
‘Overjoyed with the attorney general’s opinion’
Gov. Kevin Stitt, the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma and the American Federation for Children-Oklahoma celebrated the opinion.
“Attorney General John O’Connor’s opinion rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma,” Stitt said in a statement. “Ultimately, government takes a backseat to parents who get to determine the best learning environment for their child.”
The Catholic Conference of Oklahoma also praised O’Connor’s opinion. In an interview. executive director Brett Farley said the Catholic Conference has an application ready to submit to the SVCSB to operate its own Catholic virtual charter school.
Simply summarized, “religious charter schools are now legal in Oklahoma.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Ultimately, government takes a backseat to parents who get to determine the best learning environment for their child.” But the parents are more than happy to take the government’s money to subsidize their bastardized form of “liberty”. Nothing more than state-sanctioned discrimination on the taxpayer dime.
the Catholic Conference has an application ready to submit to the SVCSB to operate its own Catholic virtual charter school.
Because we all know how great virtual charters are for transferring monies from the public to private bank accounts based on enrollment of fictitious students.
So, of course everyone wants a piece of the pie. It’s free money.
Christian Sharia Law for America. It’s getting closer every day.
SICKENING!!!!! 🤮
Doesn’t this have to go through the courts?
I wonder how much it would cost to live in the South of France.
Nice thought. I’ve been thinking a lot about Portugal.
Mexico is the place. It’s close. It’s a pleasant climate . it’s relatively inexpensive. And the people are wonderful.
Many French people don’t like Americans.
But Mexicans are Americans, so if you go to Mexico you won’t have that problem.
Now that the pandemic revealed the idea of education as a cheap online thing with one “great” teacher having four hundred students in a charter class to be ridiculous nonsense, Gates is giving money to voucher proponents. Destruction of public services was always the goal of these fools. By any means necessary. If Osama Bin Laden had started up a charter school, these fakes would have thrown money at the Al Queda Academy of Intifada in the Belly of the Beast.
Haaaa! Or Shaman Shepherd’s Ayahuasca School for Little Cosmic Voyagers
I have opposed and advocated against charter schools primarily for this reason: that their original creation was a religious right-wing ploy to eventually get the state to pay for parochial private schools. There are other good reasons to oppose charter schools–no public accountability, no mechanism to force them to teach the state public education curriculum as charter schools are supposed to do, their repeated tendency to propagate themselves in charter “systems,” their usually inferior pedagogy and instructional methods due to lack of teacher training and hiring qualified teachers, and their sorry track record in actually improving student learning and academic success, their purported reason for existence. Indeed, it is now clear that the ultimate goal of the majority of charter schools was always to get access to public money, especially if they are religiously affiliated as many are, or to pay themselves enormous salaries in a kind of scam or grift.
When I spoke about these ideas, I always made the point that the great majority of charter schools are religious voucher schools in waiting. Sometimes I was criticized for this (see below). Getting the sectarian camel’s nose under the Constitutional secular tent was the first goal of the nascent charter school movement. Obtaining voucher money right from the start was impossible for the obvious reasons, but creating religiously-affiliated charter systems would hopefully and eventually lead to opening state money taps if any of several ploys were successful. This explains the proliferation of various voucher schemes, such as private school scholarship tax rebates, direct vouchers to secular private schools with the intention of getting court rulings from radical right Republican-appointed judges that religious private schools must be included, and the latest one: a simple opinion from a state attorney general that a state law requiring public schools, including public charter schools, to be non-sectarian (i.e., secular, as the Constitution requires) is now illegal. The contemporary perversion of the of text and spirit of the Free Exercise clause (largely by ignoring the text and spirit of the establishment of religion clause) by the Supreme Court gives religious radicals hope that the Oklahoma attorney general’s illegal opinion may not be overturned, as it richly deserves.
The obvious solution to all these ploys is for state governments to just stop sending state money to ALL private and semi-private (charter) schools, both sectarian and secular. Surveys, polls, and votes on state constitutional amendments, referenda, and initiatives have repeatedly shown that two-thirds of citizens do not want public funds funneled to religious schools (the same percentage is true for state-mandated abortion restrictions). The only reason this even happens is because agenda-driven political reactionaries and religious fundamentalists use the political power of state offices to which they get elected and believe they have a mandate to contravene the Constitution. And they are being encouraged to do this by five Supreme Court Justices.
It is true that progressives, liberals, and moderates in educational policy organizations gave early support to charter schools for a number of reasons when the concept was created and then pushed through legislatures by conservatives. I am a liberal but I was skeptical and suspicious from the start, probably because I live in Texas, the best example of the malign microcosm which allows us to predict what the future U.S. macrocosm will become with Texas-style bad government. As a lifelong opponent of the insidious influence of illiberal and extremist religions in public government, I could see how this new idea was actually a sinister ploy that would be misused for sectarian purposes, and that is just what happened and is still happening.
I was criticized for disparaging the charter school concept by some liberal educators who told me that charters would be used as experiments to improve education, especially since the old methods were failing (why they weren’t failing in Europe and Asia was never revealed). The idea was to let many flowers bloom and see which ones worked the best by using unnatural selection. The conservatives and ultra-conservatives said that charters would compete in the education marketplace and the best of them would succeed, the weak ones would continue to fail, and this competitive process would quickly reveal which educational methods were superior. The successful educational methods would replace the weak and counterproductive ones. I was very skeptical of this mantra. Why would K-12 education be similar enough to American capitalism for this marketplace competition to work in a necessarily self-improving and pain-free manner? Why would privatizing public education and socializing the costs and outcomes be a good idea? Why would experimenting with pedagogical, instructional, and classroom environment require or be conditional upon changing the economics, funding, and the public-private governance of the schools. Why couldn’t experiments, competitive or otherwise, with regular public ISD schools be designed and implemented and not use contract-based, tax-supported, ISD-independent charter schools at all?
As with Diane Ravitch, I was disappointed by caring, optimistic, and trusting leaders such as Cory Booker, Michael Bennett, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and many other Democrats who uncritically and unskeptically supported an initiative that I believed was largely inspired by parental resentfulness (for being forced to pay twice for educating their children in the narrow parochial way they desired) and loaded with self-righteous subversion and deceit (to make the concept palatable to liberals and progressives without whom it would never be funded and implemented by statute). Now we know what the educational marketplace has revealed. Not only do charter programs fail to improve academic achievement or worse, diminish it, they suck money–limited and finite allocated public tax funds–out of public education that impoverishes that system. Today, public ISDs have a great variety of magnet schools, STEM academies, art and music schools, and vocational schools (with half-time instruction and half-time employment) that students can use to earn a legitimate diploma, thereby making charter schools superfluous and removing their many negative attributes from the public education system (such as having no accountability, publically funded but privately managed, promoting sectarian religions, etc.). Today, no one need support charter schools for any academic reason. Cancel the charter concept and let individual ISDs experiment with innovative pedagogies, curricula, and assessments in different discipline programs. Stop letting the charter movement be used as a vehicle to pervert and impoverish both public and private education in the United States, and stop it from being used as a mechanism to keep students ignorant about historical facts, biological processes and conditions, political goals and methods, and economic systems.
Thanks for your comment.
In Indiana, the Southwestern Indiana Catholic Community Newspaper posted an article that gives credit to Catholics for the initiation and passage of school choice legislation in the state.
In some states, the state Catholic Conferences co-host school choice rallies with the Koch’s AFP.
The SCOTUS case that exempted religious schools from civil rights employment law was Biel v. St. James Catholic school.
Review the religious sect of many, if not, most of the high visibility researchers promoting vouchers.
Media has focused all attention on right wing protestant activists. The years- distant prejudice against Catholics is trotted out to prevent scrutiny of Catholic right wing politicking. Note the widespread reluctance by media to call the conservative majority on SCOTUS, Catholic.
The Koch-funded Paul Weyrich who proposed parallel schools to replace public schools was Catholic. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, father of 9 kids, is Catholic.
Sixty-three percent of White Catholics who attend church regularly voted for Trump is 2020.
A Bishop in Minnesota prohibited his priests from voting in a Democratic primary for President. His state Catholic Conference was cited as providing the legal authorization for the prohibition.
Omission of the obvious hinders the campaign to save public education
Steven,
If you are the expert featured in the YouTube video about science textbooks (Texas) – well done.
Your career and activism is a credit to you and the values of American education.
Those who have not read, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs,” at the Scielo site, are handicapped in fighting for democracy and equal opportunity.
Btw- Media report that the VP of EdChoice Kentucky is the associate director of the Kentucky Catholic Conference.
Reporting from KFOR-
5-20-2022
“(Ok.) Gov. Stitt to Speak at Private Catholic High School’s First Commencement”.
Background info.-The school is part of the Cristo Rey chain of schools located in 17 states. The Christo Rey model requires students to work one day a week in low level jobs. When I reviewed on-line info. about the school chain, I learned that in some schools, there is an expectation that the pay be returned to the schools. The model includes blended learning (computer instruction). The chain received grants from Gates and Walton.
A prototype in Calf. was described by the Christiansen Institute (disruption advocates). It had one teacher for 60 students.
Given the demographic of the typical Cristo Rey student, it’s not surprising in American history for us to learn the plans developed for the segment. We can compare and contrast suburban Catholic schools.
he state legislature of Oklahoma has stripped away the requirement for a college degree in order to become a permanently hired teacher in that state:
State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, though, appeared stunned when she learned during an interview that lawmakers had stripped the college degree requirement for permanent teachers. She whispered “Oh my God!” under her breath.
She called the change “worrisome,” and said Oklahoma parents expect and deserve a college-educated teacher for their child.
Educating is a science, and students benefit from college-trained graduates who have the practice and expertise in helping students lift outcomes, particularly in reading, she said.
“Overall, we shouldn’t be watering down standards in something so very important individually for students and for our collective workforce in the state,” Hofmeister said. “I am worried that we have pushed legislation to a place where it is answering a temporary emergency need that is actually creating a standard of normalcy, and that is not good for our state.”
https://www.normantranscript.com/oklahoma/news/state-law-loosening-requirements-for-teachers-comes-under-fire/article_4cfb22d5-fa3a-534e-a94e-769e284d8a40.html?fbclid=IwAR3u_4rqdbkVwMVmlY4O_fCoMrRYlhKYxj06I3vJhVfWiFVJc35pxgjanms&mibextid=Zxz2cZ
In 2018 didn’t the Taliban 5 imply that I can’t be compelled to pay taxes !
“Whenever the Federal Government or a
State prevents individuals from saying what they think on
important matters or compels them to voice ideas with
which they disagree, it undermines these ends.
When speech is compelled, however, additional damage
is done. In that situation, individuals are coerced into
betraying their convictions. Forcing free and independent
individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is
always demeaning, and for this reason, one of our land
mark free speech cases said that a law commanding “in
voluntary affirmation” of objected-to beliefs would require
“even more immediate and urgent grounds” than a law
demanding silence.”