Nora De La Cour was a teacher who now writes about education with sharp insight.

She warns about the danger of religious charter schools in Jacobin:

A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma — publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter schools are not so public after all.

In early October, Georgia state senator Elena Parent coauthored an op-ed for the 74 entreating her fellow Democrats to recall their former support for charter schools. Decrying the GOP-backed private-school voucher schemespassing in state after state, Parent warns that these programs’ unfairness “does not mean Democrats should abandon discussion around school choice.” Rather, she argues, they must reenergize their own liberal vision of school choice, focused on bringing opportunities to underserved populations.

A decade ago it was easier to make this sort of pro–civil rights, liberal defense of charter schools (albeit ignoring the gathering evidence about who is harmedby charterization and the attendant defunding and closure of neighborhood schools). Today though, it’s overwhelmingly clear that charters, like other forms of school privatization, are among the Right’s primary tools for advancing a decidedly illiberal vision of free-market fundamentalism and Christian nationalism. And recent decisions from our radicalized Supreme Court have suggested that, legally speaking, charter schools may not be all that different from voucher-supported private schools.

One of the most glaring examples of this is St Isidore of Seville, a virtual Oklahoma Catholic school that, if it opens in 2024 as planned, will be the nation’s first church-run charter. The archdiocese of Oklahoma City intends to use this publicly funded statewide school “as a genuine instrument of the Church, a place of real and specific pastoral ministry,” complete with religiously motivated discrimination against protected groups of kids. It’s just one more example of how privatization makes fertile ground for the desecularization of America’s schools — and the erosion of students’ rights.

St Isidore of Vanishing Civil Rights

Weeks before the Supreme Court elevated religious free exercise over the Establishment Clause by ruling that Maine’s town tuitioning program could not bar private schools from putting taxpayer money to religious uses, attorney and leading education policy scholar Kevin Welner made a prediction: such an outcome in Carson v. Makin, he argued, would act as an invitation for church-run charter schools.

Sure enough, Oklahoma’s virtual charter board (with two new right-wing appointees) voted in June to grant a charter for St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School (SISCVS), which will be operated by the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa. This month the board approved the school’s contract, bringing it one step closer to furthering the “evangelizing mission of the Church” on Oklahoma taxpayers’ dime. But the board’s chairman is currently refusing to sign the contract — demonstrating the high level of contention surrounding SISCVS within the conservative Bible Belt state.

A religious charter school runs afoul of both the Oklahoma Constitution and the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act — to say nothing of the US Constitution’s promise of church/state separation. While Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt has been among the school’s most avid cheerleaders (along with the state’s previous attorney general), current attorney general Gentner Drummond — also a Republican — has vehemently opposed SISCVS, asserting that “Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”

In the SISCVS charter application, the archdiocese of Oklahoma City states that the school “will operate in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” Instruction will assist parents in “forming and cultivating” children who believe, among other things, “that God created persons male and female,” and that if we “reject God’s invitation,” we will “end up in hell.”

In response to Drummond’s charge that the school appears intent on violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the archdiocese insists it is “committed to providing a school environment that is free from unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation” (emphasis added). But, emboldened by Supreme Court rulings subordinating antidiscrimination laws to religious free exercise, they suggest that these practices are lawful when they’re required by faith….

Public Schools Are the Only Public Schools

School-choice Democrats like Cory Booker, Barack Obama, and Arne Duncan mastered the contortionist art of pitching school privatization — which strips families of their right to democratically elected school boards — as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, they argued, would increase opportunities for marginalized students, leveling an unfair playing field.

It was never true, and decades of research have shown us that charter schools don’t outperform their publicly managed counterparts — but they do drain funding from neighborhood schools attended by poor kids. Nevertheless, a sheen of “equity” and “opportunity” sparkled around bipartisan charter school initiatives in the Bush and Obama days of education reform.

But in the Trump era, Besty DeVos, a privatizer laser-focused on state-funded Christian education, made the school-choice brand feel icky to its D-column champions. While DeVos treated the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) as “a slush fund for large charter chains,” Carol Burris and her team launched a series of reports documenting the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse the program was enabling. By the 2020 presidential primary it was clear that Democrats were looking to distance themselves from the charter movement, taking their cues from organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which called for a moratoriumon new charters in 2016.

Biden’s education department attempted to make good on a campaign promise to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charter schools (thanks in no small part to the work of Burris and NPE, who marshaled a grassroots network of public education advocates willing to take on the charter sector’s powerful Washington guardians). And while the department’s new CSP rules don’t go quite that far, they do make it much harder for profit seekers to cash in on the program. They also increase transparency and accountability for grantees, and set up requirements aimed at combating resegregation and federally financed “white-flight charters.” In Congress, the 2023 House Appropriations Bill supported these tighter rules and reduced CSP funding by $40 million, seemingly in recognition that the federal government caused grave harm by promoting reckless charter expansion.

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