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.
Open the link and read the article in full.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The privatization of public education is a scheme to compel the public to pay for individual choices while the public schools that serve the most students suffer the fiscal losses of funding drain. Privatization places the wants of a few over the needs of many, and public funded private schools represent regressive, anti-democratic policy. Both charter and voucher schools pay for individual choices to the detriment of the common good. Both give investors access to public money for a personal investment and pass the risk of such investment onto the local tax base. Often as in the case of larger charter chains that profit does not benefit the local community as funds are generally shipped to the company’s headquarters. While public schools are an investment in the local community, charter and vouchers schools only benefit the investors in the schools. Despite all these flaws including waste, fraud and embezzling, privatization marches on because politicians take the money and ignore the consequences.
By ignoring the establishment clause, the latest scam is passing the cost of religious education onto the public as well, despite the fact that religious schools select and discriminate at will. Public schools will continue to get increasingly undermined in their mission to serve all students to the best of their ability, and many politicians remain unconcerned as they collect their campaign donations.
Charters and … Vouchers are BAD!
One of the most telling omens that predict the demise of common goods is the continued, widespread, and deliberate black-out of info. about the Catholic Church’s attacks against democracy spanning the past 20 years.
IMO, De La Cour’s writing is representative. Her’s like other articles written about St. Isidore charter school support the narrative that the school is unconnected to a sophisticated and well-funded campaign of recent Popes, the dioceses, Catholic universities and, Catholic Conferences to privatize government functions.
De La Cour avoided telling her audience that the legal scholar credited as most influential in advancing religious charter schools is Amy Barrett’s friend, Notre Dame professor and Manhattan Institute fellow, Nicole Garnet.
De la Cour omitted the mention of regular summits for school choice conducted by Notre Dame’s ACE.
If journalists were doing their jobs, they would tell the public that taxpayers have made Catholic organizations the nation’s 3rd largest employer. They would explain the design of a political process that usurps government function. They would inform the public about the Catholic church’s threat to public schools and common goods. They would be willing to identify (1) lobbying by Catholic Conferences (2) links among Catholic Conferences, EdChoice and the Koch network and, (3) the PR spending by Catholic dioceses e.g. in Ohio on Issue 1, Aug. 2023 . They would publish the quotes from the Popes about exhorting church leaders across the globe to join the school choice movement. They would be focused on exposing the selective/distorted definition of the common good by the Church which institutionalizes privatization, specifically to benefit the Church. They would understand the significance of the reports like the one about Nate Hochman’s claims that there are opportunities for career advancement in the right wing if Catholic conversion occurs and the 2019 conversion of U.S. Sen. JD Vance.
They would cite the research in, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs.” They would expose Prof. Adrian Vermuele’s public policy advocacy that would advantage Catholics. They would make it known that Ohio and Florida have become theocratic states similar to Utah.
If the reason journalists don’t tell the truth about the politicking of the Catholic Church is that they anticipate the hell storm headed their way by tribalists and those who are incapable of recognizing the difference between the clout of a sect like the Church of Christ and the right wing in the Catholic Church, they should gain the courage demanded by their profession.
The Roman Catholic Church is intent of riding the wave of public money. It received over $3 billion in PPP loans. Now they want taxpayers to underwrite the indoctrination of our young people. Under the ACA Catholic hospitals got a waiver from having to pay for abortions on religious grounds. Ascension Healthcare, the largest Catholic hospital system in the country, signed on to the ACA Reach privatization scam so it can take advantage of The Medicare funds of unsuspecting seniors and gain more access to public money. Why should citizens be compelled to pay for any religious proselytizing with which they do not agree? Where is the waiver for those that do not want public funds to be used to forward any particular religious group?
R.E.
Thanks for acknowledging the political clout and intent of the Catholic Church.
If I was a person who found humor in anything related to the attack on public schools, I would find it funny that the variety of charter schools backed by Harvard University and billionaires like Bill Gates, provoke public school defenders to identify them as the origin.
St. Isidore charter school, where’s the mention of Notre Dame and funding for lobbying that comes from the Catholic Church?
The public school defenders’ different approach to each origin, one omitted, is the reason the enemy has a good chance at success.
The GOP is busily passing voucher laws that will send public funds to mostly religious schools. The 95% will pay for the indoctrination of the 5%.
The Roberts court’s string of decisions giving religious freedom priority over separation of church and state reminds me of nothing so much as the MAGA/ white supremacist crowd’s claiming that “equity” and affirmative action = “reverse racism.”
Somebody, anybody, could address the question- Which of the following PR messages is true AND will move the needle?
Those like Bethree’s or, what Catholic Gov. Voinovich (R)
recognized, in 1999, when he told the bishops that the public’s knowledge about the intent of vouchers to benefit Catholic schools, would doom the policy? Moving the needle requires making clear to the public, the bad actor campaigns of the Church which seek to end democracy ($900,000 spent in Ohio in August on Issue 1). When the public knows that bishops will use the tax money to cover the costs of the priest abuse, it will move the needle. When the public learns that Catholic education organizations seek to deny the community of any control in how its money is spent, it will move the needle
When the public knows that a bishop can prohibit his priests from making their own decisions in the voting booth in primaries, it will move the needle.
Only a minority of Americans- writ large- will be similar to those at this blog who gaslight on the subject of the Catholic Church.
We need to protect religious freedom, ie, the right of people to freely worship, but I disagree with the Supreme Court that the public should be forced to pay for religious education.
Exactly right, RT
Great point, Ginny! Exactly.