Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has wasted no time in pushing her evangelical, fundamentalist Christian views and diverting public money to religious schools that teach her views. Sanders, who was Trump’s press secretary, is the daughter of fundamentalist pastor Mike Huckabee, who also was governor of Arkansas.
Sanders pushed through a voucher law, and now the state will pay tuition for students at private and religious schools. As in other states, the overwhelming majority of vouchers were claimed by students already enrolled in nonpublic schools.
The state education department went a step beyond making vouchers available. It’s now using taxpayer money to advertise on behalf of a fundamentalist school that does not admit LGBT students, and is certainly not likely to enroll students who are Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, or modern Protestants.
David Ramsay of the Arkansas Times wrote:
Last week, we noted that the Arkansas Department of Education had released a video promoting Cornerstone Christian Academy, a K-12 private school in the southeast Arkansas town of Tillar.
It’s not unusual for a state agency to promote a new law or policy initiative, which this video does by highlighting the voucher program available under Arkansas LEARNS, the state’s new education overhaul. But what is unusual is for the state’s education department to use public resources to create such an explicit advertisement for a private school. As Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University and a nationally prominent expert on education policy, told us: “[U]sually they pretend it’s about parental choice more broadly. What’s less common — what I’ve yet to see, in fact — is a state agency leaning this heavily into promotion of private education. And Christian education at that.”
The publicly funded promo for a private school is made even more awkward given the religious affiliation: Cornerstone uses a Bob Jones University curriculum known for teaching “young-Earth creationism,” the belief that the planet and universe are only a few thousand years old. It requires students to take a Christian studies class and attend chapel. The application asks parents about church affiliation and about their child’s “personal experience and faith in Jesus Christ.”
The application also asks about whether a student has ever been involved with “sexual immorality” and requires that parents agree to “maintain the basic principles of biblical morality in my home.”
I left a message with the school’s administrator to find out whether its admissions policies explicitly discriminated against LGBT students. I never heard back, but after a little further digging on their website, I found a student handbook that directly states LGBT students are not allowed to attend the school:
The significance the Bible places on the severity of sexual immorality, and our commitment to a “Christ-centered” environment demands certain standards for admittance to CCA. Therefore, students will NOT be permitted to attend CCA who professes any sort of sexually immoral lifestyle or an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.
This sort of policy is not uncommon at some Christian private schools, but it raises some thorny questions about the state’s voucher program. LEARNS vouchers are funneling somewhere in the neighborhood of $419,000 in public funds to Cornerstone this school year, part of $32.5 million projected to be spent on private school vouchers across the state. It remains unclear whether the Cornerstone promo video was made directly or funded by the education department, which has not responded to questions.
The video sells vouchers as a vehicle of parental choice, but ultimately it’s the schools themselves that decide who can — or cannot — attend. The only obligation these schools face in terms of admission is that they cannot discriminate based on race, color or national origin, which would violate federal law. But unlike traditional public schools, they are under no obligation to take all comers.
They are free to discriminate against LGBT students. They are free to impose religious requirements. They do not have to admit students who struggle academically or have behavior problems. They do not have to offer necessary services for disabled students. We have no way of knowing how many students might be rejected from applying to a school, or what the reasons were. There is no transparency and there are almost no rules. To receive a publicly funded voucher under Arkansas LEARNS, a student must gain admission to a private school — but the entire admission process is an unregulated Wild West.
Kicking a student out of a private school likewise leaves wide latitude to the schools. To expel a voucher student, a private school must follow clear, pre-established disciplinary procedures. But so long as they don’t discriminate based on race, color or national origin, schools are free to follow their own policies.
Among the 94 private schools participating in the voucher program, many are Christian. It’s likely that a significant number, like Cornerstone, close their doors to LGBT students. That has been found to be the the case in voucher programs in Wisconsin and Indiana. The vouchers are publicly funded, but not all schools are open to the public: The vaunted principle of school choice is, in fact, the school’schoice, and some families may find themselves shut out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 