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Jan Resseger: Voucher Leader in Ohio Legislature Says Public Schools Cost Too Much

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
9

Jan Resseger writes today about Matt Huffman, Speaker of the House in Ohio and his determination to undermine the funding of the state’s public schools. If you read the previous post about the voucher movement in Ohio, you will recall that Huffman led the battle to enact vouchers for all families, including affluent families.

He is Catholic, he graduated from Catholic schools, and he has long been determined to get public funds to subsidize religious school tuition.

After the state was ordered to enact a plan to fund its schools fairly, relying less on property taxes, the legislature enacted the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan in 2021, which was supposed to be phased in over six years. Huffman recently declared that the plan was “unsustainable.”

Ohio has 1.75 million students in public schools. There are 173,156 students in the state’s non-public schools.

Using public dollars to pay the tuition of rich students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools is “sustainable” for the religious zealots in the legislature.

Ohio’s commitment to fair funding for public schools has been undermined by two Republican priorities:

  1. The universal voucher program now costs $1 billion a year.
  2. Republicans are determined to cut taxes and to reduce funding for public schools.

Those are Matt Huffman’s priorities, not adequate and fair funding for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Catholic Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

ProPublica: Secret Papers Reveal How Ohio Politicians Worked with Religious Allies to Get Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
10

Alec MacGillis wrote a story for ProPublica titled “On a Mission from God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools.”

ProPublica gained access to a large trove of communications among the Governor of Ohio, George Voinovich, and prominent religious figures, planning how to pass legislation to send public money to religious schools. This, despite explicit language in the Ohio state constitution prohibiting state payments to religious schools.

Here is ProPublica’s overview of the article:

Reporting Highlights

  • The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.
  • Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.
  • The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

The article begins thus:

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

Please open the link to read this important article.

Thanks to ProPublica for its excellent reporting about the effort to privatize and defund American schools.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Webinar: Public Funding for Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
14

The National Education Policy Center is hosting a webinar on the implications of federal funding of religious schools. Actually, two webinars, on September 26. Sign up here.

NEPC writes:

Should religious schools be publicly funded? And what are the implications when they are?

These questions have become increasingly relevant in the United States in the wake of Espinoza v. Montana (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022), two U.S. Supreme Court cases that forced states, under certain circumstances, to provide public funding to private religious schools. But questions raised by such public funding are not unique to our nation. In fact, many of the issues currently confronting the United States have already been wrestled with in other countries around the world.

On September 26th, two back-to-back webinars will explore these trends and issues, with an eye to helping parents, teachers, administrators, scholars, advocates, journalists, and other education stakeholders better understand the history and impact of state-funded religious education in the U.S. and abroad.

The webinars, which are free to register for and attend, feature the authors of articles in a new special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education, a peer-refereed publication. This special issue on publicly funded religious schools considers research findings around equity, segregation, and discrimination as they relate to state-funded religious education. Studies presented in the special issue were conducted in Canada, Spain, and the U.S., and they examine how state-funded religious education has shifted over time as a result of factors such as legal rulings, politics, demographic changes, global migration, and education privatization.

The webinars are sponsored by NEPC, which invites the public to attend either or both.

Law and Public Discourse is the title of the first webinar in the series, which runs from noon to 1 pm Eastern Time.

Kathleen Sellers of Duke University will moderate. Panelists are Sue Winton of York University in Canada and NEPC Fellows Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, Suzanne Eckes of the University of Wisconsin, Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, and Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado.

The second webinar, Catholic Culture and Market Concerns, will be held right after the first one, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern on September 26th.

Joel Malin of Miami University will moderate. Panelists will be James Coviello, Stephen Kotok, and Catherine DiMartino, all of St. John’s University, Clara Fontdevila of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Adrián Zancajo and Antoni Verger of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Ee-Seul Yoon of the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Click here now to register for one or both of these two webinars.

For those interested in reading the underlying articles in the Peabody journal, they’re available (although some are behind a paywall) as follows:

Fontdevila, C., Zancajo, A., & Verger, A. (2024). Catholic Schools in the Marketplace: Changing and Enduring Religious Identities

Green, P., Baker, B., & Eckes, S. (2024). The Potential for Race Discrimination in Voucher Programs in a Post-Carson World

Kotok, S., DiMartino, C.C., & Coviello, J. (2024). New York City Catholic Schools Operating in the Public Space in a Post-Makin World

Welner, K. (2024). Charting the Path to the Outsourcing of Discrimination Through School Choice

Winton, S. (2024). Same Arguments, Different Outcomes: Struggles Over Private School Funding in Alberta and Ontario, Canada

Yoon, E.S. (2024). Unequal City and Inequitable Choice: The Neoliberal State’s Development of School Choice and Marketization in the Publicly Funded Catholic School Board in Toronto, Canada

Yoon, E.S., Malin, J.R., Sellers, K.M., & Welner, K.G. (2024). Should Religious Schools Be Publicly Funded? Issues of Religion, Discrimination, and Equity

Categories Catholic Schools, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

New Hampshire: Voucher Program Aims to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2024 //
12

Veteran journalist Garry Rayno wrote a passionate editorial about the destructive voucher program in New Hampshire, promoted by out-of-state billionaires. Ninety percent of the students in the state attend public schools, but Republicans have diverted taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. Their goal is a universal voucher program, where every student in the state is eligible for a voucher, with no income limits.

Rayno wrote at InDepthNH.org:

America’s traditional institutions, the foundation for the greatest political experiment in history, are under attack from the social safety net to food regulations, and from the court system to environmental protection.

The drive to create doubt and even rejection of these long-standing pillars of our society is to eventually destroy the underpinnings of government to create a new order where the rich will flourish even more with all the advantages, while everyone else will fight over the crumbs of the plutocrats.

The current large target in this fight to turn democracy into an oligarchy is the public school system.

The first blow to the public school system in New Hampshire was the push for charter schools, which are still public schools but without the regulations and requirements traditional public schools must meet.

Charter schools have had to ask the state for more and more per pupil money to stay afloat, about double the per pupil adequacy grant amount for traditional schools.

The charter schools that found a niche have been successful, but many have fallen by the wayside over the years even with federal grant money approved during the Trump administration for start-ups and expansions.

And until recently, they have not strayed into the Christian Nationalist area that has been widely promoted by Hinsdale College in Michigan and adopted by some states.

Then came the voucher push sold as a way of helping low-income families find a more suitable education environment for students who do not do well in the public-school setting.

After several unsuccessful attempts, proponents, who include Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and State School Board Chairman Drew Cline, lawmakers successfully approved the Education Freedom Account program as a rider to the 2022-2023 biennial operating budget after it failed to pass the House and was retained.

Since then attempts to expand the eligibility of parents by raising the income cap passed two sessions ago, but failed in the recently completed session.

Instead of helping the low-income families with educational options the program has largely been a subsidy program for parents with children who were already in religious or private schools and homeschooling. 

Only about 10 to 15 percent of the increasingly expensive draw on the Education Trust Fund have left public schools for alternative education programs.

What proponents ultimately seek is a “universal program” which would be open to any New Hampshire student regardless of his or her parents’ income, although a similar program has nearly bankrupted Arizona and put public education at risk in Ohio, where it is being litigated.

New Hampshire is not alone in the push to do away with public education as we know it.

A letter from many national figures seeking to privatize education like Betsy DeVos and Edward Bennett; the CEOs of organizations pushing for privatization; former federal and state governors; sitting governors from almost all southern states; two state education commissioners including Edelblut, and state elected officials most from Republican controlled states was sent to Republican Congressional leaders saying, “The task before the next Congress is clear and unambiguous: bring education freedom to millions of students across America who desperately need it!”

The letter also touts the GOP’s platform approved at its recent national convention “to cultivate great K-12 schools, ensure safe learning environments free from political meddling, and restore Parental Rights. We commit to an Education System that empowers students, supports families, and promotes American Values… Republicans believe families should be empowered to choose the best Education for their children. We support Universal School Choice in every State in America.”

The political meddling the platform contends is that “Lessons about American values have been displaced by political or cultural trends of the day,” without noting several states have recently required the Bible be taught in public schools. 

Children whose faith is Muslim or Buddhism or are Native Americans may believe those state’s Biblical requirement is political meddling.

What the proponents of universal vouchers seek is to have Congress do what some state legislators, including Texas, have failed to do and that is approve universal private or religious education on the public’s dime.

This push to do away with public education has attempted to tarnish what has always been the great equalizer, by saying schools are failing, teachers are indoctrinating students and withholding information from parents. 

You would think public schools are a far-reaching conspiracy to destroy family values, while ignoring the fact that 90 percent of students are in public schools and many are very successful.

New Hampshire public schools ranked sixth in the nation this year, down from the number two spots five years ago.

The number ranking was before the push to privatize education became successful with the help of Gov. Chris Sununu who put both Edelblut and Cline where they are, in charge of the public education system in the state, although both seek to diminish its reach.

Edelblut focuses on the learning disparity between well to do school districts and the poorly performing ones that lack the property values to support schools in the same way property wealthy communities do as the reason to seek alternatives.

Yet when the state education funding system is raised as a possible culprit for the disparity, Edelblut is quick to dismiss that as a different issue when it isn’t.

One of the major concerns about the Education Freedom Program, the Business Tax Scholarship Program and charter schools, is the lack of accountability.

How do taxpayers know their money is being used wisely if there is no way to determine those students are receiving “an adequate education,” as the state Supreme Court ruled?
Attempts to bring more accountability have failed in the Republican controlled legislature.

At the same time, Cline this week in his column “The Broadside” touts the state as doing pretty well for educational entrepreneurs according to a recent ranking.

“There’s more that can be done to make New Hampshire a freer state for education entrepreneurs looking to start small, decentralized, and unconventional educational environments, but so far the state is doing better than most,” according to Cline.

He cites the Education Entrepreneur Freedom Index released by the yes.every kid.foundation for the ranking.

It shouldn’t be surprising that according to Wikipedia,  “Yes. every kid. (YEK) is a 501(c)(4) advocacy group that is a part of the Koch Network. Launched by the Charles Koch-funded Stand Together in June of 2019, YEK supports the privatization of education. The organization is a proponent of the school choice movement, advocating for subsidized private school vouchers and charter schools.”
The Koch Foundation has long advocated for ending public education and installing a private education system where you pay for what you get. Not exactly the great equalizer.

Cline argues New Hampshire should be looking to encourage more private education.

“States with more relaxed homeschool and nonpublic school laws/regulations score higher, as entrepreneurs have an easier time getting started in these states,” he notes.

Cline and the Koch organization suggest relaxing state requirements for non-public schools and also zoning regulations to make it easier to locate educational facilities including child care businesses by allowing education in all zoning districts in a municipality.

“Though New Hampshire lost a point for rules requiring state approval for non-public schools, the state could become much more friendly to education entrepreneurs, the study’s authors conclude, primarily by relaxing some child-care rules and local regulations,” Cline writes.

Supporters of Education Freedom Accounts are fond of saying the best accountability is if parents are satisfied with the education their children receive, which you would hope is the case or why would you leave your child in an unsatisfactory educational environment?

But that is not what the state Supreme Court said in its Claremont I decision. It said the state has a responsibility to provide an adequate education to every student in the state and to pay for it. Parents have choices but the state defines an adequate education.

The state legislature has yet to live up to its responsibility and allowing a bypass through religious and private schools and homeschooling is not constitutionally fair to those children.

If you believe public education is failing in this state, you should begin looking at the top: the governor, the commissioner and to the state board of education chair.

Their priority is not public education.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, New Hampshire, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

Josh Cowen: 2023 Was a Banner Year for Vouchers, Censorship, and Attacks on LGBT Kids

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2023 //
7

Writing in the Washington Spectator, veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen reports that 2023 was a good year for some very bad ideas, many supported by prominent rightwingers and Dark Money, whose sources are hidden.

He finds it unsurprising that the voucher movement works closely with book banners and efforts to humiliate LGBT youth.

Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers since 2005.

He writes:

Over the past 12 months, the decades-long push to divert tax dollars toward religious education has reached new heights. As proclaimed by EdChoice—the advocacy group devoted to school vouchers—2023 has been the year these schemes reached “escape velocity.” In strictly legislative terms, seven states passed new voucher systems, and ten more expanded existing versions. Eleven states now run universal vouchers, which have no meaningful income or other restrictions.

But these numbers change quickly. As late as the last week of November, the Republican governor of Tennessee announced plans to create just such a universal voucher system.

To wit: successful new voucher and related legislation has come almost exclusively in states won by Donald Trump in 2020. And even that Right-ward bent required substantial investment—notably by heiress and former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Koch network—in state legislative campaigns to oust voucher opponents. Instructively, many of those opponents were often GOP legislators representing rural districts with few private schools to benefit.

As a scholar who has studied voucher systems—including through research funded by conservative organizations—I have been watching these developments with growing concern. It can all be difficult to make sense of, so let’s walk through it.

Vouchers Hurt Kids, Defund Public Schools and Prop-Up Church Budgets

First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory lenders in the mortgage sector. These schools are either pop-ups opening to cash in on the new taxpayer subsidy, or financially distressed existing schools desperate for a bailout to stay open. Both types of financially insecure schools often close anyway, creating turnover for children who were once enrolled.

And the voucher results reflect that educational vulnerability: in terms of academic impacts, vouchers have some of the worst results in the history of education research—on par or worse than what COVID-19 did to test scores.

Those results are bad enough, but the real issue today is that they come at a cost of funding traditional public schools. As voucher systems expand, they cannibalize states’ ability to pay for their public education commitments. Arizona, which passed universal vouchers in 2022, is nearing a genuine budget crisis as a result of voucher over-spending. Six of the last seven states to pass vouchers have had to slow spending on public schools relative to investments made by non-voucher states.

That’s because most new voucher users were never in the public schools—they are new financial obligations for states. The vast majority of new voucher beneficiaries have been students who were already in private school beforehand. And for many rural students who live far from the nearest private school, vouchers are unrealistic in the first place, meaning that when states cut spending on public education, they weaken the only educational lifeline available to poorer and more remote communities in some places. That’s why even many GOP legislators representing rural districts—conservative in every other way—continue to fight against vouchers.

Vouchers do, however, benefit churches and church schools. Right-wing advocacy groups have been busy mobilizing Catholic school and other religious school parents to save their schools with new voucher funding. In new voucher states, conservatives are openly advocating for churches to startup taxpayer-funded schools. That’s why vouchers eventually become a key source of revenue for those churches, often replacing the need to rely on private donations. It’s also why many existing religious schools raise tuition almost immediately after vouchers pass.

The Right-Wing War on Public Schools

Victories for these voucher bills is nothing short of an ascendent Right-wing war on public education. And the link to religious nationalism energizes much of that attack.

Voucher bills have dovetailed almost perfectly with new victories for other priorities of the Religious Right. Alongside vouchers, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has also increased: 508 new bills in 2023 alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. As has a jump in legislation restricting book access in schools and libraries, with more than half of those bans targeting books on topics related to race and racism, or containing at least one LGBTQ+ character.

It is also important to note the longstanding antipathy that Betsy DeVos, the Koch Network, and other long-term voucher backers have toward organized labor—including and especially in this case, teachers’ unions. And that in two states that passed vouchers this year—Iowa and Arkansas—the governors also signed new rollbacks to child labor protections at almost the exact same time as well.

To close the 2022 judicial session, the Supreme Court issued its latest expansion of voucher jurisprudence in Carson v. Makin, holding that states with private school voucher programs may not exclude religious providers from applying tax dollars specifically to religious education. That ruling came just 72 hours before the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson removed reproductive rights from federal constitutional protections.

To hear backers of vouchers, book bans, and policies targeting transgender students in school bathrooms tell it, such efforts represent a new movement toward so-called “parents’ rights” or “education freedom,” as Betsy DeVos describes in her 2022 memoir. But in truth this latest push was a long time coming. DeVos is only one part of the vast network of Right-wing donors, activists, and organizations devoted to conservative political activism.

That network, called the Council for National Policy, includes representatives from the Heritage Foundation, the influential Right-wing policy outfit; multiple organizations funded by Charles Koch; the Leadership Institute, which trains young conservative activists; and a number of state policy advocacy groups funded by a conservative philanthropy called the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

It was the Bradley Foundation that seeded much of the legal work in the 1990s defending early voucher programs in state and federal courts. Bradley helped to fund the Institute for Justice, a legal group co-founded by a former Clarence Thomas staffer named Clint Bolick after a personal donation from Charles Koch. The lead trial attorney for that work was none other than Kenneth Starr, who was at the time also in the middle of his infamous pursuit of President Bill Clinton.

In late 2023, the Institute for Justice and the voucher-group EdChoice announced a new formal venture, but that partnership is just a spin on an older collaboration, with the Bradley Foundation as the tie that binds. EdChoice itself, when it was called the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, helped fund the data analysis cited by Institute lawyers at no less than the Supreme Court ahead of its first decision approving vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002).

From these vantage points, 2023 was a long time coming indeed.

And heading into 2024, the voucher push and its companion “parents’ rights” bills on schoolbooks and school bathrooms show no sign of weakening.

Prior to his political career, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. That group, which itself has deep ties to Betsy DeVos’s family, has led the legal charge to rollback LBGTQ+ equality initiatives. It was also involved “from the beginning,” as its website crows, in the anti-abortion effort that culminated with Dobbs.

The Heritage Foundation has created a platform called Project 2025, which serves as something of a clearinghouse for what would be the legal framework and policy agenda for a second Trump Administration. Among the advisors and funders of Project 2025 are several organizations linked to Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and others with ties to the Council for National Policy. The Project’s education agenda includes dismantling the U.S. Department of Education—especially its oversight authority on anti-discrimination issues—and jumpstarting federal support for voucher programs.

A dark money group called The Concord Fund has launched an entity called Free to Learn, ostensibly organized around opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. In reality, these are active players in Republican campaign attacks around a variety of education-related culture war issues. The Concord Fund is closely tied to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief, Council of National Policy member, and architect of the Roe takedown. Through the Leo connection, the Concord Fund was also instrumental in confirming Donald Trump’s judicial nominations from Brett Kavanaugh on downward.

And so while the 2023 “parents’ rights” success has been largely a feature of red state legislatures, the 2022 Carson ruling and the nexus between Leonard Leo, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice itself underscore the importance of the federal judiciary to Right-wing education activism.

Long-term, the goal insofar as school privatization is concerned appears to be nothing short of a Supreme Court ruling that tax-subsidized school vouchers and homeschool options are mandatory in every state that uses public funding (as all do) to support education. The logic would be, as Betsy DeVos herself previewed before leaving office, that public spending on public schools without a religious option is a violation of Free Exercise protections.

Such a ruling, in other words, would complete the destruction of a wall between church and state when it comes to voucher jurisprudence. Earlier Court decisions have found that states may spend tax dollars on school vouchers but, as the Right’s ultimate goal, the Supreme Court would determine that states must.

Closer on the horizon, we can expect to see each of these Right-wing groups acting with new energy as the 2024 campaign season heats up. The president of the Heritage Foundation—himself yet another member of the Council for National Policy—has recently taken over the think tank’s political arm, called Heritage Action. At the start of the year, investigative reporting linked Heritage Action to earlier voter suppression initiatives, signaling potential tactics ahead.

And the money is going to flow—they have all said as much. After Heritage’s merger of its policy and political arms, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children followed suit by creating the AFC Victory Fund—a new group to spearhead its own campaign activity.

Their plan includes a $10 million base commitment to ramp up heading into 2024. “Coming off our best election cycle ever,” AFC’s announcement declared, “the tectonic plates have shifted decisively in favor of educational freedom, and we’re just getting started.” And, they warned:

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target.”

In that threat lies the reality of the latest voucher push, and of this moment of so-called parents’ rights. None of this is a grassroots uprising. “Education freedom” is a top-down, big-money operation, tied to every other political priority of religious nationalism today.

But coming at the end of this past year’s legislative successes, AFC’s warnings are also a very clear statement of what is yet to come. The push to privatize American education is only just getting started.

Vouchers have turned into a campaign to subsidize the tuition of affluent parents while cutting the funding of public schools. This does not augur well for the health and future of our nation.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Home Schooling, Ignorance, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

South Dakota: A Catholic School Parent Explains Why He Opposes Vouchers

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
50

Kevin Woster, a veteran journalist in South Dakota, explains here why he opposes vouchers, even though he sent his own children to Catholic school and appreciated the education they got there.

He notes that the South Dakota legislature considered vouchers and did not pass them but he is sure that the issue will be back again for debate.

He and his wife made the right decision by sending their children to Catholic schools, but he nonetheless thinks it would be wrong to take public money for private schools.

He believes that public money should not be used to fund private schools.

It’s public money, for public schools. And the commitment and responsibility to provide a free public education isn’t a new idea. It’s a constitutional idea, as in the South Dakota Constitution, which reads in part:

“The stability of a republican form of government depending on the morality and intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature to establish and maintain a general and uniform system of public schools wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all; and to adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.”

And as taxpaying citizens, it’s our duty to support that system of free public schools.

Making your choice with your checkbook, not public money

Just because my first wife, Jaciel, and I decided to send our kids to a Catholic-school system didn’t mean we were absolved of our responsibilities as citizens to support public schools. You don’t stop being a citizen because you decide to become a private-school parent. You are both. You must be both.

It would be wrong, he believes, to weaken the public schools for the benefit of those who have made private choices.

Categories Catholic Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Funding, Religion, School Choice, South Dakota, Special Education, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Oklahoma: Vote on Religious Charter School May Have Been Invalid

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
8

The board that cast a 3-2 vote to authorize a Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma may have been invalid because a new appointee was not supposed to be seated until November 1 and was not eligible to cast a vote.

Monday’s national headline-making vote to give state sanctioning and Oklahoma taxpayer dollars to a Catholic school may have been invalid.

It turns out the state Attorney General’s Office believes that Oklahoma City businessman Brian Bobek is ineligible to serve on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board until November.

But an email to that effect was not received by the board’s chairman and executive director until after Bobek cast the deciding vote Monday to approve state sponsorship for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.

Long-serving member Barry Beauchamp, a retired school superintendent from Lawton who had been allowed to continue serving after his term expired some months ago, was replaced abruptly on Friday by Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall.

Less than half an hour before Monday’s special board meeting began at noon, Deputy Attorney General Niki Batt sent an email to board Chairman Robert Franklin and Executive Director Rebecca Wilkinson saying that because Beauchamp had not vacated his seat, the law that created the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board doesn’t allow Bobek to take over the seat until November.

Franklin said that if Bobek was ineligible, his vote was invalid.

He is also concerned that a lengthy, written statement that Bobek read during Monday’s meeting, which included numerous legal citations, could have influenced the votes of other board members, including Scott Strawn, who was recently appointed to the board by Gov. Kevin Stitt.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state

Oklahoma Approves Nation’s First Religious Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2023 //
74

Oklahoma just gave its permission for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to open an online charter school, supported by public funds. Governor Kevin Stitt and the state’s Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters are hard-right Republicans. This decision is sure to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. No one knows how it will rule. Even charter lobbyists are concerned about this turn of events because they like to refer to charters as “public charter schools.” A religious charter, which teaches religion, is not a public school.

Sarah Mervosh wrote the story for the New York Times:

The nation’s first religious charter school was approved in Oklahoma on Monday, handing a victory to Christian conservatives, but opening the door to a constitutional battle over whether taxpayer dollars can directly fund religious schools.

The online school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, would be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, with religious teachings embedded in the curriculum, including in math and reading. Yet as a charter school — a type of public school that is independently managed — it would be funded by taxpayer dollars.

After a nearly three-hour meeting, and despite concerns raised by its legal counsel, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the school in a 3-to-2 vote, including a “yes” vote from a new member who was appointed on Friday.

The relatively obscure board is made up of appointees by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who supports religious charter schools, and leaders of the Republican-controlled State Legislature.

The approval — which is almost certain to be challenged in court — comes amid a broader conservative push to allow taxpayer dollars to go toward religious schools, including in the form of universal school vouchers, which have been approved in five states in the last year. The movement has been bolstered by recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has increasingly signaled its support for directing taxpayer money to religious schools.

Categories Accountability, Catholic Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Oklahoma, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state

Commonweal: Stop Using Catholic Schools to Shame Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
54

There was a time long ago when public schools were thriving, and Catholic schools were also thriving. They were not in competition for students or money. But as our financial demands began pressing on both sectors, Catholic schools began closing and struggling to survive. Among rightwing ideologues, it became conventional to proclaim Catholic schools as “better” than public schools because they were free to kick out the students they didn’t want.

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, an editor at Commonweal, calls on certain tabloids (i.e. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post) to stop using Catholic schools to shame public schools. She hearkens back to that long-ago ethic when the different sectors served different populations and knew it.

The Post is unlikely to cease its attacks on the city’s public schools, because Murdoch loves school choice and lionizes charter schools. The Post eagerly prints press releases from Success Academy without ever bothering to fact-check or to acknowledge that SA is an exemplar of high attrition rates and high teacher-turnover rates.

O’Reilly writes (and this is only part of her article):

I can’t comment on the soundness of the decisions being made by the New York City Department of Education. But I know who I see using the pandemic to stuff their pockets, and it isn’t fat-cat maintenance workers. The Post’s implication that public-school educators are unconcerned with their students’ wellbeing is disgraceful. And while it is true that Catholic schools can be a lifeline for students served poorly by public education, I have also known families who have moved their children out of Catholic schools because the public system provides—is required to provide—services for learning disabilities and other special needs that Catholic schools can’t always accommodate. “Putting education first” is not as simple as it sounds.

Catholics should be standing in solidarity with all our neighbors as we do our best to cope with this crisis. We degrade our witness when we allow Catholic schools to be used in a propaganda campaign against public services—or against an honest reckoning with the facts. As the 2020 election approaches, conservatives are eager to exploit the Catholic school success story to advance the claim—let’s call it what it is, a conspiracy theory—that liberals are dishonestly playing up the threat of COVID-19 to make President Donald Trump look bad.

The truth is, my kids and their schoolmates are part of a broad experiment to find out whether masks and distancing and all the other safeguards in place are enough to prevent the spread of the virus. All of us, public and private, parents, teachers, and administrators, are looking for the best way forward in a highly unstable situation. That situation is not the fault of teachers’ unions, or lazy public-school janitors, or even (despite his many sins) Bill de Blasio. It is a direct consequence of the reprehensible failure of the Trump administration to protect Americans from COVID-19. We are all still scrambling, months after schools first shut down in March, because we have inadequate testing and tracing, no national recovery plan, and a president who undermines public trust and sneers at his opponent for wearing a mask. The real scandal we’re all facing isn’t the lack of a functional school system. It’s the lack of a functional federal government.

Categories Catholic Schools, Competition, Education Reform, Inequity, New York City

Indiana: ACB Served on the Board of a School That Discriminated Against Gays

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2020 //
15

Steve Hinnefeld, a regular commentator on education in Indiana, regrets that Amy Coney Barrett was not asked about vouchers during her hearings.

He notes that she served on the board of a Catholic school in Indiana that received state voucher funds and that openly discriminated against same-sex families.

Barrett served from 2015-17 on the board of Trinity School at Greenlawn, a South Bend Catholic school, the New York Times reported. Trinity had a policy during Barrett’s time on the board that effectively prohibited same-sex couples from enrolling their children in the school, according to the Times.

That would seem to cast doubt on Barrett’s claim in her confirmation hearing that she had “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference” and would not do so. It also raises policy questions about whether publicly funded institutions should practice discrimination.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Catholic Schools, Education Reform, Indiana, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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