Archives for category: Funding
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Ohio: The Billion-Dollar Charter School Boondoggle

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2022 //
7

For years, reformers celebrated the grand success of Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Politicians lauded it and poured money in. ECOT’s owner reciprocated by giving generously to politicians. Governor John Kasich gave the commencement address one year; Jeb Bush did another year.

But the state auditor (who was also a commencement speaker in 2015) checked the books and the whole ECOT edifice came crashing down. Ghost students, payments to companies owned by the founder, numerous ways to profit from the state’s generosity.

ECOT still owes Ohio more than $100 million.

Theodore Decker wrote in the Columbus Dispatch:

If there is such a thing as justice in this imperfect world, investigators in a federal building somewhere in Columbus are nudging ever close to it while digging into the billion-dollar boondoggle once known as the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

ECOT, at one time the state’s largest online charter school, collapsed four years ago amid claims that it had taken millions in undeserved state aid.

Allegations of wrongdoing were traded by the school and state education department. Lawsuits were filed. And about 12,000 students were left in the lurch when the school imploded.

Then ECOT fell out of the public view, overtaken by a thick layer of general dirtiness at a time when political scandal was the norm from the White House to the Statehouse.

An audit just released this week, though, found that ECOT still owes the state more than $117 million.

Ohio Auditor Keith Faber on Tuesday said the shuttered school owes $106.6 million to the state Department of Education and another $10.6 million to the state Attorney General’s office.

As others have before them, Faber’s auditors found that ECOT wasn’t entitled to all the state money it received, including some in 2016 and 2017 and none in 2018.

ECOT as an entity may be gone, but for the sake of all taxpaying Ohioans, it had better not be forgotten.

Looking at the broad sweep of the ECOT swindle, it seems unfathomable that not a single indictment has been lodged against anyone in connection with its shady operations.

The main man behind ECOT was William Lager, a man with a host of Statehouse connections who founded the school in 2000. He also operated Altair Learning Management Inc and IQ Innovations LLC, which had lucrative contracts with ECOT to provide support services. After ECOT fell apart, Attorney General Dave Yost called Lager “the principal wrongdoer“ in the case.

The series of lethal blows to Lager’s empire began in 2016, when the Department of Education demanded repayment of $80 million.

But ECOT’s attendance numbers had been disputed by the state long before that, as far back as 2006. Going back even further, to 2001 and 2002, an audit determined that the state had been overpaying the school by millions.

That ECOT’s attendance numbers were disputed so early on in its existence – and how that problem regardless went unaddressed for so long by a string of governors, legislators and state officials – are looming questions that must be the stuff of any civic-minded federal prosecutor’s dreams.

And maybe, we can hope, they still are.

Yost, while still the state auditor, excoriated ECOT in 2018 and referred his findings to both county and federal prosecutors.

The feds are a secretive lot who have a habit of neither confirming nor denying the existence of any pending investigation, but there have been a few dropped clues through the years that a probe of ECOT is afoot.

One of the biggest came in 2019, when the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice subpoenaed nearly 20 years of ECOT’s campaign contribution records.

More than three years have passed since that development, but the feds also don’t have a habit of rushing their investigations.

Maybe they will wrap things up without uncovering a single instance of criminal behavior.

If you possess a lick of common sense, given what we know already, that outcome would boggle the mind.

But even if that is how an investigation concludes, prosecutors at the very least should know many more details about how ECOT and its principals were permitted to run amok for so long.

Considering Ohio’s taxpayers footed the bill, we have the right to know each and every one of them.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Samuel Abrams: The Curious Omission in the Supreme Court’s Maine Ruling

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2022 //
13

Samuel Abrams, Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization, noticed a curious omission in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that required Maine to fund two evangelical religious schools. There was no mention of what other nations do. Some European nations fully fund religious schools. But they regulate them! Choice zealots here want religious schools to get public funds without any public oversight. None.

He writes:

In tandem with its reversal of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court stands to substantially alter everyday life in America with its recent decisions of ­Carson v. Makin, amplifying its support for public funding of religious schools, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, allowing prayer in public schools.

The significance of Kennedy is blunt. With the Court ruling 6-3 along party lines that the dismissal of a football coach at a public high school in the state of Washington for holding post-game prayer meetings violated his First Amendment right to free exercise of religion, we can expect similar meetings as well as Bible study sessions, nativity pageants, and the like in public schools across the country. Such events will surely lead some students to feel coerced into participating for fear of disappointing peers and authority figures. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor indeed noted that a lower court had determined that some players said they joined the coach’s prayer meetings “because they felt social pressure to follow their coach and teammates.”

The significance of Carson is more subtle but equally profound. In Carson, the same justices ruled 6-3—as forecasted on this site following oral arguments in December—that Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from partaking in its Town Tuitioning Program likewise violated the right to free exercise of religion. This program covers all or part of the cost for students in rural districts without high schools to attend either public or nonsectarian private high schools in nearby districts or beyond (if the school is public, the total cost is covered; if it is private, coverage is pegged to per-pupil statewide average spending). With this decision, we can expect religious groups in considerably rural states across the country to lobby legislators to create programs similar to Maine’s.

But there’s another dimension to Carson, which derives as much from what it did not say as from what it did. To grasp the wider implications of Carson requires understanding what is missing from the decision.

While many countries—such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands—have for many years allowed a considerable portion of their students to attend religious schools with public funding, the Court did not cite such foreign practice. In the Netherlands, in fact, 55 percent of students attend religious schools with public funding.

Why then didn’t the Court cite foreign practice? This indifference to foreign practice holds, as well, for the majority opinions in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, validating the provision of government-funded vouchers to cover tuition at religious schools in Cleveland, and Espinoza et al. v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, mandating that if a state permits students to attend private schools with scholarships funded by a tuition tax-credit program, it cannot bar religious schools from participation.

American jurisprudence does tend to stick to domestic precedent, but that custom cannot explain this disregard for education policy abroad. After all, former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who voted with the majority in Zelman, was a prominent champion of deference to foreign practice and inspired others to follow in his path. In authoring the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, Kennedy famously drew on British legislation and the European Convention on Human Rights to overturn state laws criminalizing homosexual relations. Two years later, Kennedy made use of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child in writing the majority opinion in Roper v. Simmons to nullify the constitutionality of the death penalty for juvenile offenders.

The answer to this question is crucial. To have invoked foreign practice would have been to invite trouble. Publicly funded religious schools in such countries as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands are regulated to a degree that American proponents of religious schools would find unacceptable.

In Carson, Chief Justice John Roberts conceded in this light that while Maine public schools must adhere to specific standards for instruction in a range of subjects, that is not so for nonsectarian and religious private schools. Though accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), such schools, wrote Chief Justice Roberts, “are exempt from these requirements, and instead subject only to general ‘standards and indicators’ governing the implementation of their own chosen curriculum.”

As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out in his dissent, one of the two schools at the heart of Carson, both of which are accredited by NEASC, considers academic and religious education “completely intertwined,” so much so that “in science class, students learn that atmospheric layers ‘are evidence of God’s good design.’”

At religious as well as nonsectarian private schools funded with public money in such countries as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, curricula must comport with national standards (meaning, for example, no attribution to divine design for atmospheric composition). In addition, teachers must be certified and guaranteed access to union membership while members of the LGBTQ community cannot be barred from either enrollment or employment.

The parameters of NEASC and other independent school organizations across the United States do not come close to such expectations, as Justice Breyer’s point about science education indicates. Indeed, many religious schools, such as the two defining Carson, refuse to hire gay or lesbian teachers.

While Maine passed an amendment to its human rights act to bar schools from receiving public money if they discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity, that does not mean other states motivated by Carson to create similar programs will enact such protections; nor does it mean that Maine’s amendment will go unchallenged on the grounds that it interferes with an institution’s right to free exercise of religion.

In a guest essay in The New York Times, Aaron Tang, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, cited this amendment as a model for deflecting the impact of decisions like Carson, but he neither acknowledged that other states implementing town tuitioning programs might not take such action nor recognized that Maine’s amendment might not last.

Setting aside whether public funding of any form of religious schooling poses a threat to democratic values by fostering societal division and conflict, as Justice Breyer claimed in his dissent, there can be no doubt that public funding of lightly regulated religious schooling poses precisely such a threat.

Policymakers abroad have understood this. And it is basic to our own tradition. The Supreme Court made this clear in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, ruling unanimously that Oregon could not, as decided by a statewide referendum in 1922, bar private schools from operating but that it was empowered to carefully regulate them.

“No question is raised concerning the power of the State reasonably to regulate all schools,” the Court declared in Pierce, “to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.”

With Carson building on Zelman and Espinoza, public funding of religious schooling appears irreversible. But that does not mean the message of Pierce and the lessons from abroad cannot be heeded. With Kennedy, the public school as neutral common ground is over.

Samuel E. Abrams
Director, NCSPE
June 30, 2022

Published Thursday, Jun 30, 2022

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Funding, International, Religion

The Koch Libertarian Project vs. America

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2022 //
56

What is happening to the America that we swore allegiance to every day in public school? what happened to the America that was “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”? How did we get a rogue Supreme Court that recklessly demolishes women’s rights, the separation of church and state, gun control, public safety, and efforts by government to prevent climate disasters? Who kidnapped the conservative Republican Party that believed in stability and tradition? From whence came the people who scorn the commonweal and ridicule Constitutional norms?

Former state legislator Jeanne Dietsch has an answer. Connect the dots by looking at what has happened to New Hampshire. The coup failed in Washington, D.C. on January 6, she writes. But it is moving forward in New Hampshire, with many of the same characters and all of the same goals.

If you read one post today, read this.

She writes:

During the last few weeks, US House leaders documented the nearly successful January 6 coup piece by piece, before our eyes. That personal power grab failed. Meanwhile, the steps clinching takeover of our government by radical reactionaries have nearly triumphed. A plan decades in the making. A plan nearly invisible to the ordinary public.


I can barely believe myself how this story weaves from Kansas to Concord to DC to the fields of southern Michigan over the course of six decades. It starts in Witchita. Koch Industries is the largest privately held company in the US, with over $115 billion in revenues, mostly fossil-fuel related. For many years, two of the founders’ sons, Charles and David Koch, each owned 42% of the company.


The younger, David, studied in the engineering department of MIT for 5 years, simultaneous with young John H. Sununu. Both finished their Master’s degrees in 1963.

1980: THE KOCHS SET THEIR GOALS


Seventeen years later, David Koch ran for Vice President of the US on the Libertarian ticket. The campaign was largely funded by Koch interests. The Libertarian platform of 1980, shown below, may look disturbingly familiar to those following news today.

Open her post to read the Koch Libertarian platform of 1980.

Libertarians demanded the abolition of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public schools, aid to children, the Post Office, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and more.

The infrastructure for achieving that platform was founded two years later. It was called the Federalist Society. It was a plan by a “small but influential group of law professors, lawyers, and judges.” Its goal?

To train members of their professions to believe in “originalism.” Originalists “strictly construe” the Constitution as they believed the Framers designed it way back in 1787. This matched David Koch’s 1980 platform. It would leave corporations free to do whatever profited them most without regard for social costs or regulations. Older Federalist Society members used their influence to advance their followers to higher judgeships.

SUNUNU FAMILY ROLES


Meanwhile, John Sununu became governor of New Hampshire, then Chief of Staff for President George W. Bush. In that role, John thwarted a plan for the US to join the international conference to address climate change in 1989. Actions like this, that benefitted Koch and the rest of the fossil-fuel industry, would become a hallmark of the Sununu family.


In 1993, an executive of Charles and David’s Koch Industries Michigan subsidiary, Guardian Industries, became a founding trustee of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy [JBC] in NH. Its mission was to advance many of the policies listed on David Koch’s platform of 1980. John Sununu, and later his son James, would chair the JBC board through today. Another of Sununu’s sons, Michael, would become a vocal climate denier and industry consultant. Still another, Senator John E. Sununu, would oppose the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003. But the Sununus were not coup leaders, just complicit.

BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE COUP


But let’s jump back to the Federalist Society. Its mission was succeeding. They were stacking the lower courts.?..Those justices hired young lawyers as clerks. From 1996-97, Thomas employed a Federalist Society clerk named John Eastman.


Twenty-three years later, Eastman would meet secretly with President Donald Trump. He would convince him that Vice President Pence could refuse to accept electoral college ballots on January 6. But back in 1999, Eastman became a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. “The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.”


Now we’re almost at the secret clubhouse of the coup. The Claremont Institute was run by a fellow regressive named Larry Arnn.(Photo below) In late 1999, Arnn was in the process of replacing the president of Hillsdale College because of a scandal that made national news. Hillsdale promotes conservative family values. Yet its leader was having an affair with his daughter-in-law. She committed suicide. Hillsdale was the central hub for Libertarian radicals so they needed a strong leader to pull them out of the mud.

Please read the rest of this fascinating post. There is one blatant error: she refers to “Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer” as Koch justices, but Breyer was a liberal justice appointed by Clinton. She must have meant the crackpot Alito.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, History, Injustice, Koch Brothers, New Hampshire, Privatization, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Nevada: Supreme Court Rejects Private School Vouchers Again!

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2022 //
8

Good news from Nevada, conveyed by the Rogers Foundation, which supports public schools.

Las Vegas, NV – Beverly Rogers and Rory Reid, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Rogers Foundation, are celebrating a Nevada Supreme Court decision that has once again halted a constitutional initiative attempting to establish an extreme and unprecedented school voucher scheme in Nevada.

“This is a huge win for students and Nevada families,” said Beverly Rogers, “This would have been detrimental for the public schools our community relies on, leading to even bigger class sizes and massive cuts. It’s a shame these groups want to sacrifice our public schools in favor of discriminatory and unaccountable vouchers. We are glad the courts once again ruled in our favor.”

The Nevada Supreme Court held, in Education Freedom PAC v. Reid, that the PAC’s voucher scheme failed in several key ways. It failed to propose a revenue source to fund the scheme’s substantial costs to taxpayers. Its description of effect was “deceptive and misleading,” failing to inform voters of the impact on the state’s budget and underestimating the cost of the scheme. Lastly, the initiative attempted to improperly direct future legislatures to enact certain laws, impeding their authority. The Court enjoined the PAC from moving forward with the initiative.

“It’s clear this group was trying to push its controversial scheme by deceptively mischaracterizing its impact on our public schools,” said Rory Reid, “Nevada’s highest court has halted their effort, rightly finding the public deserved to know the full truth.”

This failed constitutional initiative would have been one of the most extreme voucher measures in the country, putting taxpayers on the hook for at least $300 million to support the wealthy already enrolled in private schools. This would have resulted in a significant tax hike, deep cuts to public district and charter schools, and the reduction of critical community services.

“These groups will never stop and neither can we. There is a clear effort to destroy our public schools, the only system dedicated to serving all students. We cannot let them. We will not let them. And we will continue to fight on behalf of Nevada’s students and their families,” said Mrs. Rogers.

About Educate Nevada Now

The Rogers Foundation, a Nevada leader in support of public education, joined with local, state and national partners to launch Educate Nevada Now (ENN) in 2015. The organization is committed to school finance reform and improved educational opportunities and outcomes for all Nevada public school children, especially English language learners, gifted and talented students, students with disabilities or other special needs, and low-income students.

More information about ENN can be found athttp://www.educatenevadanow.com

Our mailing address is:
701 S. 9th Street
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Nevada, Privatization, Vouchers

Mark Joseph Stern: The Supreme Court’s Decision to Compel Maine to Pay Religious School Tuition Threatens Public Schools Everywhere

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2022 //
116

Mark Joseph Stern wrote recently in Slate about the dangers embedded in the Supreme Court’s Carson v. Makin decision. In this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Maine was compelled to pay tuition at religious schools because it paid tuition at some other private schools. Stern warns that the Supreme Court is very likely to extend this concept to every state that underwrites nonsectarian private schools. The Court’s zeal for religious schools is not going to end in Maine. Please open the link and read the entire article. Make no mistake: This Supreme Court is determined to abolish any separation between church and state and to require every state to pay for religious education. So you don’t want your tax dollars to underwrite a school that would not admit your own children or grandchildren; too bad. So you don’t want to pay for Madrassas, yeshivas, or schools that teach racial hatred? Too bad.

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court claims it is dedicated to the principles of the Original Constitution, as written. They say they are Constitutional fundamentalists. This decision demonstrates how phony their “Originalism” is. The Founding Fathers were very explicit in their desire to separate religion from the state. This Court is not dedicated to the Constitution or its principles. If it were, it would never have written this decision.

He writes:

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.

Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.

Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.

Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.

The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.

Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.

The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education...

It’s worth pausing, as both Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did in dissent, to reflect on the victims of Tuesday’s decision. The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory, expelling students and teachers who do not adhere to evangelical Christianity. LGBTQ students, as well as straight children of same-sex couples, are not welcome, nor are LGBTQ teachers. Even custodians must be born-again Christians. One school teaches students to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion” and believe that men serve as the head of the household. Another requires students to sign a “covenant” promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services.


The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority effectively declared on Tuesday that the separation of church and state—a principle enshrined in the Constitution—is, itself, unconstitutional. Its 6–3 decision in Carson v. Makin requires Maine to give public money to private religious schools, steamrolling decades of precedent in a race to compel state funding of religion. Carson is radical enough on its own, but the implications of the ruling are even more frightening: As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent, it has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States.

Carson challenges Maine’s effort to provide quality civic education to every child in the state. The government created a tuition assistance program to help families who live in remote, sparsely populated regions without any public schools. Under the program, parents can send their kids to certain private schools, and the state covers the cost of tuition. To qualify, these schools must give students a secular education. They may be affiliated with, or even run by, a religious organization. But their actual curricula must align with secular state standards.

Two families challenged this limitation, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. Just two decades ago, this claim would’ve been laughed out of court: SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002; at the time, it would’ve been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education.

Tuesday’s decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination.

The upshot of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court is that states have no compelling interest in providing public, secular education to children. Indeed, Roberts suggests that the very concept of secular schooling is a smokescreen for “discrimination against religion”—a pretext for unconstitutional animus toward pious Americans. His opinion reaches far beyond Maine. About 37 states have amendments to their constitutions that bar government funding of religious institutions, including schools. Carson essentially invalidates those laws while undermining the broader constitutional basis for the nation’s public school system.

Roberts reached this astonishing result by overruling broad swaths of precedent respecting states’ authority to separate church and state more strictly than the U.S. Constitution requires. The court previously upheld states’ interest in avoiding the “establishment” of religion by refusing to underwrite the indoctrination of students into a particular faith. No longer. Roberts condemned Maine’s efforts to guard against religious establishment as nothing more than “discrimination against religion”—an effort to “exclude some members of the community” from public benefits “because of their religious exercise.” He also overruled a line of cases that let the government withhold funding on the basis of religious use (like indoctrination) but not religious status (like affiliation with a church). That distinction, he wrote, “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well,” tossing it in the precedential dumpster.…

The chief justice maintained that Carson’s rule only kicks in once a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships. So, in theory, a state can send all its money to public schools and avoid constitutional concerns. Even if that’s true, the consequences are sweeping: Most states offer at least one of these programs, so Carson gives millions of families an opportunity to bail out of the public school system and demand public money for parochial education.

But can this distinction hold? Roberts’ bright line dims under scrutiny: Maine, after all, wanted private schools to replace public education for some students, not supplement it. And yet the court found no good reason for the state to insist that these substitute schools adhere to secular standards. Indeed, the chief justice’s rhetoric depicts education not as a state-sponsored benefit for all, but rather as a personal matter best left up to parents. There is, he claimed, no “historic and substantial state interest” in preserving secular education. If that’s true, how can any state refuse to fund religious schooling?…

It’s worth pausing, as both Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did in dissent, to reflect on the victims of Tuesday’s decision. The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory, expelling students and teachers who do not adhere to evangelical Christianity. LGBTQ students, as well as straight children of same-sex couples, are not welcome, nor are LGBTQ teachers. Even custodians must be born-again Christians. One school teaches students to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion” and believe that men serve as the head of the household. Another requires students to sign a “covenant” promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services….

“Legislators,” Breyer wrote, “did not want Maine taxpayers to pay for these religiously based practices,” as doing so might violate their own faith or conscience. The majority tells these Mainers their own views don’t matter, because the First Amendment forces them to foot the bill for other people’s religious indoctrination. Doing so creates a “serious risk of religion-based social divisions,” Breyer explained, exacerbating the “religious strife” that the religion clauses “were designed to prevent.” Sotomayor put the point more sharply: “While purporting to protect against discrimination of one kind,” she wrote, “the court requires Maine to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds.”

The conservative majority, however, has perfected the art of ignoring genuine discrimination while perceiving anti-Christian persecution where none exists. In the process, they are elevating the rights of one sect over all others. Carson will not benefit any religious minorities; there are not enough Muslims or Jews to create a school in the far-flung corners of Maine. Every time Roberts uses the word “religion,” he might as well be saying “Christian.” The right will praise Carson as a triumph of religious liberty. But if you practice a religion that does not stand to gain from the ruling, your liberty does not matter to this Supreme Court.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Disruption, Equity, Funding, Maine, Religion, Separation of church and state

Charles P. Pierce: Supreme Court Declares Establishment Clause Unconstitutional

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2022 //
74

Charles P. Pierce is a super writer who is smart and insightful, especially when he writes about education. He writes regularly for Esquire. In this post, he slices and dices the absurdity of the Carson vs. Makin ruling that compels Maine to pay tuition for students at evangelical Christian schools that openly discriminate against students, families, and teachers who do not share their religious views. The six justices in the majority are certainly not Originalists. Their decision overturns a key principle embedded in the Constitution, which prohibits the state from sponsoring or “establishing” religion.

He writes:

It’s been a big week for Christian nationalism in our politics. In the case of Carson v. Makin, which involved a Maine law that forbade public money to go to religious schools, the Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution is…unconstitutional. The Court’s carefully engineered conservative majority has been heading in this direction, finding anti-religious—primarily anti-Christian—discrimination in laws deliberately written to be religiously neutral. This was a pole-vault over that line, and one that conceivably could threaten public education as a whole. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said:

This case concerns two families that live in SAUs that neither maintain their own secondary schools nor contract with any nearby secondary school. Petitioners David and Amy Carson reside in Glenburn, Maine. When this litigation commenced, the Carsons’ daughter attended high school at Bangor Christian Schools (BCS), which was founded in 1970 as a ministry of Bangor Baptist Church. The Carsons sent their daughter to BCS because of the school’s high academic standards and because the school’s Christian worldview aligns with their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Translation: the school discriminates against LGBTQ citizens. Here, from a brief filed in this case, is what Bangor Christian Schools are up to.

BCS believes that a student who is homosexual or identifies as a gender other than on his or her original birth certificate would not be able to sign the agreement governing codes of conduct that BCS requires as a condition of admission.

If a student was openly gay and regularly communicated that fact to his or her classmates, “that would fall under an immoral activity” under BCS’ Statement of Faith and if “there was no change in the student’s position” after counseling, the student would not be allowed to continue attending BCS.

BCS does not believe there is any way to separate the religious instruction from the academic instruction – religious instruction is “completely intertwined and there is no way for a student to succeed if he or she is resistant to the sectarian instruction.”

One of the objectives in the ninth-grade social studies class is to “[r]efute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s Word.”

Shrug, says John Roberts. Pay up, suckers.Me? I am planning to open a taxpayer-funded madrassa out in the woods somewhere. I’ll keep you advised.

Open the link. The post has an interesting take on Herschel Walker and on Arizona official Rusty Bower’s view that the Constitution was divinely inspired.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Maine, Religion, Separation of church and state

U.S. Supreme Court Rules That States Must Fund Tuition at Religious Schools if They Fund Other Private Schools

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2022 //
114

To no one’s surprise, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of funding religious schools in states that fund other private schools. Whereas the Supreme Court has long issued rulings forbidding any state support for religious schools, the current Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to rule in favor of equal treatment of religious schools. Brick by brick, this Supreme Court is dismantling the “wall of separation” (Thomas Jefferson’s phrase) between church and state.

David Savage of the Los Angeles Times reports:

WASHINGTON — 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended its support for religious schools, ruling that parents who send their children to such institutions have a right to tuition aid if the state provides it to other similar private schools. 

The 6-3 decision in the Carson vs. Makin case from Maine could open the door to including religious schools among the charter schools that are privately run but publicly financed. 

In the past, the high court had said that giving public funds to church schools violated the 1st Amendment’s ban on an “establishment of religion.” 

But in the past five years, the court’s conservative majority has flipped the equation and ruled it is unconstitutional discrimination to deny public funds to church schools simply because they are religious.

Maine has an unusual subsidy program because many of its small towns do not have a high school. In such cases, students may enroll in a private school or in another public high school, and the state pays their tuition.

Since 1980, however, the state has not extended these subsidies to students in church schools, apparently fearing it would be unconstitutional to do so.

The court majority said that was a mistake. 

Among the six conservative justices in the majority, all of them attended Catholic schools except for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who went to public elementary and secondary schools in New Jersey. 

The conservative justices in recent years have cast aside the principle of church-state separation and argued it grew from an anti-Catholic bias in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It was an open secret that ‘sectarian’ was code for ‘Catholic,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2020, describing the common state laws that prohibit sending tax money to schools affiliated with a church. These restrictions were “born of bigotry” and “arose at a time of pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general,” he said in Espinoza vs. Montana. 

The 1st Amendment forbids laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” which had been seen as barring the government from subsidizing religion. But Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have disagreed.

“The modern view which presumes that states must remain … virtually silent on matters of religion is fundamentally incorrect,” Thomas wrote in an earlier school case. “Properly understood, the Establishment Clause does not prohibit states from favoring religion.”

Notre Dame law professor Nicole Garnett, a former Thomas clerk, predicted last year there will be a move “in the near future to permit religious charter schools,” either through the courts or the states.

If these “charter school programs are properly considered programs of private school choice,” they can take advantage of the court’s ruling forbidding the exclusion of religious schools, she said.

My comment as an historian who has studied church-state issues:

The Court is right that there was a strong anti-Catholic bias in American society throughout the nineteenth century. The so-called Blaine amendments found in many state constitutions were animated in large part by a desire to block public funding of Catholic schools. As I showed in my book “The Great School Wars,” a history of the New York City schools, the Catholic Church eagerly sought public funding in the 1840s.

But the ban on funding religious schools that has been in place nationally for more than a century applied to all religious schools, not just to Catholic schools. Schools run by Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and other religious faiths were ineligible for public funding. This view was reinforced repeatedly by the Supreme Court in numerous rulings. The common understanding, upheld by the Court, was that public funds should not be used to indoctrinate public funds into the belief system of any religious faith.

Public schools exist to promote public purposes: literacy and judgment needed to vote, to serve on juries, to participate in civic life, to sustain a democratic polity. Religious schools exist to teach and perpetuate–and yes, to indoctrinate–the faith of adherents. Religious believers do not want to support the schools of other faiths. But under this ruling, all religious faiths will be entitled to public funding in any state that funds any private schools.

Maine should end its policy of “tuitioning” and limit public funds to public schools. Other states that subsidize any private schools should stop doing so. The path on which SCOTUS has embarked will end in publicly funding schools for every religion, of which there are scores. It threatens the principle of the common school, supported by the public and open to all children.

The next step, as the article suggests, will be religious charter schools, scooping up public funds with no accountability, no oversight, and no adherence to anti-discrimination laws. Is it not unjust to expect the public to pay for schools where their own children are ineligible to attend because of their own religion?

Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch must be celebrating right now.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

Arizona: GOP Plans Massive Voucher Expansion Despite Public Opposition to Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2022 //
9

Talk about cheesy! Talk about hypocrisy! Talk about weasels! Talk about betrayal of the public! Talk about disdain for democracy!

The people of Arizona voted overwhelmingly against vouchers, but the Koch-controlled GOP majority in the legislature is promoting a dramatic expansion of vouchers. Voters be damned!

To buy the support of public school parents, the legislators added a big increase in public school funding, but the new funding is available only if the vouchers are enacted.

Arizona has 1.1 million students, but only 11,775 have used vouchers to leave public schools. Now the Republicans want to fund vouchers for every student in the state. Does it matter that multiple academic studies have found that vouchers do not improve education? Of course not.

Do you think these guys know how repellent they are?

Four years after voters rejected a similar move, Republican lawmakers are pushing ahead with a plan to let any of the 1.1 million students in public schools get vouchers to attend private and parochial schools.

And they are holding a plan to boost aid to public schools hostage until they get what they want.

HB 2853, approved Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee on a 6-4 party-line vote, would remove all restrictions on who can get what are called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Backers say this ensures that parents get to decide what is the best option for their youngsters.

That assertion was disputed by Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools.

She said that unlike public schools, private schools can pick and choose who they want to accept. Lewis said those schools, many of which are for-profit corporations, accept those who will cost them the least, meaning the highest achievers and students who do not have special needs.

Republicans said they are not ignoring the needs of public schools, voting Wednesday for HB 2854, which would increase state aid to schools by $400 million, above another $250 million additional already planned.

But there’s less there than meets the eye.

First, only half of that additional cash is permanent. And it is weighted so the districts with the most students in financial need would get more.

Beyond that, schools would have to wait until the 2023-24 school year for the one-time $200 million infusion.

And there’s something else.

House Majority Leader Ben Toma, R-Peoria, who crafted both measures, included a “poison pill” of sorts: It says that if the vouchers do not become law, the public schools don’t get any of that $400 million.

That is designed to deter the education community from doing to HB 2853 what they did to a similar voucher expansion measure approved by GOP lawmakers in 2017.

They collected sufficient signatures to put the expansion on the 2018 ballot. And voters overruled the legislation by a margin of close to 2 to 1…

And Lewis told Capitol Media Services that supporters of public education won’t be deterred, vowing to go to the ballot once again if the Republican-controlled legislature approves universal vouchers. She said while that would mean the loss of $400 million — or, really, $200 million of ongoing funds — that is nowhere near the amount that public schools need in Arizona.

She pointed out that voters in 2020 approved Proposition 208 to infuse another nearly $1 billion into public education. That was sidelined after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled the tax could not be levied because it bumped up against a constitutional limit on education spending.

Lewis, the education community and their Democratic allies are not alone in saying schools need more than HB 2854 is offering.

Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Glendale, said he is holding out for an amount close to that $1 billion figure. And with only 16 Republicans in the 30-member Senate, the plan cannot get final approval without his vote.

Wednesday’s votes come as school districts won a significant legal victory, with a judge saying they are entitled to pursue claims that the legislature shorted them billions of dollars.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Vouchers

Jitu Brown and Randi Weingarten: Charter Schools Should Be Accountable, Like Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2022 //
16

Jitu Brown, civil rights leader and director of Journey for Justice, joins here with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, to support the Biden administration’s modest proposals to reform the federal Charter Schools Program. The charter lobby has vigorously opposed any reform of the program. Their article appeared in Education Week.

Charter schools have been part of the fabric of public education in the United States for decades. Like a patchwork quilt, there is a great deal of variation among them. Some have a history of improvements to student achievement, while others have been ineffective or even harmful. Some charter operators are fiscally responsible, while others have been deemed incompetent or fraudulent.

As with every public school, and every expenditure of taxpayer funds, reasonable oversight enhances the quality and accountability of charter schools. This is the goal of the Biden administration’s proposed modest changes to the federal Charter Schools Program. But some charter school proponents have responded to the proposed changes with a fierce and well-funded opposition campaign.

The charter lobby is pushing back with big TV ad buys and op-ed campaigns, claiming that the proposed regulations would “halt innovation in its tracks,” “gut the federal Charter Schools Program,” and impose a “needlessly restrictive regulatory scheme.”

In fact, President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 budget proposes a $440 million investment in the federal grant program for charter schools. The Biden administration is right to seek more oversight of this program. As with all federal funding, there are rules to ensure proper use of the money. One study from the advocacy group Network for Public Education found that between 2006 and 2014, $45.5 million was handed out to charter schools that never even opened.

The charter lobby is chafing at one provision in particular—the requirement for applicants for Charter Schools Program startup funds to provide a community-impact statement. For the first time, the program requires charter operators to state how their new school would impact the surrounding community. The intent is to ensure that the applicant has engaged with residents in planning for the school, that there is a need for a new charter school in the community, and that the school won’t promote racial segregation…

Every school system in America, when it considers where to build a new school, considers the proposed school’s impact on the surrounding community from which it will draw students. Charter schools should not be islands unto themselves, nor should they thrust themselves onto communities that do not want them there.

Charters that function as centers for innovation and best practices for public schools should be welcome in every community. A charter industry that advocates and benefits from the closing of traditional public schools is not welcome.

Take the example of Detroit, where between 1995 and 2016, 152 charter schools opened, contributing to the closure of 195 traditional public schools in a city that already had a declining student population. This left some neighborhoods with no public schools—traditional or charter…

Responding to parents’ and communities’ needs is what many charter school operators say they are all about. Yet, this responsiveness happens less than it should. In 2017, students at Hirsch Metropolitan High School on the South Side of Chicago held a walkout protesting a proposed charter school that would be sited at their building. Parents of students at the high school complained about a lack of community engagement from the proposed charter operator. The charter school eventually found a new, nearby location and promptly obtained $840,000 in grant money from the U.S. Department of Education.

We are lifelong advocates of high-quality public schools for all students, whether those schools are charters or traditional. Schools that aspire to serve our children and communities should embrace their accountability to the public. Schools are community institutions and should not seek to destabilize other institutions in our communities. One must wonder why those seeking to open charter schools are afraid of or resistant to this reasonable transparency and engagement proposal. The proposed rules would give more students access to high-quality schools, which is what we all—charter boosters and traditional public school champions—really want for America’s children.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding

Pennsylvania: It Is Time to Reform the Charter School Law

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2022 //
9

A former Republican State Senator and the former State Auditor, a Democrat, wrote to argue on behalf of reforming the charter school law.

Bernie O’Neill (R-29, Bucks) is a former special education teacher for more than 25 years and a 16-year former member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

Eugene DePasquale is former Auditor General of Pennsylvania and former member of the state General Assembly, (D-95, York). He presently serves as a Resident for the Keystone Center for Charter Change at the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

They wrote:

Our roles as former elected officials from both of the major political parties have given us unique perspectives into not only Pennsylvania’s political process, but also its public education system, particularly charter schools.

Charter schools in the state have grown tremendously in the 24+ years in which they have existed. It is estimated that nearly 170,000 children will attend a brick and mortar or cyber charter school in the current school year and that Pennsylvania taxpayers will spend an estimated $3 billion to fund charter schools.

Despite being in operation for more than two decades, Pennsylvania’s Charter School Law (CSL) has never undergone any significant revision, other than allowing the creation of cyber charter schools in 2002, even though there are numerous glaring problems with the law. That’s not because the General Assembly hasn’t studied and introduced a myriad of legislative proposals each year to enact meaningful reforms. However, the state’s legislative body seems to be unwilling or unable to fix the problems.

Reforming the CSL should be a bipartisan issue. At its core, charter school reform would 1) ensure that public education funds are spent efficiently and appropriately; 2) that charter schools are as accountable and transparent as other public schools; and 3) preserve and strengthen educational choice by bolstering the law to ensure only quality charter school options are available to students and families.

Choice in public education is well-established in Pennsylvania. However, the status quo results in taxpayers sending hundreds of millions of public education dollars more than what charter schools need to provide an education. This is especially true for cyber charter schools, which do not maintain a physical school building and for all charter schools when it comes to well-documented overpayments for special education services. There’s a word for this type of spending – wasteful. And residents across the state feel the impact of these overpayments when their local school districts are forced to raise property taxes because of these costs.

Charter schools are supposed to be public schools. However, the boards that operate charter schools are not elected and are not required to include any representation from the community which they serve. Further, charter schools can contract with for-profit companies to run virtually all operations of the school. Once a charter school enters into one of these contracts, the public loses the ability to see how their money is being spent.

For years, proficiency on state assessments and graduations rates at charter schools have, on average, been substantially lower than those of traditional local public schools. While there are many high-performing charter schools, the current CSL makes it very difficult to close poor performers. Look no further than the fact that every cyber charter school has been identified by the state Department of Education as being in need of improvement for many years.

The bottom line is this: we owe it to our children and to the taxpayers to make sure that we are doing everything possible so that students are getting the best education available and that we are getting the best return on investment for our tax dollars. That’s something that all legislators should be able to support no matter which side of the aisle they’re on.

It is time to end the paralysis in Harrisburg, stop the practice of passing off charter school expansion proposals that fail to address serious funding flaws and contain little accountability as real reform, and finally work in a bipartisan manner to fix the law.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Pennsylvania
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »