The Grand Canyon Institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization in Arizona. Its latest report concludes that charter schools are more accountable than vouchers. Vouchers suck up nearly $1 billion a year in public money and are completely unaccountable. Oucher schools are subject to no financial audits, do not have to comply with the state curriculum, and are not audited for academic performance.
Step right up and get your free money, grifters! Courtesy of Arizona taxpayers and GOP legislators!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Charters are Accountable, Independent Private Schools are Not Yet nearly a billion public dollars flow to unaccountable private schools
Phoenix —On Monday, the State Board for Charter Schools, a public body, voted unanimously to issue a notice of intent to revoke the charter contract for ARCHES Academy, currently located in Apache Junction.
The school appears to have both academic and financial problems and recently addressed an issue with a fire marshal. This action represents the kind of responsible oversight of charter schools that serves to protect the interests of students, parents and taxpayers.
In sharp contrast, independent private schools are required to have no such oversight, even though they currently receive nearly $1 billion in state public funding. That nearly matches the state general fund support for the state university system. Public funds that support private schools come from redirected general fund dollars through tax credit donations to Student Tuition Organizations and by funds from Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA)/vouchers directly from the General Fund. Last year GCI estimates private school tax credits cost $285 million (the formal report is due by March 31) and ESA/vouchers cost $592 million, so, collectively, nearly $900 million in public support for unaccountable private schools (note: this figure includes an amount for ESA homeschooling).
The table below uses the case of ARCHES Academy to contrast charter schools (which are privately owned public schools) with private schools that operate independently with the level of oversight and accountability required.
Please open the link to see the table comparing Arches charter school and private schools receiving vouchers.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maine must pay the tuition of children at religious schools if it pays any private school tuition. Maine has a historic system of paying for students to go to private high schools if their own district does not have a public high school.
The state of Maine insisted that it would not pay tuition to schools that violate the state’s anti-discrimination. The two Christian schools that won the case did not accept LGBT students or students who practice a religion different from that of the church.
A Christian school in Maine must adhere to the state’s LGBT antidiscrimination policy to qualify for a state tuition assistance program while the lawsuit against the state continues, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock, a George W. Bush appointee, denied a preliminary injunction Tuesday requested by Bangor Christian Schools run by Crosspoint Church, concluding that the church’s lawsuit against assorted state officials is not likely to succeed.
He ruled that Bangor Christian Schools must follow all the Maine Human Rights Act provisions.
“The Court determines that the educational antidiscrimination provisions do not violate the Free Exercise Clause because they are neutral, generally applicable, and rationally related to a legitimate government interest,” wrote Woodcock.
“The Court concludes further that the educational provisions do not violate the Free Speech Clause because they regulate conduct, not speech. Finally, the Court concludes that the employment provisions do not proscribe any constitutionally protected conduct.”
First Liberty Institute Senior Counsel Lea Patterson, who represents Crosspoint, denounced the decision and expressed plans to appeal the ruling.
“Government punishing religious schools for living out their religious beliefs is not only unconstitutional, it is wrong,” said Patterson, as quoted by Bangor Daily News.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Carson v. Makin that Maine cannot lawfully stop parents from using a state tuition program to send their children to Christian private schools.
The lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ruling was driven by parents from Bangor Christian School who sued Maine over the ban on state tuition assistance for families sending their children to a private school that includes sectarian aspects in its curriculum.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter has been reviewing the religious schools that now receive public funding and frequently posts his findings on Twitter (X is banned here).
Taxpayers in North Carolina should be outraged to learn where their dollars are going.
He writes:
A Union County pastor is under fire for saying from the pulpit that he would not convict a rapist if his victim were wearing shorts. And if you’re a taxpayer in North Carolina, you are funding his organization….
Tabernacle Christian School has received voucher dollars every school year since 2014-15 for a grand total of $3,649,766 in public taxpayer funds (that data available here).
In the past two years alone, Bobby Leonard’s organization has received nearly $2,000,000 ($902,315 in 2023-24 and $923,328 in 2022-23).
I would venture to say that the vast majority of North Carolinians would prefer NOT to have their hard-earned tax dollars subsidizing institutions that espouse hateful and violent philosophies like Bobby Leonard’s.
Unfortunately, private schools are legally permitted to discriminate against students based on factors like religious beliefs and sexual orientation, even when they’re receiving public funding.
And discriminate they do.
This voucher-receiving school in Fayetteville, NC specifically bans “Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, non Messianic Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists” and refers to homosexuality as “deviate [sic] and perverted.”
Please open the link and see how well compensated these religious schools are by North Carolina’s taxpayers.
A homeschooling mother with extremist views upset the establishment incumbent for the position of state superintendent of public schools. The incumbent had a 10-1 financial advantage but still lost.
Ultra-conservative challenger Michele Morrow defeated incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary for state superintendent of public instruction.
With 99% of precincts reporting, Morrow has 52% of the vote to 48% for Truitt, who is the only incumbent Council of State member who lost to a primary challenger. Truitt had entered the Republican primary with a major fundraising lead and the endorsement of many prominent GOP elected officials.
Morrow will face off against former Guilford County Superintendent Mo Green, who has nearly two-thirds of the vote in the Democratic primary…
Truitt, 53, was elected superintendent in 2020. The former classroom teacher has political credentials such as having been senior education adviser to then GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.
Truitt’s endorsements included U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx; state Sens. Phil Berger and Ralph Hise; and state Reps. John Bell, Destin Hall and Jason Saine. Truitt had raised $327,003 compared to $37,764 for Morrow.
But Morrow and her supporters portrayed Truitt has being a liberal, pointing to how she had been supported by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is unpopular with many conservative Republicans.
Morrow, 52, is a home-school parent and former missionary who is an activist working with groups such as Liberty First Grassroots and the Pavement Education Project.
Morrow was among the supporters of then President Donald Trump who protested in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but says she did not storm the Capitol Building.
She says her plan is to “Make Academics Great Again” in North Carolina by prioritizing scholastics and safety over Critical Race Theory and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). Morrow has accused public schools of indoctrinating students, “teaching children to hate our country” and training students in “transgender theory.”
If elected, Morrow says she will “make sound basic moral instruction priority number one.” Morrow also promises that “you better believe that our teachers will be well versed in the true history of our great nation.”
The lobbyist, an official with Betsy DeVos’s Tennessee Federation for Children, made clear that Republican legislators who opposed vouchers would face harsh retribution. He pledged that anti-voucher Republican legislators would be challenged in a primary by well-funded opponents committed to pass vouchers. Money would come in from out-of-state billionaires and millionaires to knock off Republicans who voted against vouchers.
The story came from NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A secret recording reveals how ultra-wealthy forces have laid the groundwork for the current debate in the Tennessee legislature over school vouchers by using their money to intimidate, even eliminate, those who dared to disagree.
In the recording obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates from a 2016 strategy session, Nashville investment banker Mark Gill discusses targeting certain anti-voucher lawmakers for defeat as a form of “public hangings.” At the time, Gill was a member of the board of directors for the pro-voucher group Tennessee Federation for Children.
Using their vast resources to defeat key incumbents, Gill argues, would send a signal to other lawmakers in the next legislative session…
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has teed up the issue this year with a plan for school vouchers that would send hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools.
It follows a years-long effort by school privatization forces to elect lawmakers who would vote their way and to destroy those who would not.
In the 2016 recording, Mark Gill discusses the prospect of turning against Republican Rep. Eddie Smith from Knoxville because Smith had voted against a bill designed to cripple the ability of teacher groups to have dues deducted from teachers’ paychecks.
Gill has served on the Tennessee Board of Regents overseeing the state’s community and technical colleges since 2019.
“Think about it,” Gill says.
“What better way to say to people, OK, you want us to fall on our sword for you, to spend thousands of dollars — which I did personally — to get you elected, and you come up here and do this sh*t. Let me just show you what the consequences of that are,” Gill says…
At the time, Gill was also considering targeting Republican Judd Matheny from Tullahoma because Matheny was viewed as being too close to Tennessee teachers and would be a good “scalp” to hang on the school privatizers’ efforts.
“He also has, I think, put himself in a position where his scalp could be very valuable to all school reformers,” Gill says, noting Matheny’s relationship with the Tennessee Education Association. “He is one of the people who has bought the TEA line that you need to side with the TEA because of the teachers and that’s your safest route.”
The reporter for NewsChannel 5 played the recording for J.C. Bowman, leader of the Professional Educators of Tennessee.
Bowman was stunned.
“Judd Matheny was a conservative — a big Second Amendment guy. Some of the names they mention in there — conservative all the way through. So you are going to eat your own…”
NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted to Bowman that Gill was not talking about convincing lawmakers that the Tennessee Federation for Children was right on the issue of school vouchers.
“No, they are not even making that comparison,” the teacher lobbyist agreed.
“If you put this issue on the ballot — and that’s what I would say, put it on the ballot — vouchers would lose.”
“I don’t think anybody is going to get unseated without some substantial independent expenditures coming in there,” Gill says, acknowledging that wealthy special interests would need to spend a lot of money to knock off lawmakers who did not vote their way.
That strategy was apparent in 2022 when Republicans Bob Ramsey and Terri Lynn Weaver were targeted and defeated.
Weaver was among those Republicans who in 2019 refused to bow to pressure to vote for school vouchers.
And like these ads taken out against Bob Ramsey, Weaver also faced attacks from school privatization forces for supposedly being a corrupt career politician — attacks funded by so-called dark money.
“Tremendous amounts of money, much of which is outside money, [the] money was not from my district,” Weaver said. “They slander you. They want to win — and they’ll do anything to do it.”
Bowman said Gill’s strategy represents “the absolute destruction of people.”
We wanted to know, “Is there anyone on the public education side of the debate playing this sort of hardball politics?”
“None that I know of,” Bowman said. “I know of nobody playing that.”
To read the complete article and to listen to the recording, open the link.
I am a native Texan. I was born and raised in Houston. I attended Houston public schools from kindergarten until my high school graduation. The public schools of Texas gave me a strong foundation, and I will always be grateful to my teachers and my schools.
The public schools in Texas will be harmed by vouchers. Yet Governor Greg Abbott is demanding that the Legislature endorse vouchers, so that the public will subsidize every student who goes to private and religious schools. No wonder he campaigned for vouchers by visiting private and religious schools.
Some Republican legislators know that vouchers will hurt their public schools.
Governor Abbott has spent millions of dollars to defeat those brave Republican legislators who oppose vouchers.
The primary is March 5.
Funded by oil and gas billionaires and by Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire, Abbott has tried and repeatedly failed to pass a voucher bill. He failed because these Republican legislators stood up for their communities and their public schools.
These legislators know their local teachers. They are friends and neighbors. The legislators know they are hard-working dedicated teachers. They teach the children; they don’t “indoctrinate” them, as Governor Abbott falsely claims. Many have taught in the same schools for decades, raising up the children in the way they should go.
The teachers are underpaid, and the school buildings need upgrades. But the Governor won’t put another penny into paying teachers and funding public schools unless he gets his vouchers.
In every state that has vouchers, most of them are used by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are nothing more than a public subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools.
Voucher schools are free to discriminate and are excused from all accountability.
These heroic and principled legislators deserve your thanks and your vote on March 5:
Steve Allison, District 121, San Antonio
Ernest Bailes, District 18, Shepherd
Keith Bell, District 4, Forney;
DeWayne Burns, District 58, Cleburne;
Travis Clardy, District 11, Nacogdoches
Drew Darby, District 72, San Angelo
Jay Dean, District 7, Longview
Charlie Geren, District 99, Fort Worth
Justin Holland, District 33, Rockwall
Ken King, District 88, Canadian
John Kuempel, District 44, Seguin
Stan Lambert, District 71, Abilene
Glenn Rogers, District 60, Mineral Wells
Hugh Shine, District 55, Temple
Reggie Smith, District 62, Sherman
Gary VanDeaver, District 1, New Boston
For their courage in defending their community schools, their teachers, their parents, and their students, I place them on the blog’s Honor Roll.
The leadership of the Ohio legislature decided, without consulting the voters, to shift significant funding from public schools, which the overwhelming majority of students attend, to private schools, which are wholly unaccountable to the state.
It is an enduring puzzle as to why Republican-led legislatures in states like Ohio, Arizona, and Ohio demand strict accountability from public schools but no accountability from private schools that receive public money.
William Phillis, formerly a Deputy Commissioner of the Ohio Department of Education, puts a price tag on state subsidy of private schools: $1 billion.
One billion tax dollars per year will be going to private schools with no public audit.
In addition to non-public administrative cost reimbursement, auxiliary services, and student transportation services, the state will be providing a billion dollars per year for private school vouchers. There is no provision in Ohio law to audit private schools. Is this the way state government should treat taxpayers? Voucher expenditures will escalate year after year and the state is giving private schools an open checkbook without any financial accountability.
It gets worse. Some state officials are planning to authorize the use of tax funds for private school facilities with no public oversight. What are state officials thinking?
Ohio taxpayers need to wake up to chicanery concocted by state officials in Ohio.
Public school parents and concerned citizens in North Carolina have hoped that the General Assembly (legislature) would fully fund the Leandro decision of 2022, which requires full funding of public schools. The original Leandro case was decided thirty years ago!
The GOP majority is committed to charter schools and vouchers, not public schools, even though the vast majority of children in the state are enrolled in public schools.
The North Carolina Supreme Court is weighing whether to reverse a 2022 decision that allows judges to order the transfer of hundreds of millions — and potentially billions — of dollars to fund public schools. In November 2022, the Supreme Court’s former Democratic majority ruled that the courts can order state officials to transfer funds to try to provide students their constitutional right to a sound basic education. During oral arguments Thursday, an attorney for Republican legislative leaders Sen. Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore asked the court’s current 5-2 GOP majority to overturn that 2022 ruling. “The court has recognized time and time again that if a decision is wrongly decided, if it conflicts with the constitution, if it conflicts with prior precedent …. then it should be overturned and corrected at the next possible moment,” said attorney Matthew Tilley. “This is the next possible.” WILL COURT OVERTURN PRECEDENT? But attorneys representing school districts, the State Board of Education and the state urged the justices to stand by the 2022 decision. “It has been the rule of this court for over 100 years that the court will not disturb its prior holding in the same case, even if it would have overturned that holding on a properly presented petition for rehearing,” said attorney Melanie Dubis. “We do not have a properly presented petition for rehearing in this case.
“Nevertheless, that is what the defendant-intervenors are blatantly asking this court to do, to go back and overturn Leandro IV, which is binding precedent cited merely 14 months ago.” That view was echoed Thursday at a rally held across the street from the court hearing and in statements from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the state’s Democratic legislative delegation. “Public school children are at the most important crossroads in our history,” Cooper said in a statement Thursday. “Will our Supreme Court be courageous enough to protect those children, or will it once again protect the power of the politicians who would rather give billions in tax breaks and private school vouchers for the wealthy?” The court is expected to issue a ruling this year.
This week’s court hearing is the latest chapter in the now 30-year-old Leandro school funding lawsuit that was initially filed in 1994 by low-wealth school districts to get more state funding. Over the years, the state Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution guarantees every child “an opportunity to receive a sound basic education” and that the state was failing to meet that obligation. In November 2021, Superior Court Judge David Lee ordered the state treasurer, controller and budget director to transfer $1.75 billion to fund the second and third years of an eight-year plan developed by a consultant. The plan is meant to try to provide every student with high-quality teachers and principals. The eight-year plan is estimated to cost at least $5.6 billion. Just days before the 2022 midterm elections flipped the court from Democratic to Republican control, the Supreme Court upheld Lee’s order. The Democratic justices said that the courts had deferred long enough for the state to implement a plan to provide a sound basic education. Soon after taking control, the court’s GOP majority blocked enforcement of Lee’s order.
The Network for Public Education released a report card today grading the states on their support for democratically-governed public schools. Which states rank highest in supporting their public schools? Open the report to find out.
Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Neighborhood public schools remain the first choice of the overwhelming majority of Ameri- can families. Despite their popularity, schools, which are embedded in communities and gov- erned by elected neighbors, have been the target of an unrelenting attack from the extreme right. This has resulted in some state legislatures and governors defunding and castigating public schools while funding alternative models of K-12 education.
This 2024 report, Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Democratically Governed Schools, examines these trends, reporting on each state’s commit- ment to supporting its public schools and the children who attend them.
What We Measure
We measure the extent of privatization in each state and whether charter and voucher laws promote or discourage equity, responsibility, transparency, and accountability. We also rate them on the strength of the guardrails they place on voucher and charter systems to protect students and taxpayers from discrimination, corruption and fraud.
Recognizing that part of the anti-public school strategy is to defund public schools, we rate states on how responsibly they finance their public schools through adequate and equitable funding and by providing living wage salaries for teachers.
As the homeschool movement grows and becomes commercialized and publicly funded, homeschooling laws deserve public scrutiny. Therefore, we rate states on laws that protect children whose families homeschool.
Finally, we include a new expansive category, freedom to teach and learn, which rewards states that reject book bans, and the use of unqualified teachers, intolerance of LGBTQ stu- dents, corporal punishment, and other factors that impinge on teachers’ and students’ rights.
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