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Arkansas Increases Funding for Vouchers, a Bonanza for Kids in Private Schools

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2026 //
0

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.

The Arkansas Times reports:

Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.

But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.

Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.

The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida. 

Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets. 

These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Education Industry, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

The Very Important Texas Primaries: What’s Next?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
7

As many of you know, I was born and raised in Texas. I grew up in Houston, third of eight children. I went to public schools, then to college in Massachusetts. I have never stopped being a Texan. I live in Brooklyn now but a part of my heart will always be in Texas. So I keep a close watch over developments in my home state.

The victories of James Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for Governor put Texas Democrats in a good position to turn Texas blue.

Gina Hinojosa coasted to victory in the Democratic primary over seven opponents. Soon after the polls closed, she had 61% of the vote. She will face incumbent Greg Abbot in November.

Talarico won the primary by 52.8% to Crockett’s 45.9%.

(Full disclosure: I contributed to all three campaigns.)

Talarico was a member of the state legislature. He has studied theology and is working towards a Master of Divinity at the Austin Presbyterian Seminary. He hopes to win independents and Trump voters with his deep religious faith and his rhetoric of love and reconciliation.

Under Governor Greg Abbot–now seeking his fourth term–Texas became an extreme MAGA state. Abbot echoes whatever Trump says , or says it first. Abbot is mean and has a stone heart.

Gina Hinojosa swept the Democratic primary for Governor. She is smart, articulate, beautiful, and Hispanic. One of the reasons that Democrats have not won a statewide office since 1994 is low turnout and growing Hispanic support for Trump. Gina was a featured speaker at the last conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, and she was wonderful! As she explains in her PBS interview, strengthening neighborhood public schools is her top priority.

The Republicans running for Senate will compete in a May run-off. Jon Cornyn, the incumbent, is a reliable vote for Trump but not really MAGA. He seems like a moderate Republican who votes with Trump to protect his hide. Cornyn is running for his fifth term.

His opponent Ken Paxton is Attorney General of Texas, and it’s fair to say that he’s been scarred by scandals. His wife is a state senator. He cheated on her. Some of his staff blew the whistle on him and said he took payoffs from men he was investigating. The Republican House impeached him; the Republican Senate cleared him, thanks to generous donations by hard-right MAGA billionaires.

Paxton and Cornyn will have a runoff in May.

Talarico will be a strong candidate for the Senate. Hinojosa will be a strong candidate against Abbot, if Texans are sufficiently sick of pay-to-play politics.

The outcome will depend on turnout. Right now, Texas is run by a handful of oil billionaires. They want low taxes and minimal public services. They are Christian nationalists who love money and power.

If Talarico can attract the support of non-MAGA Republicans and if Gina can bring Hispanic voters to the polls, Texas will flip blue.

To learn why Gina Hinojosa ran for governor and what she wants to do, watch this excellent interview.

Watch Gina Hinojosa explain why “we don’t want handouts,” we want the services we paid for.

See Gina Hinojosa speaking at the Network for Public Education conference in April 2025, before the Republican-dominated Texas legislature passed vouchers. The passage of vouchers happened only after Governor Abbot primaried anti-voucher Republicans with the millions given him by billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania.

To see Talarico in action, watch him talk on the power of love.

See Talarico on how the worst people quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day and then violate his teachings every other day of the year.

Talarico on Christian nationalists, who–he says–are “more committed to the love of power than to the power of love.”

I love these two and will support them both. There will be a tidal wave of money pouring into Texas Republican coffers from other states to try to stop these two exciting Democrats!

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Love, Politics, Religion, Republicans, Texas, Vouchers

Fifth Circuit Court Upholds Ten Commandments in Louisiana Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2026 //
5

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state of Louisiana can require every public school to post the Ten Commandments. This issue has been controversial in many states. The Ten Commandments is a specifically religious statement, and there are multiple versions of it among Christians and Jews. Some religions do not recognize the Ten Commandments.

Whenever religion is introduced into schools and other public places, the same problems arise. Whose religion will be taught? What about the rights of atheist families? it’s easy to forget that there are scores of different religions in the U.S., and each complains if the government honors one religion but not another.

The Louisiana Illuminator reported:

NEW ORLEANS — A federal appellate court has cleared the way for displays of the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana public school classroom, removing an order that stopped state officials from enforcing a law that requires them. 

In a decision issued Friday from its full roster of 18 judges, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a June decision from a three-judge panel that determined the 2024 state law was “plainly unconstitutional” and upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law. Friday’s ruling lifts that injunction and allows the state to mandate all schools display the 10 Commandments in every classroom.” 

Five judges on the 5th Circuit dissented with the unsigned majority opinion that placed emphasis on not knowing exact details of what the displays would look like once placed in classrooms. Attorney General Liz Murrill has provided examples and guidance for displays to follow the law, but local school districts have authority to determine what they look like.

Without any context, appellate judges said in the opinion they were unwilling to rule based on conjecture. 

“It would oblige us to hypothesize an open-ended range of possible classroom displays and then assess each under a context-sensitive standard that depends on facts not yet developed and, indeed, not yet knowable,” the opinion reads. “That exercise exceeds the judicial function. guessing.”

The ruling stops short of declaring Louisiana’s law constitutional or saying it doesn’t violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that prohibits a state-sanctioned religion.

However, in a concurring opinion, Judge James Ho, a federal court appointee of President Donald Trump in 2018, went further than the other judges in the majority. 

“In sum, the Louisiana Ten Commandments law is not just constitutional — it affirms our Nation’s highest and most noble traditions,” Ho wrote.

“Don’t kill or steal shouldn’t be controversial,” she said. “My office has issued clear guidance to our public schools on how to comply with the law, and we have created multiple examples of posters demonstrating how it can be applied constitutionally. Louisiana public schools should follow the law,” said Attorney General Liz Murrill.

Murrill issued a statement in response to the 5th Circuit ruling. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the state’s solicitor general, has argued the case before the 5th Circuit.  

The ACLU of Louisiana, which was among the groups representing plaintiffs in the case, is “exploring all legal pathways forward to continue the fight against this unconstitutional law,” executive director Alanah Odoms said in a statement through a spokesman.

The plaintiffs in the case, Roarke v. Brumley, are nine families who have children in public schools in five parishes — East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon. Their views range from secular to religious, including Catholic, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Jewish and other faiths. They have argued the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments the legislature adopted for the classroom displays differs from the versions they follow.

Along with the ACLU, Americans United and the Freedom from Religion Foundation represented the plaintiffs and issued a joint statement in response to the 5th Circuit decision.

“Today’s ruling is extremely disappointing and would unnecessarily force Louisiana’s public school families into a game of constitutional whack-a-mole in every school district,” the statement reads. “Longstanding judicial precedent makes clear that our clients need not submit to the very harms they are seeking to prevent before taking legal action to protect their rights. But this fight isn’t over. We will continue fighting for the religious freedom of Louisiana’s families.”

Categories Louisiana, Religion, Separation of church and state

Josh Cowen: Why Should the Public Pay Tuition at Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2026 //
4

Over the past few years, vouchers have been endorsed by state legislatures even though the public overwhelmingly opposes them. Nearly a score of state referenda have been held, and in every single state, voters rejected vouchers. Even voters in red states said NO to vouchers.

Voters don’t want to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. But legislators ignore their votes. In Arizona, voters rejected vouchers by 65-35%. But the legislature passed a voucher bill anyway, and the cost to subsidize these nonpublic schools is $1 billion a year.

Today’s evangelists for subsidizing religious schools have chosen to ignore the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, who made clear their opposition to state-funded religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about “separation of church and state,” he was referencing a widely held principle.

Josh Cowen recently wrote about this issue on his Substack blog:

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back fifty years of national reproductive freedom in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the Christian Right has turned to another long-held priority: an eventual Court ruling that states must fund religious education.

Over the past few weeks, efforts to create religious charter schools have seen new life. Charter schools are public schools operated outside of the traditional district framework. They can be independently managed by a non-profit or, in some states, for-profit management group, or they can be part of larger networks of charter providers. There are roughy 8,000 charter schools across the country, serving nearly 4 million students.

Blurring Public and Private

In mid-2025, a case called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond deadlocked at the Supreme Court, 4-4. It returned back to Oklahoma, where that state’s highest court had invalidated efforts by a Catholic-run provider to operate a virtual charter school. Had the Court ruled in St. Isidore’s favor, it would have effectively created the nation’s first church-run public school.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, reportedly because her best friend, a law professor named Nicole Garnett, had worked extensively on the legal defense for the Catholic charter school (Side note: while I’m glad Barrett recused herself, notice that the one conservative woman on the Court has held herself to a higher ethical standard than right-wing guys like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).

The Court’s 4-4 ruling was less a definitive position and more an artifact of the small, insular nature of conservative—and especially Catholic conservative—American legal networks.
Now, efforts to create a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, and Christian public schools in Colorado and Tennessee are taking new shape.

Technically, these cases operate in a separate stream of legal theory from school voucher jurisprudence. Vouchers are simply taxpayer subsidies for private schools—either through the tax code or directly through state funds. And since 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, their application to religious schools has been constitutional. Three voucher-related cases since 2017—Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022, 3 days before Dobbs)—have extended protections to religious schools in state voucher systems.

Basically, once states use public dollars to subsidize private providers of a certain social service (such as education), they can’t limit those providers to non-religious organizations.

But for now, state’s don’t have to provide voucher funding to parents. It’s just that if they do fund vouchers, they must allow vouchers to be spent at religious schools too.

This connects to the question of religious charter schools because although charter schools are legally public entities, the organizations operating them in most cases are private. In theory, the arrangements governing these groups are similar to situations where a school district contracts with a private transportation company for their buses, or a cleaning company for their buildings. Except that with charter schools, the contracted party typically provides instructional materials and even often supplies the teachers.

What right-wing activists want is for the Supreme Court to say that states can’t prevent religious organizations from running public schools as part of a charter agreement
And in that, they are taking one tactical approach in a broader legal and political strategy to simply require states to fund religious instruction.

Establishment and Free Exercise

Spurred partly by new “education savings accounts” spreading in red states (aka vouchers, with additional allowable expenses beyond tuition), a vast network of conservative Christian homeschoolers is pushing for new legal rights. Including mandatory subsidies for their homeschools.

And Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former U.S. Education Secretary, has made no secret of her desire to see the Supreme Court overturn more than a century of state “Blaine Amendments” prohibiting public dollars spent on religious schools. That would basically force all states to pay for some form of religious instruction.

All of this is possible in large part due to the efforts of Leonard Leo, the Catholic super-fixer of right-wing judicial politics all-but-responsible for the Court’s current conservative majority. Leo has made clear that following Dobbs, state-funded religious education is his next major project in the federal judiciary. And he’s enlisting the Alliance Defending Freedom (the main litigation group in Dobbs) to help lead the way. Beyond garden-variety culture warring, this is partly what the sustained effort to holler about LGBTQ and especially trans-students in public schools is about.

Meanwhile, brand new guidance from what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education is informing public schools across the country that federal dollars will now be tied to expansive interpretations of the right for school personnel to pray during the day in schools. So long as they do not technically compel students to pray at lunch or at the start of the school day, teachers and school leaders may choose to lead their students in prayer.

The end-game here is to de-emphasize the first part of the First Amendment—the Establishment Clause prohibiting government from establishing a single religion—and to emphasize the second part, the Free Exercise Clause.

The argument pushed by DeVos, Leo, ADF and their allies is that by providing taxpayer support only for secular public schools, states are putting undue hardship on families who see religious education as a fundamental part of their free exercise of faith but must pay out-of-pocket for it.

What’s at Stake

It’s possible—even necessary—to object to all this without attacking faith. I’m a Christian man myself, looking forward to the season of reflection of Lent that begins next week.

But church-based public schools are the plan on the Right. And although it’s mostly a battle that will take place in the courts, it’s also a battle that’ll take place in legislatures and in the court of public opinion. And those venues are determined by elections and by political organizing.

When I argue that Democrats have to get serious about improving public schools as part of defending public schools, I’m not just making an argument about campaign strategy (though I’m making that argument too).

What’s at stake here is that the American Right is obsessed with schools, and with carving more and more dollars out to subsidize religious education. And that’s going to be what happens without countering that objective with a bold, sustained vision for educational opportunity for every child.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Bernie Sanders Speaks Out Against Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
4

Blogger Meg White posted on her WordPress blog (@reflectionsined) about Senator Bernie Sanders’ opposition to vouchers, which are overwhelmingly used by students who are already enrolled in private schools and are free to discriminate. The Trump administration has passed voucher legislation and is encouraging the spread of vouchers. In theory, vouchers enable poor students to transfer to better schools. In practice and in reality, vouchers are a subsidy for the rich.

Meg is an advocate for public schools and co-author of a valuable book about desegregation in New Orleans and how it affected one school: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans.

White writes:

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) released a report that addresses the federal school voucher program. In the report, Sanders charges that “The Trump administration’s school privatization agenda threatens our nation’s public schools and harms working-class students, students with disabilities, and students from diverse religious backgrounds” (forbes.com). Sanders is a ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP).

Sanders said, “President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America: private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely under-funded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable. This report makes clear that vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion, and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America. Trump’s voucher program will only make a bad situation even worse (sanders.senate.gov).

The report analyzed state-level school voucher programs, including 111 SGOs and 1,600 voucher-accepting private schools across eleven states. 

The report finds that school voucher programs:

  • Subsidize private education for the rich. School vouchers, on average, cover just 39% of middle school private school tuition across the sampled states. Even with a private school voucher, tuition prices are often out of reach for working-class families, meaning that the vouchers function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education.
  • Allow private schools to systematically deny admission to students with disabilities, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities or charge extra tuition. While public schools must provide all students with the same opportunities to learn and excel, 48% of private schools analyzed in this report choose not to provide all students with disabilities with the services, protections and rights provided to those students in public schools under the IDEA.
  • Enable private schools to discriminate against students based on their religion. This report finds that despite the fundamental right of freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution, voucher programs benefit private schools that discriminate against students based on their religious beliefs. Specifically, 17% of private schools reviewed in this report charge different tuition rates based on the family’s religious beliefs.
  • Benefit private schools that lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements. Fewer than half of states reviewed require private schools to be accredited, while even fewer require student learning assessments. Unacceptably, only two states require teacher credentials in private schools receiving vouchers (sanders.senate.gov).

“Bottom line, in my view, we should be strengthening and expanding public education, the foundation of American democracy, where Black and White and Latino, rich and poor kids come together in one room” rather than privatizing public education, Sanders said (k-12.com).

The report comes ahead of a HELP Committee hearing where Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia will testify about the harms of private school vouchers in her state, which has the nation’s largest universal school voucher program and is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation. The state is now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers, while public schools are being forced to shut down (sanders.senate.gov).Researchers found that the use of vouchers in Arizona is highest in affluent school districts, and lowest in poorer school districts. More than half of voucher students came from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Most of those students have never attended public schools (azmirror.com).

After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children. But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected. When students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised. “On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education” (msn.com). in 2023, of the 122,895 new students who signed up for vouchers, 69% (84,505) were already in private school, 13% (16,096) came from public schools, and the remainder were new kindergarteners (ncpecoalition.org).

According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in the state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher  (ncpecoalition.org).

Most students in Indiana’s voucher program come from well-off families. During the 2022-2023 school year, voucher recipients were more likely to come from families that made more than $100,000 per year than families that made less than $50,000 per year (the74million.org).

Since Ohio expanded its voucher program to wealthy families, the percentage of low-income students using vouchers in Cleveland fell from 35% to 7%. Now, most Ohio voucher students did not attend public schools before they took a voucher: the percentage of voucher students statewide who had already attended a private school in the year prior jumped from 7% in 2019 to almost 55% in 2023 (ncpecoalition.org).

State-provided data shows that about two-thirds of students receiving vouchers in Iowa’s new statewide program were already attending private schools before getting taxpayer money for tuition. Only about 13% of voucher recipients had ever previously attended a public school (ncpecoalition.org).

Savannah Newhouse, Department of Education Press Secretary commented, “Opponents of President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit are quick to lecture about equity and fairness, but they’re fighting to keep families trapped in failing government-run schools and environments that don’t meet kids’ needs. The reality is this historic tax credit, funded entirely from private philanthropic dollars, puts parents in the driver’s seat—supporting scholarships that can be used for tutoring at public schools, tuition, and essential services for students with disabilities. Expanding school choice levels the playing field so that every family, no matter their income or needs, can better prepare their child for success”. (forbes.com).

Sure, because it’s working so well.

Public Schools in the U.S. educate 90% of the children. Strengthening and supporting public education is essential to maintaining a fair and equitable society. As Sanders’ report illustrates, universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy, leaving working-class families behind. Diverting billions of dollars to unregulated private schools not only creates massive budget shortfalls but also destabilizes neighborhood schools that serve the vast majority of American children.

These are my reflections for today.

If you like what you’re reading, consider sharing and following my blog via email.

@reflectionsined

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

ProPublica: The Zealots Who Hate Public Schools Now Work in the U.S. Department of Education

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2026 //
2

ProPublica published this article by Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards in October, but I somehow missed it. It’s still relevant because it nails the personnel that Trump and wrestling entrepreneur Linda MacMahon installed at the U.S. Department of Education. The common thread among them: they want to privatize public schools, and they want to emphasize the Christian mission of schools.

It starts:

The department is not behaving like an agency that is simply winding down. Even as McMahon has shrunk the Department of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how children will learn for years to come. The department’s actions and policies reflect a disdain for public schools and a desire to dismantle that system in favor of a range of other options — private, Christian and virtual schools or homeschooling.

Over just eight months, department officials have opened a $500 million tap for charter schools, a huge outlay for an option that often draws children from traditional public schools. They have repeatedly urged states to spend federal money for poor and at-risk students at private schools and businesses. And they have threatened penalties for public schools that offer programs to address historic inequities for Black or Hispanic students….

To carry out her vision, McMahon has brought on at least 20 political appointees from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools, which have educated students for roughly 200 years.

Among them is top adviser Lindsey Burke, a longtime policy director at The Heritage Foundation and the lead author of the education section in Project 2025’s controversial agenda for the Trump administration.

In analyzing dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events for McMahon’s appointees, as well as their writings, ProPublica found that a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools. This includes expanding programs that provide payment — in the form of debit cards, which Burke has likened to an “Amazon gift card” — to parents to cobble together customized educational plans for their children. Instead of relying on public schools, parents would use their allotted tax dollars on a range of costs: private school tuition, online learning, tutors, transportation and music lessons.

Although more than 80% of American students attend public schools, Burke predicted that within five years, a majority would be enrolled in private choice options. The impact of their policies, she believes, will lead to the closure of many public schools.

Accountability, once a watchword for conservatives, won’t be needed in the future that McMahon and Burke are building.

As tax dollars are reallocated from public school districts and families abandon those schools to learn at home or in private settings, the new department officials see little need for oversight. Instead, they would let the marketplace determine what’s working using tools such as Yelp-like reviews from parents. Burke has said she is against “any sort of regulation….

Advocates for public schools consider them fundamental to American democracy. Providing public schools is a requirement in every state constitution.

Families in small and rural communities tend to rely more heavily on public education. They are less likely than families in cities to have private and charter schools nearby. And unlike private schools, public school districts don’t charge tuition. Public schools enroll local students regardless of academic or physical ability, race, gender or family income; private schools can selectively admit students.

Karma Quick-Panwala, a leader at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, which advocates for disabled students, said she wants to be optimistic. “But,” she added, “I’m very fearful that we are headed towards a less inclusive, less diverse and more segregated public school setting.”

McMahon has welcomedeaders of extremist rightwing groups into the Department, like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education.

Little attention was paid to the conservative education activists in the front row [at McMahon’s confirmation hearings] from Moms for Liberty, which has protested school curricula and orchestrated book bans nationwide; Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education), which has sued districts to fight what it calls liberal indoctrination; and the America First Policy Institute, co-founded by McMahon after the first Trump administration.

Now two people who once served at Defending Education have been named to posts in the Education Department, and leaders from Moms for Liberty have joined McMahon for roundtables and other official events. In addition, at least nine people from the America First Policy Institute have been hired in the department.

AFPI’s sweeping education priorities include advocating for school vouchers and embedding biblical principles in schools. It released a policy paper in 2023, titled “Biblical Foundations,” that sets out the organization’s objective to end the separation of church and state and “plant Jesus in every space.”

The paper rejects the idea that society has a collective responsibility to educate all children equally and argues that “the Bible makes it clear that it is parents alone who shoulder the responsibility for their children.” It frames public schooling as failing, with low test scores and “far-left social experiments, such as gender fluidity…”

AFPI and the other two nonprofit groups sprang up only after the 2020 election. Together they drew in tens of millions of dollars through a well-coordinated right-wing network that had spent decades advocating for school choice and injecting Christianity into schools.

Ultrawealthy supporters include right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, who, through a super PAC, gave $336,000 to Moms for Liberty’s super PAC from October 2023 through July 2024.

Defending Education and AFPI received backing from some of the same prominent conservative foundations and trusts, including ones linked to libertarian-minded billionaire Charles Koch and to conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, an architect of the effort to strip liberal influence from the courts, politics and schools.

Maurice T. Cunningham, a now-retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, studied the origins and connections of parents’ rights groups, finding in 2023 that the funders — a small set of billionaires and Christian nationalists — had similar goals.

The groups want “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization,” he concluded. The groups say they are merely trying to advocate for parents and for school choice. They didn’t discuss their relationship with donors when contacted by ProPublica.

These groups and their supporters now have access to the top levers of government, either through official roles in the agency or through the administration’s adoption of their views.

Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, is optimistic about the plans of MacMahon:

Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Justice, who is now with The Heritage Foundation’s political advocacy arm, told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero….”

McMahon’s tenure also has been marked by an embrace of religion in schools. She signaled that priority when she appointed Meg Kilgannon to a top post in her office.

Kilgannon had worked in the department as director of a faith initiative during the first Trump term and once was part of the Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

She has encouraged conservative Christians to become involved in what she’s described as “a spiritual war” over children and what they’re being taught in public schools.

Open the link to read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Religion, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Vouchers Are Robin Hood in Reverse

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
2

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH keeps a close watch over the legislature in New Hampshire. He is particularly interested in the state’s relatively new voucher plan. It was sold, as usual, as a plan to help poor kids “escape failing schools.”

That wasn’t what happened.

Predictably, the legislature removed income limits and the program now subsidizes affluent families whose children never went to public school.

The program this year will cost $51.6 million. Almost $50 million goes to students already enrolled in private or religious schools.

Meanwhile, the funding for vouchers is drawn from the state’s Education Trust Fund, which was intended for public schools. That means the subsidy for nonpublic schools comes right out of the public schools’ budget, with no tax increases to compensate public schools. The vast majority of New Hampshire’s students are now subsidizing the nonpublic schools.

There is a new regime at the Department of Education that has released more than the most basic information about the Education Freedom Account program.

For the program’s first four years, the department released spreadsheets detailing the numbers of students, where they live and how much each student received in grants with a total cost of the program and the quarterly state distributions to cover those grants.

The money does not really go to the parents, its goes to the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which takes its cut and sends the rest in the child’s name to ClassWallet, a company that received early stage investments twice from the Chinese-based venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.

A 2018 Defense Department report flagged the company as participating in China’s “technology transfer strategy,” a state initiative to acquire foreign innovation.

Several states that also use ClassWallet for voucher money distribution have raised concerns about data security and foreign influence like Arizona and Missouri, but not New Hampshire, although Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued Executive Order 2025-04 which would appear to prohibit doing  business with a company with investors like ClassWallet.

ClassWallet does not technically work for the state, but it was hired by a state contractor, Children’s Scholarship Fund of NH, which administers the EFA program.

How many parents of EFA students would want their education spending data potentially accessed by a foreign country like China?

That information is not what was released late last month by the Department of Education, but is easily found with a Google Search, which ironically also brings up that Sinovation Ventures was co-founded by former China Google President Kai-Fu Lee.

The information released last month provides far greater detail than released under former DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who kept the program’s details out of the public’s eye, such as where the money went and if the children’s foundation was carefully vetting income levels and other requirements to access additional grant money.

A small sample compliance report by the now long gone DOE overseer of the EFA program, indicated it was not following guidelines.

The 100 applications sampled for the report over the first two years of the program had a 25 percent error rate that resulted in a rebate to the state for only those applications improperly approved not for 25 percent of the program’s costs.

One of the biggest criticisms of the program is that very few of the students using the state’s money are actually leaving public schools to join the program. Instead the vast majority of the students using EFAs were already in religious or private schools or homeschooled when their parents applied to participate in the state-funded program that draws its funding from the Education Trust Fund, which also pays for the bulk of state aid to public schools, no matter how meager compared to every other state in the country.

This year the program is projected to cost $51.6 million and will cost an additional $61.9 million next year, totaling $113.5 million for biennium, which makes it $26.7 million over budget.

And if you read the fine print of the data released last month, only $1.68 million on the low end, to $4.42 million on the high end for this school year, and $2.52 million if you use the four-year average is going to kids who were not in public schools when they joined the program out of the $51.6 million for this school year.

The data from the DOE notes that for the current school year only 343 students left public schools to join the program whose enrollment is now 10,510 students, which is nearly double what it was last year before the Republican-controlled legislature removed any earnings cap for the program.

That 3.26 percent of the students is the low end of the estimate above, and if you use the number of new students this year compared to last school year, which is 4,745, the new students from public schools is 7 percent and the high figure.

If you add the kids leaving public schools for the last four years, the number is 1,162 which compared to enrollment over those four years of 23,937 and the number is the four-year average.

That means state taxpayer money going to support students who were not in public schools when they joined the EFA program for this school year would be between $49.92 million and $47.18 million.

That is money the state was not paying to educate these kids because they were in religious or private schools or homeschooled and not supported by state dollars.

In essence that is a new education cost for the state, but no new taxes, or fees or anything was created to pay for it.

Instead, it is money drawn from the Education Trust Fund which was established after the Claremont education decisions to support public education.

As Rayno writes: For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

So when lawmakers say the state doesn’t have the money to increase its share of public education costs, it really means “we do not want to increase the state’s share, but we are OK subsidizing religious and private schools and homeschooling.”

For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

But the above figures are probably a little generous because they do not account for the kids who joined the EFA program from public schools and then returned to public schools either before or after one year.

Data released by the department indicates that last school year, 101 of the former public school students who switched to the EFA program, re-enrolled in public schools.

For the 2023-2024 school year, 75 EFA students returned to public schools, and for the 2022-2023 school year, 38 re-enrolled in public schools.

But those are not the only ones leaving the EFA program every year.

It also does not include EFA students who either graduated or completed their course of instruction that school year or left for unexplained reasons.

For the 2024-2025 school year, 151 EFA students left the EFA program because they graduated or completed their course of study along with the 101 who returned to public schools, and the 887 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program that school year was 1,139 or 21 percent of the total EFA enrollment for the year. 

For the 2023-2024 school year, 108 students either graduated or completed their course of study, with the 75 who returned to public schools, and 525 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the EFA program that school year were 708, or 19 percent of the total EFA enrollment.

For the 2022-2023 school year, 76 students graduated or completed their course of studies, along with the 38 who re-enrolled in public schools and the 344 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program was 458 students or 15 percent of the enrollment that year.

Total students leaving over the three-year period was 2,305 from a total three-year enrollment of 12,557 or 18.4 percent.

What would we say about a dropout rate of nearly 20 percent if it were a public school? 

This is not the widely successful program its advocates tout on the floor of the House and Senate and does not save school districts the amount of money Edelblut used to claim because more than 90 percent of the students in the program were not in public schools, but he counted them as savings to school districts.

This program is not serving the children of low-income parents who want an alternative to public schools, but those parents who can already afford to pay for their children to attend those alternatives without the state’s taxpayers’ help.

That is not government helping the most vulnerable, it is Robin Hood in reverse, a system New Hampshire knows very well.

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

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Hoax, New Hampshire, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

The 74: More Religious Charter Schools Apply for Public $$

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
4

You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.

Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.

Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.

The 74 reported the latest proposal:

When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands. 

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation runs a network of Hebrew language charter schools in Florida. Now it wants to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma. (Ben Gamla)

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Charter Schools, Ethics, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Virtual Charter Schools

Carol Burris: Another Religious Charter School Applies for Public Funding in Oklahoma, Backed by For-Profit Corporation

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2025 //
13

In this post, Carol Burris reviews the latest challenge to separation of church and state. A religious school has applied for public funding as an online charter school. But that’s not all: the religious school is a tentacle in the vast for-profit empire of the Florida-based Academia charter chain.

Carol Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education (NPE). She was a teacher and principal in New York State and was designated as Principal of the Year. She is an expert on the charter school sector. She follows the money, studying federal records, state records, and financial reports. She has posted numerous reports, which can be found on the website of NPE.

Burris writes:

After the first bid for an online religious charter failed in Oklahoma, we were told it would not be the last. True to that promise, the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation has informed Oklahoma’s statewide charter board that it plans to seek public funding for an online high school serving roughly 40 students to start. According to Peter Deutch, who filed the letter of intent, a complete application is expected to be submitted before the end of the year. While owning a residence in Florida, Deutsch has lived in Israel for more than a decade.  

Ben Gamla Charter Schools were founded in 2007 by Deutsch under the nonprofit umbrella of the National Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation Inc. Students receive instruction in Hebrew language and learn about Israeli culture and Jewish history during school hours. Religious teachings (such as prayers or Torah study) are offered as optional programs after school hours. According to this 2013 article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA),

About 150 students mill around for a few minutes before heading back to the classrooms. They are followed by Orthodox rabbis with dangling tzitzit fringes and black-velvet yarmulkes pushing carts laden with prayer books and snacks.

Within a few minutes, the kids are chanting morning prayers — even though it’s afternoon and until a few minutes earlier, the classrooms had belonged to a taxpayer-funded public school.

That’s because Ben Gamla’s lease on the building lapses at about 2:15 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. For the next two hours, the classrooms are taken over by a religious Jewish after-school program.

From the beginning, it was widely understood that Peter Deutsch’s goal in launching Ben Gamla was to create a publicly funded alternative to Jewish day schools, which charge tuition and are often financially out of reach for many families. Deutch is not shy about using his charters to promote Jewish communal purposes. He made it clear to the Times of Israel that, “He wants to give Jewish kids who otherwise would attend public school an opportunity to be in a Jewish environment and develop a Jewish identity — at taxpayer expense. The Hebrew curriculum includes Israel education and Jewish history, and most of the schools are located on Jewish community campuses. Some 85 percent of the students are Jewish. Supplementary after-school religious programs take place onsite or nearby.”

Now, Deutsch appears to be abandoning even the pretense of maintaining a secular framework, creating a new nonprofit that includes “Jewish” in the foundation name. His new vision would effectively erase the boundary between public education and religious instruction, pushing the model well beyond the constitutional line that Ben Gamla once claimed to walk carefully around.

But Ben Gamla’s story is even more complicated than above. Since its beginning, Ben Gamla charter schools have been run by a for-profit corporation—the largest for-profit charter management corporation in the United States—Academica.

Ben Gamla and the For-Profit Academica

To understand how deeply Academica’s involvement with Ben Gamla reaches, one need only examine the network’s earliest tax filings. The first available IRS Form 990—filed in 2009 for the 2008 school year, when the original Hollywood, Florida campus was the only Ben Gamla school open—lists the organization’s address as 6361 Sunset Drive in Miami, the location of Academica’s offices at the time. By the 2011 submission, Academica had moved to 6340 Sunset Drive, Miami. That address then appears as the Ben Gamla address on the Foundation’s subsequent 990s.

The overlap goes beyond shared office space. Those early tax forms were signed and submitted by Academica’s longtime Chief Financial Officer, underscoring that from the very beginning, Academica was not merely a vendor or service provider—it functioned as the operational and administrative engine behind the Ben Gamla charter school network.

The Ben Gamla Foundation’s address at 6340 Sunset Drive is still listed on the latest public 990.According to the latest Foundation audit, Academica provides both “academic and administrative services, including, but not limited to, facility design, staffing recommendations, human resource coordination, regulatory compliance, legal and corporate upkeep, maintenance of the books and records, bookkeeping, budgeting, financial reporting, and virtual education services.” Personnel in the school work for another for-profit ADP, which appears as the personnel vendor for many Academica-run schools. 

But that is not all. The audit lists the following Academica-related corporations as having received finance lease agreements and lease liability payments for its Hollywood and North campuses in 2023: North Miami Lakes Campus, LLC, Van Buren Facility, LLC, and Hollywood Educational Annex, LLC. These corporations, located at the same address as Ben Gamla and Academica companies and affiliated charter chains, are three of scores of real estate arms of the for-profit. 

During the 2023-24 school year alone, the Ben Gamla Charterschool Foundation, Inc. paid Academica and what the audit terms as “its affiliates” $3,413,317.00.

The relationship between the for-profit Academica and charter schools is repeated across the nation: Academica’s “brands” are nonprofits that hold charters and get taxpayer funds, including federal CSP grants, while Academica, for all intents and purposes, runs the schools. 

Other Academica-affiliated charter brands beyond Ben Gamla include:

• Somerset Academy, Inc. – A large charter school network (founded 1997) that partners with Academica. It encompasses roughly 80 schools across Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona, with a small international presence inSpain.

• Mater Academy, Inc. – A Florida-based chain (founded 1998) supported by Academica, and started by Academica’s owner, Francisco Zulueta. Mater Academy has grown to 44 charter schools in 3 states (primarily Florida and Nevada, with recent expansion to Texas). 

• Doral Academy, Inc. – A charter school network (founded 1999) affiliated with Academica and originating in Doral, FL. It operates 16 schools across six states – Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, North Carolina, and Texas. 

• Pinecrest Academy, Inc. – A charter network under Academica’s umbrella, founded in 2000. Pinecrest Academy operates 26 schools in Florida, Nevada, and Idaho.

• Sports Leadership & Management (SLAM) – A specialized charter school network focusing on sports-themed academics, co-founded by artist Pitbull in partnership with Academica. Since the first SLAM opened in Miami (2013), the network has expanded to multiple campuses. SLAM schools are located in Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Texas. 

• CIVICA – A newer Academica-affiliated charter network focused on career and civic leadership academies. It began with the City of Hialeah Educational Academy (COHEA) in Florida and has grown into the CIVICA Network operating schools in Florida, Nevada, and Colorado.

• International Studies Charter Schools, Inc. – A boutique network of multilingual college-prep charters in South Florida supported by Academica in Florida. 

• Independence Classical Academy: Academica’s latest brand of classical virtuous charter schools, with schools opening in Colorado and Nevada.

Nearly all of these chains have an Academica-supported online school. In addition, Academica provides both national and international for-profit virtual education. And it operates colleges associated with its charter chains in Florida. All of this is tied together neatly by the for-profit here.

Implications for Religious Charter Schools

To believe that Peter Deutsch—who resides in Israel—and the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation, which he created, are seeking approval to open a virtual religious charter school in Oklahoma without the quiet support and coordination of Academica is simply naïve. Fewer than 0.1% of Oklahomans identify as Jewish. No one launches a niche virtual religious charter in that context unless a far more powerful operator is standing behind it. 

And Academica is nothing if not opportunistic. When CTE schools became trendy, Academica created the Civica chain. When “classical education” surged in conservative states, it launched the Independence charter network. Whenever a new market emerges—no matter how small, remote, or ideologically charged—Academica is there to plant a flag.

Academica likely brings in billions each year through its vast ecosystem of charter schools, real-estate deals, management fees, and related-party businesses. But for Academica, enough is never enough. The possibility of religious charter schools—publicly funded, lightly regulated, and ideologically branded—is not just appealing. It’s a gold mine. 

Some will insist this new online religious charter will be “independent.” It will not be. The pattern is already documented. As far back as 2013, the Fordham Institute—itself a charter school authorizer—admitted as much. When a Ben Gamla governing board attempted to fulfill its legal duty to operate independently from the Foundation and Academica, it was swiftly shut down. The Institute’s candor in its commentary confirmed what insiders already knew: independence is tolerated only until it interferes with the chain and its operator’s control. From that report:

“But it seems this local board took its job too seriously. Peter Deutsch, the founder of the Ben Gamla network and a former Congressman from South Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times that the local board ended up making all the decisions about the school. The foundation, he said, wanted more control.”

If the Oklahoma Virtual Charter Board approves this application when filed and the case ultimately reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, the challengers won’t just be arguing before a bench that includes Amy Coney Barrett. They will also confront the power behind an established charter chain whose own governance and for-profit entanglements make the point more clearly than any brief could: charter schools—despite what their advocates claim—are not truly public schools in most states at all.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

Podcaster Debra Shushan Interviews Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum About Her Support for Zohran Mamdani

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2025 //
4

I love and admire Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum. She recently retired as the leader of the nation’s largest LGBT synagogue. She looks 16, but she’s not. She is one of the wisest people I know. She is a fighter for justice and kindness. She is fearless.

You will enjoy this interview. And you will learn by listening.

Categories Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Hope, Love, Religion
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