Texas Governor Greg Abbott waged a multimillion dollar campaign to defeat moderate Republicans in the Hogse of Representatives so he could finally get the legislature to pass his voucher bill. He wanted to subsidize private Christian schools and was shocked when Islamic schools wanted their students to get vouchers.
Abbott falsely claimed that public schools were “indoctrinating” students, and he wanted the state to pay for students to go to religious schools, whose explicit purpose is indoctrination.
As usual, the overwhelming majority of voucher applicants had never attended a public school. Most were already enrolled in a religious or private school or were none-schooled.
What would’ve been school-choice proponents’ triumphant publicity tour after the application period closed on Texas’ shiny new voucher program, in mid-March, was instead consumed by catty finger-pointing between two top state officials over who’s to blame for the state seemingly botching its attempt to religiously discriminate against some program participants.
It’s the sort of comedic tragedy that has become all too common in the red empire of Texas: Pass a harmful new policy while prevaricating as to its actual intent, create a pretext to carry out the policy in a clearly discriminatory fashion, invite a costly lawsuit that will ultimately end with the state being forced to comply, muddy the waters over who’s to blame.
While pushing the private-school voucher bill through the state House and Senate last year, Republican legislative hands repeatedly insisted, when presented with various theoretical scenarios, that this near-universal “Texas Education Freedom Accounts” program would be open to any and all types of private schools—of all creeds and persuasions. Religious freedom was to reign supreme. How dare thee even question the universality of this venerable program, Republican legislators inveighed.
In predictable fashion, the Texas GOP—lately in the throes of another virulent anti-Muslim bender—hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. In the lead-up to the official voucher rollout, acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock—who is currently in charge of administering the program and was, at the time, trying to win a primary election to hold onto his appointed post—used the administrative process to effectively block certain Islamic schools from participating by alleging such potential applicants were affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national civil rights group akin to the NAACP or LULAC, and the Egypt-based transnational organization the Muslim Brotherhood, each of which the state has deemed a “foreign terrorist organization.” (The rule also sought to block schools affiliated with the darned Chinese Communist Party.) The conflation of CAIR with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s Hamas is a theory that’s long brewedin the right’s more feverish swamps. (CAIR is suing the State of Texas over this designation.)
In response, a group of Islamic schools and Muslim families went to court over the discriminatory exclusion from the program: “The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit read. A federal judge ordered the state to extend its application deadline to allow for these schools to go through the process.
The comptroller’s office has since said that it has accepted all eligible Islamic schools that applied to participate in the program—including Houston’s Quran Academy—but not before Hancock sent a letter critiquing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s handling of the court case and urging Paxton to strip Quran Academy, which the state unsubstantially claims has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, of its ability to operate in the state. In the letter, Hancock—fresh off being blown out in his primary bid to be the duly elected comptroller by ex-state Senator Don Huffines—effectively accused Paxton of being soft on terrorism. “Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” Hancock wrote.
Paxton, in the midst of a heated runoff battle with John Cornyn after coming in second in his own primary bid to ascend to the U.S. Senate, took exception to being scolded by the likes of a RINO such as Hancock (i.e., one of the two GOP senators who voted to convict Paxton in his impeachment proceedings in 2023). The still-AG issued a scorched-earth retort, calling the interim comptroller an incompetent never-Trump hack nursing a deep political grudge—and demanding Hancock be fired. (It’s not clear who, if anyone, would have the authority to fire him.)
Paxton then said his office, whose duties include serving as legal counsel for state agencies, would no longer be defending the comptroller in the federal vouchers lawsuit, claiming Hancock’s letter undermined the state’s case and introduced “incendiary” accusations against Quran Academy that had not been entered into evidence in court.
“Never before have I witnessed such a fundamentally unserious person be both an unbelievable embarrassment to the State and put his own interests above Texans,” Paxton wrote. “It would be easy to disregard Kelly Hancock’s letter as nothing more than hotheaded, politically-motivated behavior from someone desperately clinging to relevancy, but it’s far worse than that: His actions hurt my office’s ability to defend the Comptroller’s office in these critical cases.”
For vouchers, there have been some other PR snags as well. For instance, one religious school—Cypress Christian in the Houston area—that hosted a pro-voucher event during Governor Greg Abbott’s promotional tour last year, has itself opted not to participate in the program.
Per the Houston Chronicle, the school’s leader told parents that the institution is “governed exclusively by biblical doctrine and scripture” and that enrolling in the voucher program would inherently result in “ongoing government entanglement.” Many other high-end private schools—where the annual tuition typically far exceeds the standard $10,000 voucher allotment—in the Houston area have also optedagainst participation.
All the while, Abbott—who claims political ownership of both the school voucher program, having succeeded in ramming it through a humbled Texas House, and Kelly Hancock’s comptrollership, an ally whom he plucked from the state Senate to take over the statewide office and launch of the program—was radio silent. The governor, in late March, spent his allotted time at CPAC in Dallas, while Paxton and Hancock traded potshots, droning on about the urgent need to stop the “Talarico takeover of Texas,” referencing the Democrats’ Senate candidate.
Meanwhile, how does the voucher program—which was sold as a tool to allow low-income families to get their kids out of the state’s failing woke indoctrination facilities, known as public schools, and into predominantly Christian private schools—appear to be sizing up with its mission?
It’s certainly succeeded in getting more applications than the $1 billion that the state has initially appropriated can cover, which is about 90,000 spots. Applications had been submitted for about 275,000 students as of late March. But just 25 percent of those—about 60,000—were for students currently enrolled in public schools, according to state comptroller data. (That, per the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, amounts to about 1 percent of the state’s 5.5 million public school students.)
To be clear, that means the vast majority of the students who are applying for vouchers are already enrolled in private schools, being homeschooled, or entering school for the first time. There were roughly 2,300 schools enrolled in the program so far—though those schools have full discretion in whether or not to accept a voucher recipient. Many of the enrolled schools are parochial Catholic schools or Christian academies. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, dozens of these enrolled schools have policies that restrict admission based on religion and even sexual identity.
The application period closed on March 31, then the process moved on to the next phase in which the state—through its privately contracted voucher vendor—will determine who receives the limited number of vouchers, based on a convoluted, multistep process accounting for family income and other variables.
By that point, it seems assured, some new brouhaha will be consuming the program.
An organization called the Ben Gamla Charter School Foundation wants to open a virtual Jewish religious charter school in Oklahoma.
The story is not as straightforward as it appears.
Behind the Florida-based Ben Gamla charter chain is a for-profit management company called Academica, which derives huge annual profits from its connection to more than 200 charter schools across the nation.
There are fewer than 9,000 Jews in the state of Oklahoma, and they are not clamoring for a Jewish charter school.
The state charter board twice rejected the Ben Gamla application, because a previous appeal for a Catholic online charter school was turned down by Oklahoma state courts, then by a 4-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court because Justice Amy Coney Barret recused herself due to her friendship with a lawyer for the religious school.
The Ben Gamla Foundation filed a lawsuit on March 24, claiming that the state law banning public funding for religious schools is unconstitutional religious discrimination.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to strike down Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools, and to order the state to stop denying applicants on the basis of their religious character.
“We’re asking the court to end that blatant religious targeting and allow families to choose schools that are best for them,” Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman in Florida and founder of the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges that Oklahoma’s requirement that charter schools be “nonsectarian” is unconstitutional, citing the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
But Jewish organizations in Oklahoma are wary of the Ben Gamla application. A small group of Jews and a rabbi in Tulsa recently asked to join a lawsuit to block the Ben Gamla charter school.
Rabbi Daniel Kaiman, the principal rabbi of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa, says he opposes the mixing of religion and government because of the potential for abuse. His own children attend a public elementary school in Tulsa.
“I am passionate about Jewish education—indeed, I have dedicated my life to it. Kaiman wrote in a declaration filed with the court. “Children in my congregation, including my own children, receive excellent, privately funded Jewish education through our synagogue and at home in accordance with our community values. But the mixing of religion and government creates opportunities for religious coercion…”
The motion was filed on behalf of the seven by the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Oklahoma Appleseed.
The Ben Gamla school would under insert religious teaching into all subjects and require all employees to uphold Jewish values in their lives. What any of that means is unclear. How would math, reading, science, and other subjects be taught from a Jewish perspective. What sort of “values” would employees uphold and who would determine whether they did?
The Ben Gamla application is opposed by state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is against religious charter schools. But Drummond leaves office in January and might be replaced by a supporter of religious charter schools.
The state charter school board is pro-charter and is not vigorously opposing the Ben Gamla application. In fact, the state charter board retained First Liberty Institute to represent it. It is a conservative Christian legal group that believes that religious charter schools should be legal.
Oklahoma Jews are opposed to Ben Gamla. The Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City sent a statement to the state Attorney General saying that religious charter schools “risk eroding the constitutional safeguards that protect both religious freedom and government neutrality toward religion.”
Ben Gamla’s financial interdependence on the Academica charter chain should alarm Oklahomans as much as the effort to turn public money over to religious schools.
Academica is a very wealthy for-profit charter management organization.
According to Ben Gamla’s strategic plan, Academica will control its budget and finances, facilities and management, human resources, and much more. And, of course, charge a management fee.
Academica manages more than 200 charter schools in at least 22 states. Its biggest chains are Somerset Academy (at least 80 campuses), Mater Academy (40-50 schools), Doral Academy, and Pinecrest Academy.
Academica held more than $115 million in properties in Florida in 2010 and collected $19 million in profit. That’s 16 years ago, the network has vastly expanded, and no one has updated the total value of Academica’s real estate since then or its annual profits.
Academica makes its hefty profits through management fees and “related party transactions.”
This is how a “related party transaction” works:
A real estate LLC controlled by Academica allies buys or builds a school property. The nonprofit charter school, like Ben Gamla or Mater or Somerset, leases the building. The school collects public funds from the state or the city, then pays rent to the LLC. The rent is high, often as much as 20% of all public funding. The management company chooses the services provided, making contracts with its allies.
Academica: The largest EMO is Academica, based in Miami, Florida. Academica’s owner is a real estate developer, Fernando Zulueta, who opened the first charter, Somerset, as part of a housing development he had constructed. He reasoned that his real estate venture would be more attractive to buyers since students would have a school within the development. Using their real estate companies, Fernando and his brother, Ignacio, built what journalist Jessica Bakeman called “an empire of charter schools.”
Over 100 active corporations linked to Fernando Zulueta and his family members are listed as residing at Academica’s Miami headquarters at 6340 Sunset Drive and 6457 Sunset Drive in Miami.39 They include real estate corporations, holding companies, and finance corporations, as well as sub-chains both within and outside of Florida.
Like many other charter schools and chains, Academica cashed in on the COVID Paycheck Protection Program during the pandemic. Individual schools and other nonprofit and for-profit entities related to the chain received in total up to $35.7 million dollars, even though there is no evidence of revenue lost during the pandemic. In fact, during the pandemic, the EMO continued to expand. In total, charter schools cashed in on one billion dollars from the PPP program.
Mater Academy Foundation, Inc., the related non-profit corporation that oversees Academica’s Mater brand of charter schools, acquired a $127.5 million educational facilities lease revenue bond to purchase several facilities from Academica. The South Florida Business Journal detailed the purchase price of several of the facilities and the Academica-affiliated real estate entities that cashed in on the sales, concluding that “the Pandemic Profiteering deal allows Academica to cash out after investing in the development of charter schools, although it will still earn management fees for the schools.”
The connection between Fernando Zuleta’s real estate holdings and his for-profit managed charter schools goes beyond the state of Florida. According to the State Public Charter School Authority, Academica Nevada pays the lease on behalf of the charter school Mater Academy Mountain Vista of Nevada to Stephanie Development LLC. The managingmembers of Stephanie Development are Fernando and Ignacio Zulueta and Robert and Clayton Howell. Robert Howell is the manager of Academica Nevada.
About 18% of all charter students are enrolled in for-profit charter schools, like those of Academica. If Ben Gamla is approved in Oklahoma, that will open new horizons for their expansion.
Be sure to read NPE’s report:
For-Profit Charter Schools Gone Wild—Proof That Greed and Education Don’t Mix
This is bad news indeed. The Trump administration, in its ongoing campaign to harass institutions of higher education in the U.S., demanded a list of Jews from the University of Pennsylvania. The university, as well as Jewish groups, objected.
The Trump regime says it is combatting anti-Semitism on campus and wants to collect evidence. The university believes this is an intrusion into private and personal information.
What reason is there to trust the good faith efforts of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? Under current leadership, it has tossed aside all efforts to defend the rights of historically marginalized groups. It fights DEI and any programs that are intended to help Blacks, Hispanics, women and LGBT individuals. The leader of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, has devoted her career to fighting civil rights law.
Frankly, their sudden obsession with anti-Semitism is likely to cause an explosion of anti-Semitism. Maybe that’s their goal.
As a Jew, I say to the Trump regime, “No, thank you.” I don’t want my grandchildren in your census. It stinks.
The Trump administration was within its rights to demand that the University of Pennsylvania turn over information about Jews on campus as part of a federal investigation into discrimination at the school, a federal judge decided Tuesday.
The government’s investigation had united Penn leaders with Jewish students and faculty members as they opposed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s subpoena. Many on campus drew parallels between the government’s approach and methods deployed in Nazi Germany.
But the Trump administration has said that its request was typical for discrimination investigations to seek potential victims and witnesses, and Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court agreed on Tuesday. He gave Penn until May 1 to comply with the administration’s subpoena, though the ruling appeared unlikely to quell the debates around how the administration has pressured top American universities.
In his ruling, Judge Gerald J. Pappert of Philadelphia’s Federal District Court said Penn “relies on two federal-court opinions which hurt, not help, its position.”
Judge Pappert, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, appeared to hint at the discomfort that the government’s subpoena had prompted and at the accusations that the E.E.O.C. had gone too far with its tactics, especially a demand for information tied to groups “related to the Jewish religion.”
Ken Fredette is a Vermonter who is dedicated to improving the state’s public schools. He is a former President of the Vermont School Boards Association and is currently active in Friends of Vermont Public Education.
A decade ago, when I visited Vermont, I was very impressed by the State Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcomb. She had a vision for public schools that was centered on the well-being of children, not punishments for teachers and schools. She ran for Governor and unfortunately lost. She is currently serving in the Legislature.
The current Governor is Republican Phil Scott. Ken Fredette wrote me that Scott left the Secretary of Education job open for a year (after Holcomb’s replacement Dan French resigned). Then, Ken wrote:
In 2024, following Phil Scott delaying appointing a replacement for SecEd Dan French for a year, he then appointed Zoie Saunders, from Florida, who worked for a for-profit charter school organization, and whose only experience with public schools was closing them. I was in the Vermont Senate chamber when the vote was 19-9 against approving the appointment – that advise and consent thing – and Scott reappointed her to “fill the vacancy” created by that vote before I was out of the building. You can’t make this stuff up.
So, clearly, Vermont has a Governor and Secretary of Education who have no commitment to Vermont’s public schools, attended by 90% of the state’s children.
You can help save Vermont public schools! Log in here. Stay informed.
Ken wrote this article, which was published by Weekender Rutland Herald and also the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
If anyone had any doubts that there is a concerted effort to undermine public education here in Vermont and throughout the country, those doubts should have evaporated on March 20, when an assistant U.S. secretary of education — on a tour to visit a school in all 50 states — opted to visit a small (less than 60 students) parochial school in Newport for a good example of schools in Vermont.
The plan to shift support from our constitutionally-mandated public education system to private schools — sometimes religious, sometimes for-profit charter schools in other states — has been orchestrated somewhat quietly for decades by groups employing tactics from a national playbook.
But the campaign is no longer quiet, bolstered by edicts from the White House, such as the federal voucher program; The Heritage Foundation (which carved out the dark caverns of Project 2025); questionable opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the separation of church and state, enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and articulated by Thomas Jefferson; and countless other conservative groups.
The never-ending attacks have presented in blatant falsehoods: Remember the absurd claim that Critical Race Theory — a college level course — was being taught in our public schools? Lacking even a shred of evidence, it seems the fallback position of those promoting this was the more times the lie was told, and the louder the bombasts got, the more people would buy into it.
At the height of that hoax, a sitting member of the Vermont Legislature came to a local school board meeting with a list of words and phrases I recognized as having been generated by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (one of the above-mentioned conservative groups). I watched with my eyes growing wider as they rattled off the list, ending by demanding the board immediately issue a directive to all teachers that nothing on it would ever be spoken in a classroom.
When the air let out of the CRT balloon, it merely meant it was time to turn to the next page in the national playbook. That presented as empowering parents. Seriously, what possible argument could be given against parents having a say in their children’s education?
Choice has been a highly charged topic around the country for many years. Here in Vermont, this has reached a point where it is pitting the administration against our Legislature. My faith is placed with our representatives and senators to thoughtfully deliberate such important policy matters, and not afford so much decision-making authority to the governor’s office.
Also on March 20, a commentary from the director of policy and communications at the Vermont Agency of Education sang praises of Mississippi raising their fourth-graders’ reading proficiency dramatically, and relatively quickly; our governor had also pointed to this remarkable achievement during his recent State of the State address.
I’m very glad for the kids of Mississippi, but to imply Vermont students are falling off some sort of educational cliff by cherry-picking numbers and using vague phrases like “… trending downward for a decade” (starting about when our current governor took office) is chicanery. So is skipping over a major piece of the story: Mississippi third-graders who weren’t likely to excel in the fourth-grade assessments were forced to repeat third grade.
Vermont is unique in many ways, including — and perhaps especially — our education system. When 30% of school budgets failed at Town Meeting 2024, Vermonters weren’t saying to tear down our school system — they were saying that property taxes were burying them.
There are some pretty basic steps that could be taken to relieve those tax burdens on longtime working Vermonters. Asking those affluent enough to have a second home here to pay a fairer share is an obvious one, and that’s been a very successful program in a couple of other states already. Following that, let’s update the Common Level of Appraisal system such that if I buy a place in Vermont for $475,000 that was listed at $247,000, I just agreed the new value is $475,000, and my new neighbors’ property tax rates won’t float up to subsidize mine.
There are other steps we could take, but going back to a foundation formula is not among them. When you hear talk from the administration about a plan that is “evidenced based,” please bear in mind that the highly paid outside consultants providing the evidence repeatedly conceded that it didn’t really apply to Vermont, because we are different from any of the places they’d studied.
We need to look at data germane to who and where we are in order to make informed decisions on how to best proceed, because we need to get this right.
The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.
The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.
The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.
The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).
The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.
Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:
Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.
A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit
The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.
SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.
[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]
Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers.
The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.
[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]
Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit
Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.
At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1
What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control
FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.
Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.
Why Oversight and Accountability Matters
Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.
Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.
Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.
Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools.
The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.
Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?
Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs.
This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.
A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education
Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.
This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.
By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.
Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded
Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections.
These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.
By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.
Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.
The Cost to Public Schools and Communities
Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.
[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]
This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.
Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more.
IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap.
We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.
The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.
When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.
Notes
The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
A federal judge in Arkansas blocked a state law requiring the display of the 10 Commandments in public school classrooms.
The Hill reported:
A judge ruled Monday to permanently bar several school districts from following Arkansas’s law to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks ruled the law violates the Establishment Clause and the free exercise rights of the plaintiffs.
“Act 573’s purpose is only to display a sacred, religious text in a prominent place in every public-school classroom. And the only reason to display a sacred, religious text in every classroom is to proselytize to children. The State has said the quiet part out loud,” the judge wrote.
The ruling affects several Arkansas school districts but is not a statewide ban.
“Today’s decision ensures that our clients’ classrooms will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed and can learn without worrying that they do not live up to the state’s preferred religious beliefs,” said Heather Weaver, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Jeff LeMaster, communications director for the office of state Attorney General Tim Griffin, said the office is “reviewing the opinion and will appeal.”
The ruling comes after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Louisiana’s state law requiring the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms. Arkansas is under the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
A split in decisions could lead the case to the Supreme Court, which some proponents of the law are hoping for.
Let’s be clear. Hanging a citation from the Bible does not change student behavior. It does not make them more likely to obey the commandments. It is an effort to indoctrinate children, but it probably doesn’t do that either.
The Biblical verse is given a place to please adults.
It might be useful if education researchers compared the crime rate in districts that do or don’t hang the 10 Commandments in classrooms.
The Republican majority in the Texas legislature, funded by white Christian nationalists, persists in trying to turn the state’s public schools into Christian indoctrination centers. They have passed laws to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, to teach lessons from the Bible as part of literacy instruction, and to demolish any line between church and state.
Meanwhile the 5.5 million children in the public schools of Texas come from every imaginable religion, as well as none at all. Public school is not the place to teach religion. That’s the job of parents and religious institutions.
A diverse coalition of faith leaders and defenders of civil liberty joined to support separation of church and state.
March 10, 2026, Austin, TX – A statewide coalition of diverse organizations and Texans across the state successfully empowered Texas families to defend the religious freedom of millions of Texas public school students from Senate Bill 11, the state-organized prayer in school law. Passed in the 2025 legislative session, S.B. 11 required school districts to vote on whether to adopt periods of state-organized prayer and religious study during the school day. The deadline to vote was March 1.
The coalition, comprising both religious and secular voices, empowered community leaders and school boards to reaffirm the value of religious diversity and the essential separation of religion and government in our democracy. Parents, students, teachers, clergy, and more spoke up in districts across the state. As the Texas Tribune reports, nearly all of Texas’s 1,200 school districts rejected S.B. 11. This includes many who adopted a coalition-supported alternative resolution emphasizing religious freedoms already present in public schools. As a result, millions of students in Texas are protected from coercive, divisive, and overbroad state-sponsored expressions of religion in schools.
“S.B. 11 is part of an ongoing effort to undermine public institutions, especially our schools, in favor of Christian nationalist policies that govern based on a distorted version of one religion’s teachings,” said RAC Texas Field Organizer Blake Ziegler (he/him). “Reform Jews in Texas proudly stood alongside our interfaith and secular friends against this violation of religious freedom. S.B. 11 would hurt our Jewish students, excluding them from their peers instead of promoting the religious pluralism essential to our democracy.”
“The people of Texas aren’t buying what SB11 was selling,” said Rabbi David Segal, Policy Counsel at Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC). “This massive rejection of state-organized prayer proves that Texans value the separation of church and state. Student led prayer is already allowed in our public schools, it just shouldn’t be a government-run program. We are proud to see districts across the state stand up for the religious freedom of every student, regardless of their faith tradition.”
“This is what democracy looks like,” said Carisa Lopez, deputy executive director of the Texas Freedom Network. “Across Texas, people of every faith – and no faith – came together to protect our shared right to practice religion freely, without the government telling our children when, how, and what to believe. SB 11 handed the state the power to organize prayer in public schools and put teachers in the impossible position of refereeing religious participation. Worst of all, it asked families to sign away their constitutional rights just to opt out. We are grateful to every school board member, parent, and coalition partner who showed up to protect our public school students and their religious freedom. Together we’ll continue fighting for the Texas we all deserve.”
From Texas Impact: “Texas Impact has always fought for religious freedom, and in the case of Senate Bill 11, that meant preventing Christianity from being pushed into public schools. Every student in Texas has the right to pray on their own time in any public school. Senate Bill 11 attempts to overstep by inserting prayer into our schools, per the advice of our Attorney General Paxton. We should let Texan families and faith communities lead religious education, not our elected officials.”
“Texas public schools serve all children from every conceivable faith tradition, and no faith tradition. They are public institutions that must not favor, advance, or establish any religion. Religion is for the congregation, home, and individual. When it becomes a tool of the state, both get corrupted. Every single time,” said Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Executive Director at Pastors for Texas Children.
“School districts across the state overwhelmingly rejected S.B. 11 because inviting state-organized prayer into public schools would cause division, pressure students to conform, and distract schools from their core educational mission,” said Caro Achar (she/her), engagement coordinator for free speech and pluralism at the ACLU of Texas. “Texas students already have robust rights to pray and read religious texts on their own during the school day. This law didn’t address a real problem. Instead, it threatened to create new problems by blurring the line between church and state – putting students’ and families’ constitutional rights at risk.”
“SB 11 is just another in a long line of culture war bills meant to drive a wedge between us to keep people distracted from the bigger picture,” said Texas AFT President Zeph Capo. “School districts are just affirming what we know to be true: our students already enjoy religious freedom and SB 11’s prayer period imposes a specific agenda that would alienate students and educators alike. The brave organizers and students on the ground that advocated against SB 11 at school boards across the state deserve special recognition and Texas AFT is in this fight with them.”
“The resistance to implementing S.B. 11’s state-organized prayer periods in Texas public schools should send a message to state legislators that Texans don’t support the Christian Nationalist agenda of imposing one set of religious views on all public school children,” said Rachel Laser (she/her), president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Our Constitution’s promise of church-state separation means that students and their families – not politicians – get to decide if, when and how public school children engage with religion.”
“SB 11 is a transparent attempt to erode the constitutional separation between church and state by promoting religious activity in public schools,” said Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor (she/her). “Our classrooms must remain secular spaces that respect students of all beliefs and none.”
“I want my granddaughter to be able to go to school and be herself. I want her to not feel left out, or ‘othered,’ when she doesn’t participate in a state-organized prayer time, ” said Robyn C., NCJW Dallas Advocacy Committee member. “I want every child to feel included, regardless of their faith or lack thereof.”
“Students across Texas showed up to speak for themselves and their classmates. In places like El Paso, Bastrop, Katy, and many others, we saw students testify and share how important it is that public schools remain welcoming to people of every faith and those not observing a particular religion. The decisions by these districts to reject state-organized prayer periods reaffirm that religious freedom means everyone has a seat at the table. Our schools should be spaces where diversity is respected and no student feels pressured to participate in someone else’s religious practice,” said SEAT Senior Policy Associate Azeemah Sadiq, a high school student in Alief ISD.
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About the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
For more than six decades, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (the RAC) has worked to educate, inspire, and mobilize the Reform Jewish community to advocate for social justice. We mobilize around federal, state, provincial, and local legislation on more than 70 pressing socioeconomic issues, including gun violence prevention, immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice reform.
About Baptist Joint Committee (BJC) & Christians Against Christian Nationalism
BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) is an 90-year-old religiously based organization working to defend faith freedom for all and protect the institutional separation of church and state in the historic Baptist tradition. BJC is the home of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.
About Texas Freedom Network
The Texas Freedom Network is a grassroots organization of religious and community leaders and young Texans building an informed and effective movement for equality and social justice.
About Texas Impact
Texas Impact equips faith leaders and their congregations with the information, opportunities, and outreach tools to educate their communities and engage with lawmakers on pressing public policy issues. They help people live out their faith in the public square, moving the faith community from charity to justice.
About Pastors for Texas Children
Pastors For Texas Children mobilizes the faith community for public education support and advocacy.
About the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas
The ACLU of Texas works with communities, at the State Capitol, and in the courts to protect and advance civil rights and civil liberties for every Texan, no exceptions. Established in 1938, the ACLU of Texas is an independent affiliate of the national ACLU.
About American Federation of Teachers-Texas
Texas AFT is a statewide union with 66,000 members, including K-12 educators and support staff, community college and university faculty, and retirees. We believe that education is the path to a just and democratic society. We also believe the only way to give students a quality education is through the dedicated work of empowered public educators.
About Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a religious freedom advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, AU educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.
Faith Commons
Faith Commons mission is to lift up faith voices in the public square for the common good. They do that by cultivating unexpected relationships through educational programs that inspire more people to participate in public life with mutual respect, hospitality, and generosity.
About the Freedom From Religion Foundation
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism.
About National Council of Jewish Women Dallas
National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) Dallas is a grassroots organization of volunteers and advocates who turn progressive ideals into action. Inspired by Jewish values, NCJW strives for social justice by improving the quality of life for women, children, and families and by safeguarding individual rights and freedoms.
About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas
SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. Advocating for a seat at the table, SEAT is normalizing the presence of students in educational policymaking - nothing about us, without us.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Diane Ravitch's blog 