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How Trump Promoted the Civil Rights of White Christians, America’s Most “Persecuted” Majority

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2025 //
4

Perhaps the most stunning act of legerdemain in recent history was the bold capture of civil rights laws as a tool to ignore its original beneficiaries–people of color and women–and to turn those laws into a protective shield for men and white Christians. No longer will white Christians be demonized and oppressed!

Jessica Washington writes in The intercept about how the Trump administration has twisted the civil rights rhetoric so that the beneficiaries are white Christians.

She wrote:

With an assist from Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has made the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion a centerpiece of his new administration.  For all the crowing about his early success — much of it greatly overinflated— Trump has simply flipped the script: Instead of creating a level playing field, he launched DEI for white Christians.

“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims.”

Trump’s bid to dismantle the legacy of the civil rights movement while using its own language is part and parcel of the Christian right’s playbook, according to Christine Reyna, a psychology professor at DePaul University who studies extremism.

“They’ve stumbled on a winning strategy, which is to portray white people as victims and portray their movement as a civil rights movement,” Reyna said. “And they’ve completely co-opted the strategies of the Black civil rights movement.”

At the prayer event that morning, Trump announced the latest gift to his right-wing evangelical supporters: a task force on “anti-Christian bias,” helmed by his new Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“[T]he task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide,” he said.

So, in Trump’s new world order, any effort to raise up Blacks, women, Hispanics, and other minorities is immediately derided as “woke” or DEI and banned.

Such efforts, by implication, are anti-white. The Trump administration rides to the rescue of white Christians, to end their persecution.

Categories Civil Rights, Religion

Trump Plans to Spend Billions for Vouchers, Mostly for Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2025 //
10

The Trump administration plans to roll out a massive voucher program that will be available in every state.

We know from the statistics of every voucher program that most vouchers will be claimed by students who never attended public schools. The voucher recipients are already attending religious and private schools. Their parents are able to pay tuition, but will gladly accept a government subsidy to lower their costs. In every state with universal vouchers, most are taken by students already in nonpublic schools.

We also know that vouchers will not help the poorest kids, who are likely to be rejected by good private schools and end up losing ground in substandard schools. Vouchers have not improved education in any state that adopted them. One of the nation’s most expansive voucher programs is in Florida; that state just posted its worst NAEP score in two decades. To learn more, read Josh Cowen’s The Privateers.

Nonetheless, Laura Meckler reports in The Washington Post, the Trump administration is prepared to dole out billions of federal dollars to pay for tuition at nonpublic schools, most of them religious.

Meanwhile, the public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of all K-12 students in the U.S., would receive less funding, have larger class sizes, and less money for teachers’ salaries.

Vouchers have been tested in state referenda repeatedly and have consistently, often by huge margins.

Meckler writes:

The school voucher movement has scored victories in conservative states in a quest to send public dollars to private schools, with tax money following the child. Now backers see their best chance yet to go national.


Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, are pushing for a new tax credit that would direct billions of dollars a year to school voucher programs — and not just in conservative states.


The program would be fueled by a powerful, never-before-tried incentive: Taxpayers who donate to voucher programs would get 100 percent of their money back when they file their taxes. That means the tax break for giving to voucher programs would dwarf tax incentives for giving to churches, hospitals, food banks and every other charity.


Taxpayers who donate to other charities might qualify for a tax deduction — meaning they would not pay taxes on the dollars they contribute. But donors to voucher programs would get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, meaning they could subtract the full value of the donation from their bottom line tax liability.

The goal is to give more families more options for their children’s education. Too many children, supporters say, are stuck in public schools that do not serve them well but cannot afford other options. A federal program would give more children in more states the opportunity to make a different choice for their education. The tax credit, they say, would encourage and allow taxpayers who want to help to do so.


One version of the plan would cost the federal government $5 billion a year in lost revenue; another version, $10 billion. At $10,000 per student, $5 billion would be enough to pay for about 500,000 vouchers, which families could use to send their children to private schools or to pay for home schooling expenses. Under a version of the bill approved by the House Ways and Means Committee last fall and a new version introduced this year, all but the wealthiest families would be eligible to receive vouchers.

“It would be transformational,” said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, which advocates for school choice programs. [Blew worked for Betsy DeVos when she was Secretary of Education.] “Although the numbers are very small in the federal context, in the context of the school choice movement, these are huge numbers.”

About 46 million American children — nearly nine in 10 — attend public schools; about 5 million are enrolled in private schools, according to federal data.

But opposition is fierce from those who say these plans drain resources from public schools, which are required by law to take all children. Public school advocates are mobilizing publicly and privately against the plan, lobbying Republicans who might oppose it based on the merits or the cost.

“We’re making sure the public understands this is the greatest threat to public education we’ve ever had at the federal level,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, the School Superintendents Association, who helps lead a coalition of more than 60 groups opposed to the voucher plan.

Pudelski noted that unlike public schools, private schools can reject students based on their religion, test scores, disability or ability to pay tuition. The vast majority of vouchers in existing state programs go to religious schools.

“It would be the first time the federal government is choosing to subsidize a secondary private system of education that can pick and choose the students it educates over the one that welcomes all,” she said.

Voters, too, have opposed these plans. In November, ballot measures to allow vouchers in Kentucky and Colorado failed, while voters in Nebraska voted to repeal a voucher program put into place by the legislature.

But the federal plan enjoys robust support from the most powerful people in today’s Republican Party. President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to create a federal school choice program. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) have both co-sponsored versions of the voucher legislation.

There goes the separation of church and state. There goes common sense. Voucher programs don’t help students. They hurt public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students. Vouchers are a huge drain on the budget.

Why should taxpayers pay tuition for wealthy families? Why should taxpayers underwrite tuition at schools that discriminate against students for any reason they want, be it race, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, or low test scores? If public schools did that, their test scores would be sky-high, but it would betray the promise of public schools: equal educational opportunity. Not for only those we choose to admit.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on the “Final Mission”

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2025 //
9

Former entertainment entrepreneur Linda McMahon is now U.S. Secretary of Education. She released her first statement, reiterating Trump’s attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as well as “gender ideology” (I.e. recognizing the existence of ONLY the male-female binary and not recognizing those who are LGBT, such as Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who is openly gay).

McMahon’s views are closely aligned with those of Moms for Liberty. Check out the website of the America First Policy Forum, where McMahon was chair of the board.

This statement was released by the department’s press office.

SPEECH

Secretary McMahon: Our Department’s Final Mission

MARCH 3, 2025

Secretary Linda McMahon

When I took the oath of office as Secretary of Education, I accepted responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Department of Education and those who work here. But more importantly, I took responsibility for supporting over 100 million American children and college students who are counting on their education to create opportunity and prepare them for a rewarding career. 

I want to do right by both. 

As you are all aware, President Trump nominated me to take the lead on one of his most momentous campaign promises to families. My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children. As a mother and grandmother, I know there is nobody more qualified than a parent to make educational decisions for their children. I also started my career studying to be a teacher, and as a Connecticut Board of Education member and college trustee, I have long held that teaching is the most noble of professions. As a businesswoman, I know the power of education to prepare workers for fulfilling careers. 

American education can be the greatest in the world. It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better. 

After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington. 

This restoration will profoundly impact staff, budgets, and agency operations here at the Department. In coming months, we will partner with Congress and other federal agencies to determine the best path forward to fulfill the expectations of the President and the American people. We will eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy so that our colleges, K-12 schools, students, and teachers can innovate and thrive. 

This review of our programs is long overdue. The Department of Education is not working as intended. Since its establishment in 1980, taxpayers have entrusted the department with over $1 trillion, yet student outcomes have consistently languished. Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology, or saddled with college debt for a degree that has not provided a meaningful return on their investment. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves after just a few years—and citing red tape as one of their primary reasons. 

The reality of our education system is stark, and the American people have elected President Trump to make significant changes in Washington. Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly. 

As I’ve learned many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great. Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students. 

True change does not happen overnight—especially the historic overhaul of a federal agency. Over the coming months, as we work hard to carry out the President’s directives, we will focus on a positive vision for what American education can be. 

These are our convictions: 

  1. Parents are the primary decision makers in their children’s education. 
  2. Taxpayer-funded education should refocus on meaningful learning in math, reading, science, and history—not divisive DEI programs and gender ideology. 
  3. Postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs. 

Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children. An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom—enabling them to get back to basics. 

I hope each of you will embrace this vision going forward and use these convictions as a guide for conscientious and pragmatic action. The elimination of bureaucracy should free us, not limit us, in our pursuit of these goals. I want to invite all employees to join us in this historic final mission on behalf of all students, with the same dedication and excellence that you have brought to your careers as public servants. 

This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students. I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete, we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.

Sincerely,

Linda McMahon
Secretary of Education

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Funding, Gender, Home Schooling, Ignorance, Innovation, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Teachers, Vouchers

ProPublica: A Handy Guide to Segregation Academies

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2025 //
0

ProPublica has created a database where anyone can check out where the segregation academies are. The database shows the demographics of public and private schools.

Bear in mind that highly segregated private schools are subsidized by taxpayers in states that have enacted universal vouchers. The politicians today are fulfilling the fever dreams of segregationist governors in the South in the 1950s.

ProPublica reports:

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.

While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.

In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.

Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.

Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.

How to Use the App

Searching: You can search for private schools or public school districts by name and drill down on results using several filter options.

For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.

For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Ethics, Privatization, Racism, Religion, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

ProPublica: Mike Johnson Shares Home with a Far-Right Pastor Who Has a Political Agenda

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2025 //
7

ProPublica reported that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson lives in the home of a far-right evangelical who lobbies for his extremist views.

How is this different from being roommates with a lobbyist for Big Pharma or the Tobacco Industry?

It’s not, but it may be more dangerous because this pastor is one of those wing nuts who knows nothing about the Founding Fsthers or the Constitutuion.

ProPublica reports:

In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.

The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress.

Over the past four years, Berger and his wife, Sarah Berger, have dedicated themselves to what they call their D.C. “ministry center.” In addition to Johnson, who is an evangelical conservative, the pastor has built close relationships with several other influential conservative politicians. Dan Bishop, now nominated for a powerful post in the Trump White House, seems to have also lived in the home last year while he was still a congressman, according to three people.

A spokesperson for Johnson said that the speaker “pays fair market value in monthly rent for the portion of the Washington, D.C. townhome that he occupies.” He did not answer a question about how much Johnson is paying. House ethics rules allow members of Congress to live anywhere, as long as they are paying fair-market rent.

The spokesperson added that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr. Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy.” Berger and Bishop did not respond to requests for comment.

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Please read the rest of the article.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

Sara Stevenson: Fully Fund Texas Public Schools Instead of Handouts for the Wealthiest

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2025 //
5

Sara Stevenson is a retired school librarian and Catholic school English teacher. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. Her article was published in The Austin American-Statesman. At this very time, the Texas Legislature is debating voucher legislation. It has already passed the State Senate. It is now being considered in the House.

She writes:

Many years ago at a school financing conference, I approached an East Texas House member from a rural district. I asked him, “Do y’all even have private schools for vouchers in your district?” He answered, “Hell, no. Private school vouchers are a tax break for families that already send their kids to private schools.” I thanked him for clearing that up.

Now most of those rural House Republicans opposing private school vouchers are gone. Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire investor in TikTok, gave Governor Greg Abbott $10 million to primary them out of office.

Texas has been trying to pass a school voucher or (ESA: Educational Savings Account) bill since 1995, but the bills keep failing session after session. In their earlier forms, these bills called for ESAs (using public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition) as a way to help poor children or those with disabilities trapped in Texas’s “failing public schools.”

Sidenote: If Texas schools are failing, the Republican party is responsible since it has dominated the Legislature for more than two decades and has controlled the governor’s office since 1994.

But over time, the proposed bills kept demanding more, not only in the amount of tuition money offered, but in the expanding pool of students qualified to receive them.

With this year’s version, Senate Bill 2, which passed the Senate, the GOP is saying the quiet part out loud. No longer are the ESAs solely for the families who can’t afford private school tuition or those with disabilities; now a family of four, making as much as $161,000 a year, five times the federal poverty level, can still receive up to $10,000 toward private school tuition or $11,500 for students with disabilities.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick then reassures us that 80% of the vouchers will go to special needs or “low-income” children. Since eligibility is universal, 20% will go to families making more than $161,000 per year.

I remember in 1976 when Ronald Reagan talked about people who abused the welfare system by getting government handouts they didn’t need. He called them “welfare queens.” In those days the GOP praised the working poor for their dignity in refusing a government handout.

Fast forward to 2025. Now families making over $161,000 per year are entitled to your tax dollars to send their children to private schools with little to no accountability. In fact, Sen. José Menendez’s Amendment 36, requiring the state to collect data to determine if the program is even successful, failed.

In earlier iterations, the student had to be enrolled in a failing public school before receiving a voucher. Now children already enrolled in private schools are eligible. Promoters argue this is only fair because private school families pay thousands each year in property taxes to schools their children don’t attend. Well, if they deserve a taxpayer refund, what about all the Texas property taxpayers, including seniors, who have NO children currently attending Texas schools?

No, because contributing to public education is a common good; an educated citizenry benefits all Texans and the Texas economy.

And speaking of children with disabilities, this bill clearly states that these students receiving vouchers must waive any rights for accommodations guaranteed by IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

Although SB 2 boosters contend the bill promotes school choice for parents, the bill really means “schools’ choice” for private schools. While public schools must accept every child, private schools, including those receiving vouchers, are free to turn away or expel any child for any reason. For instance, they can continue to prefer legacies and the siblings of current students.

SB 2 earmarks $1 billion for this program in order to give vouchers to just 100,000 students. In contrast, 5.4 million Texas students currently attend public school, 10% of all U.S. school children.

Let’s first pass Senate Bill 1, the budget bill, and include increasing the basic student allotment to fully fund our public schools. Since Texas ranks 44th among the states in per pupil spending, let’s first invest in the school system we already have rather than spend a billion dollars to fund another one.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Hoax, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Texas

Florida: Vouchers Are Helping Affluent Families Pay Private School Tuition

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
6

Annie Martin and Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel have repeatedly exposed the fraud baked into Florida’s voucher program. It began in 1999 with the modest ambition of offering choice to low-income students in “failing schools.” It expanded to provide vouchers for students with disabilities. In past articles, they surveyed voucher schools and identified academic deficiencies, such as uncertified teachers and principals, and Bible-based textbooks. Now, they report on what happened after the state removed all income limits in 2023. Florida now offers money for all students, regardless of family income.

Most of the students getting the voucher money are not low-income, do not have disabilities, and are not escaping bad public schools.

The students getting vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. They don’t need the extra money but they are happy to take it.

They write:

A block from Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue sits St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where tuition can top $14,000 a year for a K-8 education.

But at this school in the heart of one of Central Florida’s wealthiest communities, about 98 percent of students used taxpayer-funded scholarships worth roughly $8,000 to help pay tuition last year.

Only three percent of St. Margaret Mary’s students got that state financial aid just one year earlier.

The change – repeated at schools around the state – is one powerful measure of how a 2023 Florida law has supercharged a school voucher initiative that was already the nation’s largest.

Once reserved for low-income students and those with disabilities, state scholarships, often called vouchers, are now available to all – and they’re fueling an unprecedented pipeline of public money, estimated at $3.4 billion this year, into private, mostly religious schools across the Sunshine State.

All that money is doing more than just expanding Florida’s voucher program. The new rules are transforming it.

Since their emergence as a conservative educational talking point four decades ago, vouchers have been pitched as a way to provide “school choice” – the opportunity for families who couldn’t otherwise afford private education to escape a substandard neighborhood public school.

But when lawmakers dropped the income limits on Florida’s programs, the key element of the 2023 law, the system became something else:

Choice for lower-income families plus a wide-open taxpayer subsidy for the better off.
More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions, according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.

So in many cases the new law did not expand these new families’ options. Instead, it provided state subsidies for the choices they had previously made and were able to afford on their own.

The implications of that shift are vast, an Orlando Sentinel analysis has found.

• Voucher use has jumped by 67% since the new law was approved.
• Individual private schools are seeing even bigger surges, creating new reliance on taxpayer funding. The Sentinel found nearly 250 schools where the number of students using vouchers jumped by at least 100 children in the first year after the law changed. At St. Margaret Mary, the growth pushed total annual voucher funding from $65,000 to $3.5 million – in just one example of the multi-million dollar windfalls.
• A significant amount of the money is flowing to Florida’s most expensive private schools, many of which served few voucher students in the past: Campuses that advertise annual tuition of $15,000 or more added more than 30,000 voucher students last year.
• The proportion of private school students with state scholarships has topped 70% this school year. Ten years ago it was less than a third.
• More Florida students use vouchers — a total of 352,860 — to attend private campuses than are enrolled in public schools in Osceola, Orange and Seminole counties combined.

Program critics say Florida is now spending an inordinate amount of its education resources on the wrong people – rather than focusing on system improvements that would be good for all students.


“This is just a subsidy for wealthier people — people who already have the advantage,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from Boca Raton who voted against the expansion.


Skidmore is among those who fear the impact of the voucher explosion on public schools – which are losing money as students shift to private education – and the implications of handing millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools over which the state has little control.


These schools are free, as the Sentinel has reported previously, to hire teachers without college degrees, teach history and science lessons outside mainstream academics and discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. They do not face the same accountability requirements as their public counterparts, whose students’ test scores and graduation rates are publicly reported. Without such numbers for private schools, it’s difficult to assess the impact of Florida’s voucher program on the quality of education students receive.

Nevertheless, the voucher push shows no signs of abating, with more than 10% of all K-12 students in Florida now receiving the subsidy.

On Jan. 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated Florida’s “choice revolution” at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, which now enrolls more than 1,200 voucher students.

“The debate about school choice I think is over. Clearly you’re better offering choice than not offering choice,” DeSantis said.

An Orlando mother of four sent them to The First Academy, affiliated with First Baptist Church of Orlando, where high school tuition is more than $24,000 a year. Nearly 90% of the students use vouchers now, up from about 20% two years ago. She paid the full cost for her two oldest, who graduated, and can afford to pay for her two youngest, but is delighted to take the state subsidy.

Florida is spending $3.4 billion annually to subsidize the state’s most affluent families.

Is it surprising that Florida’s NAEP scores fell to their lowest point in 20 years? The state is not investing in its public schools, which enroll the overwhelming majority of its students.

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Diseases Eliminated by Science or RFK Jr. or Prayer

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
15

I borrowed this from Andrea Junker at BlueSky:

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY SCIENCE:

  1. Chickenpox
  2. Diphtheria
  3. Measles
  4. Pertussis
  5. Pneumococcal Infection
  6. Polio
  7. Tetanus
  8. Typhoid
  9. Yellow Fever
  10. Smallpox

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY RFK JR. OR PRAYER:
1.


    1. 4.
      5.
      6.
      7.
      8.
      9.
Categories Health, Religion, Science

Texas: Public Schools Are Imposing Austerity Measures While State Holds Huge Surplus

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2025 //
14

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is holding hostage the more than five million students in public schools while he demands vouchers for kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. Abbott has refused to increase funding for the state’s public schools unless the legislature approves vouchers, most of which will subsidize the affluent.

Last year, the legislature refused to approve vouchers. Since then, Abbott engineered the defeat of several anti-voucher Republicans. He’s hoping to win approval in the current session. Vouchers will pass easily in the state senate. We will see what happens in the House, where rural Republicans stood against vouchers in the past, before Abbott’s purge.

Abbott is playing Reverse Robin Hood. He is stealing from the poor to pay for the rich. Billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man jnnOennstlvsnia, and Betsy DeVos of Michigan, are funding his intransigence with millions in campaign contributions.

The Texas Monthly reports that school superintendents are increasing class sizes, laying off teachers, eliminating electives, and doing whatever they can to keep their doors open.

The article says:

Two years ago, during the 2023 legislative session, superintendents of Texas schools were optimistic that state lawmakers would boost public-education funding. After all, soaring inflation was straining the already meager finances of districts across the state, and lawmakers had at their disposal a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Spending some of that money on the urgent educational needs of the state’s children might have seemed like an uncontroversial proposal. 

Instead, the unthinkable happened: Legislators left Austin without putting any significant new money into schools or giving teachers a raise. The consequences have been dire.

Texas’s public schools were already among the most poorly resourced in the country: Our per-student funding is about 27 percent less than the national average. The basic allotment—the minimum amount of funding per student that school districts receive from the state—has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. That would need to be upped by about $1,400 just to keep pace with rising costs. Public education advocates worry that lawmakers will provide only face-saving increases to the basic allotment in 2025 while diverting billions to private schools.

Many school leaders have had to undertake draconian austerity measures. Nearly 80 percent of districts have reported challenges with budget deficits. Given the stakes, 2025 could be a pivotal year for Texas’s public-education system….

Texas Monthly spoke to a group of superintendents to ask about how they were coping. They all spoke about the budget cuts and unfunded mandates (like requiring the hiring of police officers without providing funding). One superintendent, Jennifer Blaine of Spring Branch, said:

JB, Spring Branch: We don’t have anywhere else to cut. We are cut to the bone. I consolidated everything I could, and I cut everything that I could. If we have to cut further, you’re talking about severely impacting academics in the classroom and, quite frankly, safety and security. Five and a half million kids are in Texas public schools, and I don’t understand how our legislators and our governor don’t see this as a crisis. If we don’t educate these kids to the highest levels and prepare them for postsecondary success, we’re going to crumble as a state. I don’t know where the disconnect is. Education is the great equalizer. But nobody is talking about that, and I think it’s a missed opportunity because this is not going to end well. 

The title of the article in the print edition was  “A Legislature That Will Spend at Least as Much Per Pupil as Louisiana.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

The Christian Case for Separation of Church and State

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2025 //
11

Benjamin Cremer is a Wesleyan minister in Idaho. He posted an important commentary, making the Christian case for separation of church and state.

I believe in the separation of church and state as a Christian, not because I’m against Christianity, but because I know the history of Christianity.

It is because I have studied all about the tremendous harm that is caused whenever the church crawls into bed with the empire. The crusades, inquisitions, genocides, slavery, and subjugation of women, and persecution of people who don’t believe the way “the church” demands, all done in the name of “preserving our Christian faith.”

Whenever a government mandates Christianity, it ceases to be a matter of faith pursued by human freewill and therefore it ceases to have anything to do with Jesus and just becomes another tool to oppress people that are seen as “outsiders” by those in power.

I believe in the separation of church and state because of the teachings of Jesus. One of them being, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So if I wouldn’t want another religious group mandating my civic life, legislating their scriptures to be read in our public schools to my children or posting the commands from their god on public spaces, then I wouldn’t want that done with my religion either to people from other religious and nonreligious backgrounds.

I believe in the separation of church and state because there are numerous Christian sects within our country alone, let alone within the entire world. Each sect has their own unique theology and interpretation of the Bible. So which Christian sect gets to dictate the kind of Christianity that is mandated?

As a Protestant, I don’t want my civic life to be mandated by Catholics, nor would Catholics want their civic life mandated by Protestants. We’ve seen the horrors of that fight already in the conflicts since the Protestant reformation.

As a Christian in the Wesleyan tradition, I don’t want my civic life mandated by Calvinist Christians or Baptists or Fundamentalists. As I am sure they wouldn’t want their civic life dictated by Wesleyan Christians either. 

Just imagine if Amish Christianity was mandated over all civic life. How would you feel about a “Christian nation” that made sure you couldn’t use your car or any modern technology? Now apply that same logic to certain Christian sects dictating public education or the decisions people can make regarding their own healthcare.

History has shown us that mandating one form of Christianity through the government leads to oppressing all outsiders, which even includes faithful Christians from other traditions as well.

That is another part of Christian history we often forget. Before the United States was founded, many fled here from a “Christian nation,” which was Britain, which was mandating one form of Christianity over everyone else. Repeating that here would be to not only ignore the reasons why many people came here in the first place, but it would just show the world that we refuse to learn from our mistakes in the past and repent from them.

As an American and a believer in the 1st Amendment, I believe everyone should be free to live according to their own beliefs and not be mandated by the government to live according to a set of beliefs from a single religious group. Including my own. Only a government that is free from religious control can guarantee religious freedom for all.

This is why I believe in the separation of church and state and I am staunchly opposed to Christian Nationalism, which is both unAmerican and unChristian. Not only does it violate religious freedom, but Jesus called us to love our neighbors as ourselves, which I believe includes not shoving our religion down their throats and dictating their life decisions by mandate of law. That is simply not loving at all. 

This is why I believe it is a bankrupt Christianity that insists on legislating its beliefs over everyone else. It is a hypocritical Christianity that demands things like everyone be subjected to Bible readings and the Ten Commandments in our public schools, yet would claim to be “persecuted” if another religion did those exact same things.

I deeply believe that when we Christians arrive at the point of needing our beliefs mandated by the government, it is because we have ultimately concluded that the truth of the message we claim to have from Jesus no longer has the power to stand on its own merit, so we need the government to do it for us instead. It declares to the world that we don’t actually believe in the power of our beliefs at all. It declares to the world that the church has failed to be the church on its own, failing to rely on the power of God, and therefore needs the government to intervene.

Far too many people in our society have witnessed a kind of Christianity that insists its particular beliefs need to be legislated over others, yet opposes legislation that would help hungry students be fed in schools, bring increased wages for people working to take care of their families, paid family leave, affordable childcare, healthcare for all, teachers being paid well, curbing gun violence, funding the education system better and supporting it rather than vilifying it and constantly attacking it, or caring for our planet, and the list goes on and on.

Is this the kind of selfish and callous reputation we want as Christians? Where we see the government as a tool only to mandate our particular beliefs instead of seeing it as an opportunity to work together towards a society where all people are free, don’t have to struggle to just have their basic needs met, and can live flourishing lives? 

Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave behind? Are we really that fearful of other beliefs stamping out the gospel of Jesus that we have to resort to government mandates and using taxpayer dollars to legislate our beliefs? Isn’t that just functioning out of fear rather than faith?

I encourage anyone who is unsure about this topic to go study church history for themselves. You can begin with the Holy Roman Empire and the Doctrine of Discovery. Or even more recently the British Empire and Christian imperialism and colonialism. We have tried having nations run by a Christian sect far too many times before and we must learn from those examples or we will repeat them. 

I encourage all Christians to consider how we might be destroying the very gospel we claim to hold so dear by wanting it mandated over others rather than living it out ourselves. Because mandating our beliefs by force of law against people’s free will is one of the most effective ways of causing people to reject the God we claim to believe in with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I believe in the separation of church and state because it not only allows the church to be the church and the state to be the state, but it also prevents the church from giving into the temptation to worship political power and allows it to faithfully embody the gospel of Jesus, including speaking truth to the powers of this world. The church simply can’t speak truth to the power of the state when it has become one with the power of the state.

Jesus rejected Satan’s temptation to control the kingdoms of this world and I believe we as his followers should too.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” -Jesus

Now I’d like to hear from you!

Remember, you can now view this and all previous newsletters as well as invite friends to join through this link: https://benjamin-cremer.ck.page/profile.

Categories Idaho, Religion
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