Archives for category: Separation of church and state

Ohio: Fund Public Schools, Not Vouchers

February 12, 2024 //

Tanisha Pruitt, Ph.D., wrote the following statement on behalf of Policy Matters Ohio last June. She urged the legislature not to expand vouchers. Her plea was ignored. The legislature decided to raise the cap on vouchers to 450% of the federal poverty level. Given research that shows the failure of vouchers in Ohio and elsewhere, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Republican dominated legislature doesn’t care about the state’s children or their future.

Regardless of race, neighborhood, or how much money is in their parents’ bank account, every child should be able to attend an excellent school that has everything they need to learn and grow. Every dollar spent on vouchers makes this vision less achievable. Vouchers take public money and give it to private schools, with real consequences for the 90% of our kids who attend Ohio’s public schools.

With their recent budget proposal, Senate leadership has shown they are willing, even eager, to sacrifice Ohio’s kids to ram through a universal voucher scheme they’ve been planning for years. The Senate plan would make EdChoice vouchers — worth $8,407 a year for students in grades 9-12, and $6,165 a year for those in grades K-8 — available to households with incomes up to 450% of the federal poverty rate. (For a family of four, that’s about $135,000 a year.) And they wouldn’t stop there: Senate leadership would also allow households making more than that to get 10% of the value of EdChoice vouchers, subsidizing a discount on private school tuition for the children of the wealthiest Ohioans.

<<< And that’s just one of the ways the Senate proposal will disproportionately benefit the rich while hurting the rest of us.>>>

Kids bring their whole selves to the classroom. To succeed they need well-funded schools — and they need good food, health care, and quality child care to build a solid foundation. Senate leadership would make it very easy to qualify for vouchers, while Ohio already makes it very difficult to qualify for other, more fundamental public programs. Legislators impose tight caps on family income to participate in SNAP, Medicaid, publicly funded child care and free school meals. Compare those income limits to the proposal for limitless access to private school vouchers and you get a good sense of where the Senate majority’s priorities and loyalties lie.

Public schools in Ohio are responsible for educating 1.6 million students. The Senate proposal cuts their funding by $245.6 million in FY 2024 and by $295.8 million in FY 2025. At the same time, Senate leadership would increase funding for vouchers by $182 million in FY 2024 and $191 million in FY 2025 — pushing the total annual cost to more than a billion dollars by the end of this budget cycle. That’s $1 billion of Ohio taxpayers’ money being funneled to unaccountable private schools, many of which are operated by churches and other religious entities.

The budgetary choices that we see in the Senate proposal begs the question of where our legislators’ priorities lie when it comes to funding our education system. How we fund our schools now will impact education — and our workforce and economy — for years to come. Ohio is currently ranked near the bottom at 46th in the nation when it comes to equitable distribution of funding in schools. By proposing massive new spending on vouchers, Ohio legislators would only make things worse.

In the last budget, we won the Fair School Funding Plan, with the promise to fully and fairly fund schools so every child in Ohio gets what they need to set them on the path to a good life. Now we need legislators to live up to that promise and finish the job. State leaders have a constitutional duty to protect public schools. Ensuring a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” — as Ohio’s constitution requires — means correcting disparities created by bad policies of the past, which still harm kids today. We do that by prioritizing public schools, cutting spending on vouchers, and paying teachers what they’re worth, so every student in every district in every school can thrive.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Ohio: Charters and Vouchers Defund the Public Schools

By dianeravitch

February 12, 2024 //

This report was written by Tanisha Pruitt, Ph.D., for Policy Matters Ohio in April 2023. It provides a comprehensive review of the funding of K-12 education in the state. The state has 1.6 million students. The state Constitution says (Article 6, section 2):

The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.

The legislature and governor of Ohio apparently believe that the state Constitution does not mean what it says. The Republican leadership has steadily increased the funding of charter schools (which are not “common schools,” but are privately managed schools, some for-profit) and vouchers, which go primarily up religious schools.

The report was written before the legislature lifted income caps on vouchers, agreeing to subsidize the tuition of all students regardless of family income.

Please open the link to see the graphs.

The Policy Matters Ohio report begins:

School is a place where childhood happens. Ohio’s public educators teach children of all races and backgrounds basic skills, but also challenge and inspire them to follow their dreams. For many students, school is a safe place to learn, develop and grow.

Ohio currently educates 1.6 million children attending school in our cities, suburbs and small towns. For years, almost no one was happy about how the state of Ohio funded public schools. The system pitted communities against each other and private and charter schools against public schools. We were living in the K-12 version of the “Hunger Games”: The wealthier your district, the stronger your chances of success.

Most state lawmakers signed off on a system that relied too heavily on local property taxes,[1] so communities where many residents have low incomes struggled to pay for the basics like updated resources and teaching materials. The state capped the funding it sent to some districts, often leaving those districts feeling cheated. In others, state funding failed to keep up with changing costs and student needs. Since 2005, lawmakers have been systematically sending more resources to the wealthiest Ohioans by cutting the state income tax, which accounts for nearly one-third of the state’s spending on schools. Meanwhile, lawmakers have diverted almost $1 billion a year from local levies to private and charter schools.[2]

These policy choices have taken a toll on Ohio’s educational outcomes. Education Week ranks Ohio 46th in the nation for equitable distribution of funding.[3] The performance metrics included: (1) state spending by examining per-pupil expenditures adjusted for regional cost differences, the percent of students in districts with per-pupil spending at or above the national average, spending index, and percent of total taxable resources spent on education and (2) Equity, by examining the degree to which education funding is equitably distributed across the districts within the state.[4]

The pandemic has contributed to a decline in test scores, which could have an impact on our overall ranking, if we do not get students caught up.[5] Over nearly two decades, we can draw a straight line between the racial and economic achievement gaps and the lack of funding to provide Black, brown, economically disadvantaged students[6] and students with disabilities what they need to succeed in school.

Ohio’s schools are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse; the Hispanic[7]population (a close proxy for Latinx) alone has more than doubled over the last 10 years.[8] Student poverty is also on the rise with 51% of students considered economically disadvantaged and the homeless student population doubling over the last decade.[9]

COVID-19 created unstable and even chaotic learning environments across Ohio. The elevated stress and social isolation caused by the move to virtual learning[10]exacerbated students’ need for mental health services.[11] The pandemic continues to take a toll on educators as well. COVID and other outbreaks are making educators sick. Moreover, increased stress and low pay cause many educators to leave the profession. Districts across the state have grappled with unprecedented staff shortages. For example, Columbus City Schools (CCS) had 800 employees absent every day during the height of the pandemic.[12] Hamilton City School officials were forced to cancel classes when 170 staff members were out due to illness.[13]

COVID has especially hammered school districts in communities that can’t raise enough money through local property taxes — especially in big cities, where Black, brown and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to live.[14] Schools in these communities often have fewer resources for COVID mitigation efforts like improving ventilation.[15]

Long before COVID, many policymakers neglected public schools, siphoning away their funding for tax giveaways[16] to corporations and undercutting them with schemes that send public money to charters and private schools. Combined with the effects of COVID, Ohio’s legacy of inadequate and inequitable funding has weakened the role school plays as a foundational public service for families and communities. For our state to be a vibrant place where people want to live, we need fully and fairly funded schools in all districts, no matter what students look like, or how much money their families have.

This report describes how the state funds public K-12 education and some key investments proposed in the 2024-25 Executive Budget, the legacy of unconstitutional funding, the role private school vouchers play in harming public schools, and how the Fair School Funding Plan — when fully funded and fully implemented, including weights and cost corrections — can provide districts with more resources to prepare Ohio’s children to succeed.

A brief history of Ohio school funding

The framers of Ohio’s constitution obligated the state to provide a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” for all students.[17] In 1991, the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, representing more than 500 school districts in Ohio, filed suit in the Perry County courts against the State of Ohio for failing to uphold this constitutional requirement.[18] In DeRolph vs. The State of Ohio — named for Perry County school district student Nathan DeRolph — plaintiffs argued the state was failing to live up to its obligation due to over-reliance on local property taxes for school funding: In wealthy communities, high property values generated revenues needed to provide students with more resources for cutting-edge technology, advanced classes, and extracurricular activities; the opposite was true in poor communities. This left schools in cities, rural areas and many low-income communities severely under-resourced, significantly harming outcomes for their students.

The litigation dragged on until 1994 when Perry County Court Judge Linton Lewis, Jr. ruled that “public education is a fundamental right in the state of Ohio” and that the state legislature must provide a better and more equitable means of financing education.

The DeRolph case was the start of a foundational shift in the school funding system in Ohio, but the fight for constitutional and equitable funding continued for decades following the ruling. By failing to keep up with inflation and by diverting public funds to charter schools[19] and vouchers (i.e., scholarships to private schools), lawmakers in fact cut state aid to traditional public schools over time.[20] As a result, public schools have increasingly relied even more on local resources, which exacerbates the problem of unequal funding and quality across districts,[21] a problem that persists today….

Public dollars, private benefits

Two smaller education systems run alongside Ohio’s traditional public schools: charters and private schools. When legislators redirect funding from traditional public schools to pay for charters and vouchers (which pass public dollars through parents and into private schools), the vast majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public schools have to make do with less.

In Ohio charter schools have been branded “community schools” and are considered “public” because they cannot charge tuition and they are supposed to accept all students. However, charter schools do not necessarily serve the public good. Charter school sponsors may contract with for-profit companies to operate the schools. In 2020, Ohio had 313 charter schools serving 102,645 students and 178 (57%) of them were operated by for-profit entities.[48]These “operators” have been the source of much scandal in Ohio. Simply put: The charter system in Ohio has lots of loopholes for private, profit-seeking companies to siphon off public dollars.

In FY 2022 the state sent $1.45 billion to charter schools — up from nearly $620 million in 2007.[49] During that time, Ohio’s legislators earned our state a reputation as “the wild west of charter schools” by failing to hold charters and their operators accountable.[50] Problems with Ohio’s charter school system came to a head with the ECOT scandal: A for-profit online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow squandered millions in public money by inflating enrollment numbers.[51] Other charter scandals have prompted rounds of legislative reform to reduce self-dealing, prevent the state from paying for students who were not actually attending school, and stop attempts at double-dipping by selling state-purchased materials back to the state for even more public dollars.[52]

The Ohio Charter School Accountability Project, a joint effort of the Ohio Education Association (OEA) and Innovation Ohio, using data primarily from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), created a tool to help Ohioans know the state of publicly funded charters and private schools that accept public vouchers, and how they compare to traditional school districts. Analysis includes state report card rankings, classroom expenditures, and state aid deductions to charter schools. This system is intended to provide transparency so that parents, teachers, students and advocates can hold charter schools accountable.[53]

Based on the recent Annual Community Schools report conducted by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE),[54]community schools in Ohio are receiving more funding through the Quality Community School Support Grant (QCSS). Eligibility requirements for these grants are based on performance standards and overall academic achievement. In the current budget lawmakers increased funding to QCSS to $54 million for FY 2022, a $24 million increase from 2021. This increase includes a per-pupil increase of $1,750 for economically disadvantaged students and a $1,000 per-pupil increase for all other students.[55]

Vouchers eat up state funding for K-12 schools

As problematic as under-regulated charter schools can be, the proliferation of private school vouchers has had the most serious consequences for public schools and the vast majority of Ohio students who attend them. Since the Cleveland Voucher Program for low-income students in Cleveland City Schools launched in 1996, policymakers have expanded voucher programs across the state. Ohio currently has four main school voucher programs: the Educational Choice (EdChoice) Scholarship Program, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP), the Autism Scholarship Program, and the Jon Peterson Special Needs (JPSN) Scholarship Program. The EdChoice program is split into two types: the Traditional EdChoice Scholarship, also known as performance-based EdChoice, and the EdChoice Expansion Scholarship, also known as income-based EdChoice.

Policymakers introduced the Traditional EdChoice scholarship program in 2005 and continue to expand it. The EdChoice Expansion program was introduced in 2014 and has also expanded in scope. The performance-based EdChoice program is available to students in underperforming school districts, while the income-based EdChoice program is available to low-income students. The Cleveland Scholarship is for all K-12 students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The other two scholarships, Autism and JPSN, are for autistic students and students with any disability, respectively.

What started as a program to provide alternative education options for students in what the state perceived to be underachieving schools has now expanded to include students from public schools with high achievement grades. According to a brief by the Northwest Local School District, 47.7% of the buildings on the current list of Ohio schools eligible for vouchers have overall grades of “A,” “B,” or “C” under the state’s report card system. The number of eligible schools has also grown rapidly. During the 2018-19 school year Ohio had fewer than 300 school buildings that were considered eligible; by 2020-21, 1,200 school buildings were eligible: a 300% increase in just two years.[56] Similarly, income-based vouchers are now being proposed for families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level. This expansion would be a costly and needless expansion, subsidizing private education for families that need no help. A family of four could earn up to $120,000 and be considered income eligible. This expansion will make vouchers nearly universal, by providing an additional handout to upper-middle-class families at the expense of public schools.

Vouchers in the state budget

After years of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that have drained resources from public schools, and as COVID has created new pressures, the state further undercuts public schools by pumping hundreds of millions of public dollars into private schools.[57]

The 2022-23 biennial budget expanded funding of private schools, especially through EdChoice and other voucher programs. Traditional, performance-based EdChoice received $212.5 million, and the income-based EdChoice Expansion program received close to $103 million, a combined 61.4% of voucher payments statewide in FY 2022. The Autism and JPSN scholarships received $116.5 million and $76.6 million, respectively, making up 17% and 12.4% of distributed scholarship funds. The Cleveland Scholarship program received $46 million and only makes up 9.1% of distributed scholarship funds.[58]

Legislators have increased voucher payments from state funds since 2014, as illustrated in Figure 6.[59]

Figure 6
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7sKMh/2/

The FSFP funds vouchers directly instead of allowing them siphon away districts’ state funding. Lawmakers increased total voucher allocations from $395.4 million in FY 2020 to $635.1 million in FY 2022.[60]They also increased direct state aid to private schools, though not as dramatically. Policymakers increased funding for “auxiliary services” to private schools from $149.9 million in FY 2021 to $154.1 in FY 2022 and just under $156 million in FY 2023. Meanwhile, “nonpublic administrative cost reimbursement” aid — which reimburses charter schools for the cost of mandated administrative and clerical activities such as preparation, filing and records keeping[61] — increased from $68.9 in FY 2021 to $70.8 in FY 2022 and $71.6 in FY 2023.[62]

Lawmakers have increased spending on vouchers by increasing the amount families can receive. For income-based EdChoice Expansion vouchers for FY 2022-23 the state now awards qualifying K-8 students $5,500 per year and high school students $7,500 per year for tuition at non-public schools, up from previous award amounts in FY 2020-21 which provided $4,650 for K-8 students and $6,000 for students grades 9-12.[63]….

Voucher expansion threatens our public schools

Because of the General Assembly’s continued expansion of voucher programs, more Ohio families are enrolling in them — up from 52,000 in 2019 to 69,991 in 2021. Even accounting for this growth, most voucher students were already attending private school before receiving vouchers.[64] Further, the number of vouchers is a fraction of the number of students served in public schools. When students use state-funded vouchers to attend private schools, even if they were never enrolled in traditional school districts, it means less money in the state budget that could otherwise be spent creating great public schools, which must serve all students.

The Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, a coalition of over 100 school district and 20 education and community groups, took the state of Ohio to court, claiming that EdChoice Expansion violates the constitutional requirement that the state provide a “thorough and efficient system of common schools.” Coalition advocates believe that state lawmakers’ growing investment in vouchers could lead to a school funding system that privileges private education even more in years to come.[65]

Many proponents of voucher expansion have painted it as the state simply supporting parents’ right to choose where their child will be educated, but choice is not the problem, priorities are. The state has not fulfilled its constitutionally mandated responsibility to fairly fund public schools. Key components of the FSFP are still outstanding. Allocating close to $1 billion in public funds for students to take vouchers to private schools is a huge disservice to the 90% of students who attend our public schools.

Ultimately, the way the executive budget proposes to distribute foundation aid over FY 2024-25 will further erode the share going to traditional public schools by allocating a greater share to charters. The proposed budget would send 77.9% of foundation funds to traditional schools, compared to 79.1% in the last budget. Charters would take 10.8%, up from 9.9%. Voucher programs stay at 7.1%, and joint vocational school districts increase to 4.2% from 3.8%.

Recommendations & conclusion

Ohio has underfunded public schools and other essential public services for years.[66] Ohio lawmakers have cut state income taxes since 2005, reducing our ability to provide an equitable education system for all our students, and giving huge windfalls to the wealthiest Ohioans and little or no benefit to people with middle or low incomes.

Policymakers have a constitutional duty to protect public schools. Ensuring a thorough and efficient system of common schools means correcting disparities generated from over-reliance on property taxes by fully implementing the FSFP, with accurate estimates of how much it really costs to educate our kids.

Lawmakers in Ohio need to invest in developing an educator workforce of qualified teachers who are paid fairly for their essential work and strongly supported while doing it. Other pressing issues include a bussing crisis,[67] fewer 5-year-olds prepared for kindergarten,[68]lowered reading and math proficiency scores,[69] chronic absenteeism,[70] and a persistent digital divide.[71]

The state has sufficient revenue to meet these challenges, so long as legislators make public schools and kids a priority. Ohio has the money to fully commit to the FSFP in this budget. Instead of phasing in funding piece by piece, year after year, lawmakers should fully fund it right now. Ohioans must come together to demand lawmakers live up to the promise of the FSFP in the next biennium and beyond.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Ohio: After GOP Lifts Income Caps on Vouchers, Enrollments and Costs Soar

By dianeravitch

February 12, 2024 //

Republicans in the Ohio legislature love vouchers. They don’t love public schools. First, they created vouchers for Cleveland in 1995 as part of a budget bill. The ACLU challenged the program, and the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 decision called Zelman Vs. Simmons-Harris.

Here is a summary at Case Western Reserve University’s website:

On June 27, 2002, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of vouchers, with Justices Sandra Day OConnor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas joining Chief Justice William Rehnquist in delivering the majority opinion. Rehnquist argued that the program is “entirely neutral with respect to religion.” He explained, “It permits genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious. The program is therefore a program of true private choice.” Justice David H. Souter offered a harsh dissent, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. Souter called the ruling “potentially tragic” as a “major devaluation of the establishment clause.”

Souter was right. Cleveland has had its voucher program in place since 1996. Almost 30 years later, it’s clear that it did not improve academic achievement. Cleveland has participated in the NAEP testing since 2003. It is one of the nation’s lowest scoring urban districts, outperforming only Detroit (a city with many charter schools). Vouchers didn’t make education better in Cleveland and may have made it worse by reducing civic investment in the public schools.

Lots of choices—public, charter, and vouchers—no improvements.

Despite the clear evidence of failure in Cleveland, the Ohio legislature created multiple statewide voucher programs. Initially, they were targeted towards specific high-needs groups, including low-income children.

Now, however, the legislature has raised the income cap again. Students are eligible if their family income is 450% of the federal poverty level.. Enrollment more than tripled, from 24,000 to 82,000, and costs are ballooning. But that won’t slow down the rush to universal vouchers, where the state gives a voucher to every student regardless of family income.

The only statewide evaluation of Ohio vouchers was released in 2016. It was sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a rightwing think tank that supports school choice The findings were negative. Vouchers depressed achievement. But no one cared.

Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com reported:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The number of applications for Ohio-funded scholarships for private schools has more than tripled this school year over the last after the state legislature increased both the cash amount of the vouchers and family income eligibility, according to new figures.

So far, the state has paid out $166.9 million for private school tuition this year in one of the voucher programs that the legislature expanded.

But that amount will continue to rise. Most private schools collect tuition on a monthly basis, and not all applications to the program have been granted or even submitted. Parents have until the end of the June to submit voucher applications…

According to the latest figures from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the state’s new K-12 agency:

– Thus far in the 2023-2024 school year, 82,610 students have been awarded scholarships to private schools in the one of the five voucher programs that the legislature expanded. In the 2022-2023 school year, families of 24,320 kids received vouchers.

-An additional 8,582 applications had been received as of Jan. 25 but were in need of a correction or were otherwise incomplete.

DEW has changed the way it’s reporting the dollar amount, as reporters have published dozens of stories about the controversial growth in private school vouchers this year. Previously, it reported how much money the state had committed to private school vouchers in the 2023-2024 school year, based on approved student applications.

For instance, in late October, it had committed $239.8 million for 41,120 students whose applications had been approved at the time. That figure raised eyebrows because it suggested the state could go well over the $397.8 million the General Assembly had budgeted for vouchers this school year.

Since then, the number of applications approved has more than doubled, but the state agency is reporting only how much it has paid out rather than its total commitments to date. Calculating that number is difficult without detailed data because the state awards scholarships based on a sliding income scale.

That means the state spend reported now is about $73 million lower than what the state said in October. However, by the end of June, the amount of state money spent is almost guaranteed to be higher.

In the two-year state budget bill passed over the summer, lawmakers expanded voucher eligibility to all families. Among the changes:

-The General Assembly raised the full voucher award from $5,500 to $6,165 this school year for students in K-8 and from $7,500 to $8,407 in 9-12.

-For the full voucher, lawmakers expanded family income eligibility to 450% of the federal poverty level, or $135,000 for a family of four, from the previous 250% of the federal poverty level, or $75,000 for a family of four.

-Lawmakers removed income caps for all families this year, meaning high-income families also can receive scholarships, but the award decreases the wealthier a family is. For instance, families at 451% to 500% of the poverty level are eligible for $5,200 for K-8 and $7,050 for 9-12.

The state has five private school voucher programs. Some are for children with special needs or for families who live in the boundaries of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The program with explosive growth this year is Education Choice, which is based on income eligibility. (That is different from an EdChoice program for families who live in the boundaries of low-performing public schools.)

So far this school year, 146,544 Ohio students are receiving a scholarship for one of the five voucher programs, costing the state $428.5 million to date.

A Wednesday report about Ohio’s private school vouchers by ProPublica found that parents with kids in private schools were being pressured to apply for vouchers, even if they were against it on principle. Schools pressured lower-income parents to obtain the scholarships first before asking for financial aid. Some schools appeared prepare to raise tuition, because the increase could be absorbed by parents, now that the state was paying a large chunk of their tuition, the reporting found.

What is more, Ohio’s voucher program enables the revival of discrimination that federal law forbids.

Journalist Marylou Johanek writes:

Public financing of parochial school prejudice is the law in Ohio. Take a minute to process, I’ll wait. The state has opened its coffers to Catholic schools that discriminate. The overwhelming amount of Ohio’s voucher money — free taxpayer money to offset private and religious school tuition — goes to Catholic schools.

The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland receives a ton of voucher funding. It just announced a new anti-LGBTQ+ policy in its 84 private religious schools that is blatantly discriminatory. Your tax dollars at work. Against the LGBTQ+ community. Against highly vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.

Turns out the Church’s “all are welcome” spin is a conditional precept based on strict adherence to unchristian bigotry. Church leaders in Cleveland put their flock on notice that the universal invitation of acceptance may be rescinded to those who “openly express disagreement with Church teaching on matters of sex, sexuality, and/or gender in an inappropriate or scandalous way.”

The way Jesus turned nonconformists away.

From here on out, Catholic policy in Cleveland elementary and high schools — that rake in millions in taxpayer-funded vouchers — states that every person is expected “to present and conduct themselves in a manner consistent with their God-given biological sex” or face disciplinary action. Apparently, inclusive, affirming, nonjudgmental love is overrated.

The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland aligned itself with “culture war” extremists attacking people who can’t fight back. When an institution as influential as the Cleveland diocese rolled out sweeping prohibitions on LGBTQ+ expression and support in its diocesan-run and parish schools, it effectively blessed the record wave of hateful anti-LGBTQ+ bills being introduced by right-wing politicians in Ohio and Republican statehouses across the country (500 and counting).

Open the link and read it.

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Unity Group of Chattanooga Protests Vouchers

By dianeravitch

February 8, 2024 //

The supermajority of Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are driving fast and hard to enact universal vouchers, which means the state will subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools, regardless of family income. In every other state that has adopted universal vouchers, most of the students who sought them had never attended public schools. The voucher was used by families who could afford to pay tuition. The voucher was a nice plum for families that didn’t need it. And many of the voucher/receiving schools were openly discriminatory—against students not of their own religion, against LGBT students, against students with disabilities.

The Unity Group is a coalition of African American community leaders in Chattanooga.

It released the following statement:

February 6, 2024

Cc: Unity Group of Chattanooga Opposition to Universal School Voucher Program

This week, the Tennessee General Assembly is expected to begin the process of crafting legislation that would permanently affix universal school vouchers throughout the State.

On the surface, this would appear to be a worthwhile and noble goal. We hear numerous romanticized soliloquies to describe why this is justified, such as providing expanded access, flexibility, choice, and opportunity. The glossy and rosy pictures they paint would have one to believe that universal vouchers were the best thing for schools and students since assorted Crayola boxes, number two pencils, and Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street starting on PBS.

Yet, the research and data paint a starkly different picture. In fact, at a budget hearing held in November 2023, the State’s own Department of Education had to concede that 63 of the 75 schools that received funding from the State’s budget program, well over 80%, were “private “religious “schools in nature. Even more shocking is that last week, a report from the Education Trust concluded that 39% of TN school districts receive less in per-student funding than students that used private school vouchers.

Also last week, a draft plan of the proposed legislation was leaked that illustrated that the expanded voucher program would have no accountability measures, no anti-discrimination provisions, and no safeguards for students with disabilities. It is no wonder that there was consideration to forgo federal education funding because not only does this proposal not pass the smell test, but it very well could be in violation of federal law under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

As a matter of record, there have already been multiple lawsuits launched that have challenged the constitutionality of the State’s voucher program, and in fact in January the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that Davidson and Shelby County families could go forward with a potential suit.

From a fiscal management sense, the projected amount universal vouchers will cost Tennessee taxpayers is murky at best. If the budget shortfalls we have seen occur in other States are any indicator, then we can expect major cost overruns that will go down the well so deep it will eventually run dry.

A 2023 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Education Law Center provides a good analysis on this. In The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, it was found that between 2008-2019, voucher disbursements in at least 7 states doubled in contrast to initial budgetary projections.

In Arizona alone, voucher spending for the current academic year is more than 300 million over initial estimates; it is expected that the State may spend close to 1 billion dollars for their voucher program. In North Carolina, there were reports where some schools received more vouchers than they had students. There are also numerous reports that voucher recipients from states across the country have made highly questionable purchases like theme park tickets, kayaks, trampolines and yes, in one instance a chicken coop.

It does beg the question, will one able to use universal voucher funds to build a chicken coop in Tennessee as we have witnessed in other states.

Perhaps most profoundly, the process in which the universal voucher program is being crafted is both procedurally and fundamentally flawed. While there has been a basic framework “leaked” to the public, there remains critical questions about transparency, accountability, and oversight. The general publichas received little to no official details on this plan, only that the voucher program is being filed as a caption bill which, if we can borrow from a metaphor taught to our youngest students, lacks the “who, what, when, where, why, and how.”

In a perfect world, legislation of such consequence would merit a public hearing where experts on all sides would gather to provide analysis, evaluation, insights, and recommendations. The directly impacted people such as your local school boards and local education agencies would be invited to detail if the proposed legislation would have a positive or negative effect on them. The people of Tennessee, the taxpayers who would ultimately have to foot the bill, would be allowed to give sworn testimonies like they do in their city councils, county commissions and school boards.

Without such a process along these lines, can the legislators in Nashville really be able to measure the temperature across the State? Will they truly be able to establish public faith, confidence or trust if a potentially harmful program is simply ramrodded down the taxpayer’s proverbial throats?

The Economic Policy Institute released a rather frank and somber assessment on the growing school voucher moment in 2023 entitled, “State and local experience proves school vouchers are a failed policy that must be opposed.” They noted that at least 23 voucher bills were introduced in state houses last year, with universal bills passing. They noted that there is, “growing evidence that voucher programs do not serve students and may deepen educational and economic inequality.”

Further assessments found within the report are: (1) Evidence and research suggests vouchers do not improve academic achievement or education outcomes; (2) Vouchers represented a redistribution of school funding; (3) Vouchers benefited more wealthy and affluent areas over low income and rural. Amongst other major points of contention, one of the more profound conclusions of this analysis is that universal vouchers are, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.”

A decision that will affect schools and districts throughout the State, rural and urban, merits greater public discourse, fiscal analysis, and research-based evidence. The lack of this type of transparency will truly make the universal voucher program, “Ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable.” For these reasons, the Unity Group of Chattanooga must be adamantly opposed because this program will not solely be about autonomy, school choice or expanded options, rather, it will be ushering in a new era of Separate but Equal; and for the sake of our children, we must be better than that.

Yours in Abundance,

Unity Group of Chattanooga

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Justice, Privatization, Religion, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

ProPublica: Private Schools in Ohio Urge Parents to Get a Voucher

By dianeravitch

February 1, 2024 //

ProPublica reported that private schools in Ohio are actively encouraging parents to seek vouchers for their children to supplement their tuition. This enables the private schools to reduce student aid and also to raise tuition.

ProPublica said:

Tara Polansky and her husband were torn about where to enroll their daughter when they moved back to Columbus, Ohio, a year and a half ago. The couple, who work for a nonprofit organization and a foundation, respectively, were concerned about the quality of the city’s public schools and finally decided to send her to Columbus Jewish Day School. It was a long drive out to the suburbs every day, but they admired the school for its liberal-minded outlook.

So Polansky was startled when, in September, the school wrote to families telling them to apply for taxpayer-funded vouchers to cover part of the $18,000 tuition. In June, the Republican-controlled state government had expanded the state’s private-school voucher program to increase the value of the vouchers — to a maximum of $8,407 a year for high school students and $6,165 for those in lower grades — and, crucially, to make them available to all families.

For years the program, EdChoice, targeted mostly lower-income students in struggling school districts. Now it is an entitlement available to all, with its value decreasing for families with higher incomes but still providing more than $7,000 annually for high school students in solidly middle-class families and close to $1,000 for ones in the wealthiest families. Demand for EdChoice vouchers has nearly doubled this year, at a cost to Ohio taxpayers of several hundred million additional dollars, the final tally of which won’t be known for months.

That surge has been propelled by private school leaders, who have an obvious interest: The more voucher money families receive, the less schools have to offer in financial aid. The voucher revenue also makes it easier to raise tuition.

“The Board has voted to require all families receiving financial assistance … to apply for the EdChoice Program. We also encourage all families paying full tuition to apply for this funding,” read the email from the Columbus Jewish Day School board president. She continued: “I am looking forward to a great year — a year of learning, growing, and caring for each other. Let’s turn that caring into action by applying for the EdChoice Program.”

Polansky bridled at the direction. She had long subscribed to the main argument against private school vouchers: that they draw resources away from public education. It was one thing for her family to have chosen a private school. But she did not want to be part of an effort that, as she saw it, would decrease funding for schools serving other Columbus children. Together with another parent, she wrote a letter objecting to the demand.

“For this public money to go to kids to get a religious education is incredibly wrong,” she told ProPublica. “I absolutely don’t want to pull money out of an underfunded school district.”

For decades, Republicans have pushed, with mixed success, for school voucher programs in the name of parental choice and encouraging free-market competition among schools. But in just the past couple of years, vouchers have expanded to become available to most or all children in 10 states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. The expansion has been spurred by growing Republican dominance in many state capitals, U.S. Supreme Court rulings loosening restrictions on taxpayer funding for religious schools, and parental frustration with progressive curricula and with public school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the expanded programs are experiencing high demand, which voucher advocates are taking as affirmation of their argument: that families would greatly prefer to send their children to private schools, if only they could afford them.

But much of the demand for the expanded voucher programs is in fact coming from families, many quite affluent, whose children were already attending private schools. In Arizona, the first state to allow any family to receive public funding for private schools or homeschooling, the majority of families applying for the money, about $7,000 per student, were not recently enrolled in public school. In Florida, only 13% of the 123,000 students added to the state’s expanded school-choice program had switched from public school.

In Ohio, the effects of the move toward looser eligibility in recent years was clear even prior to last summer’s big expansion: Whereas in 2018, fewer than a tenth of the students who were newly receiving vouchers that year had not attended a public school the year before, by 2022, more than half of students who were new to EdChoice were already in private schools.

That ratio will climb much higher in Ohio, now that the vouchers are available for families at all income levels and private schools are explicitly telling parents to apply. The surge in applications this school year has been so dramatic that it’s nearing the total enrollment for all private schools in the entire state.

At St. Brendan’s the Navigator, on the other side of the Columbus beltway from the Jewish Day School, the missive arrived on the last day of July. The letter, signed by the Rev. Bob Penhallurick, called the expanded vouchers a “tremendous boon to our school families and Catholic education across Ohio” and said that all families were “strongly encouraged to apply for and receive the EdChoice scholarship.” He noted that, depending on their income level, families could receive up to $6,165 for each child — nearly covering the $6,975 tuition. “Even a small scholarship is a major blessing for you, the school, and the parish,” he wrote.

And then he added, in italics, that if a family did not apply for the vouchers, “we will respect that decision,” but that “supplemental financial aid from the parish in this case will require a meeting” with either himself or another pastor at the school…

At Holy Family School near Youngstown, the directive arrived a few days later, on Aug. 3. “As you are aware, ALL students attending Holy Family School will be eligible for the EdChoice Scholarship. We are requesting that all families register their child/ren for this scholarship as soon as possible,” wrote the school’s leadership. And then it added in bold: “It is imperative that you register for EdChoice for each of your students. We are waiting to send invoices until your EdChoice Scholarship has been awarded.”

In an interview at the school, Holy Family principal Laura Parise said the push to apply for EdChoice had succeeded. “One hundred percent of our students are on it,” she said. “We made it that way — we made our families fill out the form, and we’re going from there.”

There is more. Open the link.

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Oklahoma: Should the Public Fund a Religious Charter School?

By dianeravitch

January 28, 2024 //

The big issue currently raising hackles in Oklahoma is whether a Catholic Church should be allowed to operate a publicly-funded virtual charter school.

Leave aside, for the moment, whether the state should be funding a religious school at all.

Leave aside, for now, the fact that multiple evaluations have reported that virtual schools get worse results than brick-and-mortar schools.

Leave aside, for now, the fact that Ohlahoma already has seven virtual schools already.

The state attorney general is opposed to it.

But Governor Kevin Stitt and the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual School Board approved the idea (3-2), so the issue will be resolved in court.

Governor Stitt just selected one of the Board’s members to be his top education advisor:

OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma official who voted in favor of founding the nation’s first religious charter school will serve as Gov. Kevin Stitt’s next education secretary.

Nellie Tayloe Sanders, of Kingfisher, is the third member of the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board to join the Stitt administration. She is the second to do so after approving a Catholic charter school in a landmark 3-2 vote last year. Stitt was a staunch advocate of the school.

As education secretary, Sanders will serve as the governor’s top adviser on school policy. She will be paid $25,000 a year for the position, according to the Governor’s Office.

Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board member Nellie Tayloe Sanders, left, pictured at an Oct. 9 meeting in Oklahoma City, is Gov. Kevin Stitt’s choice to be his education secretary. (Photo by Nuria Martinez-Keel/Oklahoma Voice)

“My goal is to empower parents with choices and support teachers in unleashing their full potential – moving beyond the constraints of politics and bureaucracy,” Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. “Governor Stitt’s commitment to educational freedom resonates deeply with me.”

Sanders resigned from her seat on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board on Sunday in an email to Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat, his office confirmed. The Senate leader had appointed Sanders to the board in February to oversee the seven Oklahoma charter schools that primarily teach online.

However, she won’t leave the board entirely. The education secretary holds a non-voting seat.

The board’s president, Robert Franklin, said the news of her appointment to the governor’s Cabinet caught him off guard.

“If you were asking me (about) a laundry list of colleagues that I thought had a seasoned background and a footprint in Oklahoma’s educational landscape, I wouldn’t have picked Mrs. Sanders,” Franklin said. “But I know she’s thoughtful. I know she’s kind. I know she’s an engaging person. So, I certainly wish her well.”

In other developments, the judge in the Catholic virtual charter school case stepped aside, because he had relationships with people on both sides of the issue.

Lawyers involved said the case was starting all over because the state board had entered into a contract with St. Isidore, and the board itself had new members.

One new board member said that the Catholic Church sponsoring the school would not provide a Catholic education, but the church disagreed.

Appointed Oct. 27, one of the new SVCSB members is Brian Shellem, a former Edmond mayoral candidate and the president of Advanced Automotive Equipment.

Shellem has also been appointed by Gov. Kevin Stitt to serve on the new Statewide Charter School Board, which the Oklahoma Legislature created last session to replace the SVCSB on July 1. It will become the new board overseeing virtual charter schools and other charter schools.

Shellem said that although he was not a board member when the SVCSB decided to authorize St. Isidore, he supports more educational choices for students, as long as those choices meet the right educational standards and requirements.

“The (St. Isidore) contract is not to provide religious education, it’s to provide education and a curriculum that the state requires, and I don’t think they should be disqualified because they are a Catholic school,” Shellem said. “I equate it to if you go to a car wash and you pay $20 for a car wash and then they go, ‘Hey, we’re gonna give you for free the wheel package and the air freshener,’ and they don’t charge you, [now you’ve got] a $5 value, but we’re not charging you for it. The state’s not contracting them to teach religious education, but it happens to be in that environment. They’re getting contracted to teach the curriculum that’s required by the state.”

Throughout their application process, St. Isidore leaders have indicated that the school intends to provide students with a Catholic education.

Shellem said he believes charter schools are public schools, so he could understand how including the proverbial extra car wash package that is Catholic education could create some legal questions to be dealt with in court.

[Note: You may have seen this article Friday. I moved it because it was supposed to appear today.]

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools

Thom Hartmann: What Did the Founders Say About Separation of Church and State?

By dianeravitch

January 25, 2024 //

Thom Hartmann is at his best in this column. He writes about the current GOP obsession with a “Christian America” and compares it to what the Founding Fathers wrote about the role of religion in their new nation. Added to the current pandering is the fact that we now have a Supreme Court majority of six-three that elevates “religious freedom” above the Constitutional prohibition of “establishment” of religion. That means trouble for those of us who do not want to live in a theocracy.

He writes:

Monday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was National Religious Freedom Day. But what does that mean, and for whom? What would the “Christian America” that Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are calling for look like?

When I was a kid, my parents and our pastor taught me that Jesus specifically, and religion more generally, was all about peace, love, and people caring for each other. That’s what’s explicitly at the core of Jesus’ most famous and clear teachings at the Sermon On The Mount and in the Parable of the Goats and Sheep.

But the Republican Party, thirsting for more voters in the 1980 Reagan vs Carter election, realized that Southern Baptists had helped give the White House to Carter in 1976 (he’s a Southern Baptist). If they could just peel those voters away from Carter and the Democratic Party, they believed they could win big.

The issue the Reagan campaign decided to use to bring religious voters to Republicans in that election was abortion, a topic Jesus never discussed.

Up until that election, both former Governor Reagan and former CIA Director Bush had been open supporters of a woman’s right to choose; in the run-up to the primaries Reagan became an unabashed foe of abortion, and George H.W. Bush changed his position on the issue when he joined the ticket in 1980.The legacy of those decisions has brought us Trump, Qanon, and badly damaged large parts of what’s left of Christianity in America (church attendance is collapsing). It’s turned both religion and politics into armed camps. At the founding of our Republic, if there was any one topic that the Framers of the Constitution were mostly in agreement about, it was the importance of keeping religion separate from government.

More recently, even uber-Catholic Antonin Scalia wrote, in the 1990 Employment v Smith case rejecting Native Americans’ petition to overrule federal regulations and legally use peyote (an outlawed substance) for religious purposes:

“The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this. …

“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Don’t tell today’s Republicans that’s a bad thing, though: Scalia’s list is a good summary of many of the realms they’re currently targeting. The six Catholic extremist Republicans on the Court appear anxious to overturn any final semblance of secular primacy in law, using religion as their excuse.

It’s gotten so absurd and frankly obscene that a reporter recently spoke with a woman at a Trump rally sporting a crucifix and a tee-shirt that said “Hang Joe Biden For Treason”; she was essentially arguing that Jesus would be all in favor of watching Biden’s execution.

Monday was Religious Freedom Day because it commemorated the publication of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That early publication (he was 33) not only asserted that all citizens should be free to practice whatever religion they wanted but, more importantly, that nobody should be persecuted for holding either a religious belief or no religious belief.

Jefferson thought it was more important than his having been a two-term president: when he wrote his own epitaph, he only included his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his founding America’s first free university (University of Virginia), and his Statute for Religious Freedom.

Jefferson and Madison had a philosophical debate over which would be more dangerous: a religious individual who wants to bring religion into government like Christian nationalist Mike Johnson, or the government endorsing or subsidizing any particular religious group or belief like Trump is promising.

Jefferson (a Deist) was worried about religious leaders (a letter of his is *footnoted below) corrupting government; Madison (a Christian) was more worried about government corrupting his beloved religion.

For example, on February 21, 1811, President Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, Madison believed, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of both money and political power to religious leaders.

In Madison’s mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty — a function of government — and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer’s purse.

Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a “legal agency” — a legal precedent — that would break down the walls of separation the Founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from religious zealots gaining political power.

Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down the proposed law:

“Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of poor children of the same;…” which, Madison said, “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, flatly rejected government supporting religion in any way whatsoever, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:

“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”

He added in that same letter:

“I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”

Now we see that both were right, although Madison probably had the edge: when the GOP offered evangelicals political power and big money in 1980, it so corrupted many conservative Christian churches that they’ve today put Trump above Jesus.

It’s gotten so bad that fully a third of evangelicals polled said they supported violence to advance political goals, which is quite literally the opposite of Jesus’ telling the Pharisees:

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Not to mention his extensive preaching about nonviolence. He was MLK’s role model, for G-d’s sake.

Instead, Trump’s followers are busily sharing memes of him as their savior, while Speaker Johnson and his fellow travelers on the Supreme Court are working as hard as they can to open the doors (and money) of government to religious leaders.

Religion has a lot to offer people and often fulfills a basic need to stand in awe of creation, to feel at one with everything and everyone. Every culture all the way back to the Neanderthals have engaged in religious rituals, particularly around funerals: no tribe or group has ever been found that entirely lacked what could be described as religious rituals.

But, as our founders pointed out, religion should be separated from government as far as possible. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute says it explicitly:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Instead, Republicans are exploiting that religious urge built into us humans to cynically pander for the votes of those people who’ve put religion at the center of their lives.

They’re reinventing America as a country where religion dictates women’s healthcare, specifies who can marry whom, and destroys the lives of people who weren’t born heterosexual.

They’re promoting movies/vids portraying Trump as the incarnation of Jesus, a bizarre sort of Second Coming worthy of North Korean propaganda.

They’re using religion as an excuse for bigotry, a rationale for government tax subsidies of churches that promote Republicans from the pulpit, and a weapon to wield against those they condemn as being insufficiently pious.

In the process, they’re harming both religion and our government.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Hoax, Propaganda, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump

Arkansas: Governor Assures Christian Schools That They Can Continue to Discriminate

By dianeravitch

January 25, 2024 //

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to a summit of Christian school leaders and pledged to them that the state would not prevent them from discriminating against students or teachers or families if they accepted students with vouchers. Governor Sanders, who previously served at Trump’s press secretary, pushed through legislation launching vouchers and protecting the state against indoctrination and “critical race theory,” even though there was never any evidence that teachers were “indoctrinating” students or teaching “critical race theory.” Nothing quite so satisfying as battling non-existent demons, ‘cause you always win. But Governor Sanders had to reassure the church folk that they could go on discriminating.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made her support of Christian education crystal clear Monday at the Arkansas Christian School Summit held at the Capital Hotel — even hinting to a superintendent that she would fight to allow schools to set their own rules.

Brad Jones, the superintendent of Fayetteville Christian School, told Sanders of being forced to display an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission poster that includes sexual orientation as a protected class.

“We were like, ‘Whoa!’ Of course we discriminate, we’re a Christian school,” Jones said, then asked if that non-discrimination requirement could find itself in the LEARNS Act down the road with future administrations.

Sanders said there’s certainly going to be things that are fluid in the future.

“As much as we want things like the banning of indoctrination and CRT that we put into Arkansas LEARNS, that doesn’t mean that a future legislature administration can’t come up behind us and make changes down the line,” she said.

She urged Jones and the others in the room to be diligent about engaging and continuing to build those coalitions of support “to make sure like-minded people are representing you” in the Arkansas Legislature.

One comment said:

It’s disgusting they’re so open in their disdain. Imagine being proud of that.

Pretty sure Jesus didn’t feel that way.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Why Rightwingers Oppose Public Schools

By dianeravitch

January 18, 2024 //

Thom Hartmann continues to amaze me, with his steady production of powerful articles. This one is especially important for the readers of this blog, whose primary purpose is to strengthen and protect our public schools.

Thom Hartmann writes:

In 1776, British economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a book that laid out the principles that modern economies have operated under for centuries (with the exception of the Reagan Revolution years of 1981-2021). In addition to arguing for a strong domestic manufacturing base and high taxes on the wealthy, Smith pointed out that one of the things that most directly constitutes the wealth of a nation is its educated workforce and well-informed populace (as a result of that education).

From Thomas Jefferson creating the first tuition-free American college (the University of Virginia), to Horace Mann’s advocacy of public schools in the late 19th century, right up until 1954, this was an uncontroversial position. It’s why every developed country on Earth has a vibrant public school system and — with the exception of the US since Reagan ended free college in California — most developed countries offer free or near-free college to their citizens.

But in 1954, the US Supreme Court upset the education apple cart by declaring in their Brown v Board case that “separate but equal” schools, segregated by race, were anything but “equal.” That decision fueled two movements that live on to this day.

The first was the rightwing anti-communist movement spearheaded by the John Birch Society, which was heavily funded back then by Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. They put up billboards across the country demanding that Americans rise up and “Impeach Earl Warren,” who was then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for requiring “communist” racial integration of our schools.

The second was the private, all-white “academy” movement that has morphed over the years into charter schools and the “school choice” movement of today. It received a major boost when the white supremacist co-founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, published a widely-read and influential article in 1955explicitly calling for what he called “education vouchers” to fund all-white private schools to “solve the national crisis” the Court had created.

In 1958 when the Virginia Supreme Court went along with the US Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision and ordered that state’s schools desegregated, the governor shut downevery public school in the state. Prince Edward County’s schools were still closed in 1964, when they were finally ordered to open by the courts.

Hundreds of “segregation academies” opened across the South; in Mississippi, for example, 41,000 white students left public schools to attend these academies in just the one year of 1969. Parents had to pay the tuition themselves, but they were willing to do so to avoid their children having to interact with Black, Hispanic, or Asian kids.

The turning point for the Republican Party was 1964, when President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed and signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, one Southern Democratic politician after another changed party affiliation to the GOP so they could continue to argue against “forced integration” of public schools.

The Republican war on public schools burst into the open with the Reagan Revolution, when Education Secretary Bill Bennett oversaw a 30 percent cut in federal aid to public schools following Reagan’s promise to abolish the Department altogether. Every Republican running for president since has made a similar promise or claimed the need to end the Education Department.

Bill Bennett wasn’t shy about explaining why it was necessary to gut public schools, after the Supreme Court had ordered they must be racially integrated. Bennett wanted to privatize public education — as did Trump’s former Education Secretary, billionaire Betsy DeVos — and is probably most famous for his statement that gives us a clue as to why this idea of ending public education is so persistent in the GOP:

“If you wanted to reduce crime,” Bennett said on the radio, “you could, if that were your sole purpose; you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

LISTEN NOW · 0:17

Could it be that it’s all about keeping white children away from Bennett’s Black babies? Is simple racism what’s animating the GOP’s antipathy toward public education?

One clue is that the idea of ending public education in America goes back even farther than Bennett or Reagan to a single moment and a single court decision.

When I was born, in 1951, Republicans loved public schools. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to build gleaming new public schools all across the United States: I attended one, as did perhaps a majority of my generation.

But then came the Supreme Court, with their Brown v Board decision.

In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools desegregated. The “Little Rock Nine” — nine Black children trying to desegregate Little Rock Central High School — became nationally famous when Governor Orval Faubus prevented them from entering the school that fall, provoking Eisenhower to call up federal troops to escort the children to class.

Faubus called a referendum — an election — and the good citizens of Little Rock voted 19,470 to 7,561 to shut down their entire school system rather than comply with Eisenhower’s order. That, in turn, led back to the Supreme Court, which, in the fall of 1958, ruled unanimously in Cooper v Aaron that the Brown v Board desegregation order was, in fact, now the law of the land for public education.

In response, whites-only private schools and “academies” began springing up across the nation, many run by all-white churches. (Jerry Falwell tried, in 1966, to open an all-white school; in 1980 he became Reagan’s main advisor on merging the white supremacist faction of evangelical Christians — also triggered by Brown v Board — into the GOP.)

Thus, in 1958 the governor of Virginia closed all the public schools in racially mixed Warren County, Norfolk, and Charlottesville; Prince Edward County’s public schools remained closed for a full five years.

While that’s the foundational history of what has become the GOP’s war on public education, for most of the past 40 years Republicans have merely claimed vague libertarian principles when they try to explain what they ironically call “school choice.”

It wasn’t until Donald Trump gave them permission — and showed them how politically potent it could be — to unleash their inner racists that the GOP went public with overt white supremacy as a core value for the party.

While Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a little-known 1993 analysis of structural racism pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell taught only in law school, rightwing influencer Christopher Rufo popularized the term with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox “News” show.

From there, it echoed around the GOP for a few months before catching fire across rightwing hate radio, podcasts, and Fox. Pretty soon white supremacist militia members were showing up at school board meetings threatening members that “we know where you live.”

Republicans anxious to stoke the fears of their white racist base began inveighing against teaching CRT in public schools — even though such a thing had never happened — and passing laws so loosely worded as to bar any meaningful teaching or classroom discussion of America’s racial history.

All-white private schools funded with taxpayer dollars have become the darlings of Republicans. In most cases these schools don’t need to flout the law by declaring their segregated status: Black, Asian, and Hispanic parents most often simply aren’t interested in enrolling their children in schools that proudly proclaim they will not allow a drop of “CRT,” true American history, or real science education in their classrooms.

The issue of privatizing public schools came up in Arizona in 2018 with a statewide ballot initiative that would extend free school vouchers to every student in the state: it was defeated by voters by a 2:1 ratio. Writing for The Arizona Republic, columnist Laurie Roberts was unambiguous in her description of the state’s voters’ horror at the ballot initiative:

“Actually, they didn’t just reject it. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it. Then they backed up and ran over it again.”

Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered state, though, didn’t much care about the will of the voters. Appealing exclusively to their white racist “Christian” base, they pushed what was essentially that same proposal through the GOP-controlled state legislature and it was signed into law last year by Republican then-Governor Doug Doocey.

In giving every student in the state the ability to opt out of public education with a taxpayer-funded voucher, Doocey established a new benchmark in the war against racially integrated public schools that was matched this year by Florida, Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah.

Legislation to gut public schools and replace them with vouchers for private schools have failed in six states so far (Georgia, Texas, Idaho, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota), but Republicans are not letting go. This year voucher bills were introduced in at least 24 states.

The fact that most of the nation’s public school teachers are union members has given Republicans another good reason, in their minds, to do everything possible to destroy public schools. As Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimedlast year, in the minds of Republicans the American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten is “the most dangerous person in the world.”

Republicans also love the fact that voucher programs mostly subsidize upper-income families, while educationally ghettoizing the children of low-income parents. Vouchers almost never cover all the costs of attending a private school, so they primarily serve as a government handout to the mostly upper-middle-class white families who already wanted to send their kids to today’s version of the segregation academies.

Once the public schools are largely dead, Republicans will begin lobbying to “reduce spending” by cutting the amount allocated for the vouchers, locking the emerging two-tier status of publicly funded education into place.

For the moment, though, private schools are a booming industry as a result of the GOP’s embrace of Friedman’s vouchers. In Florida, for example, they have virtually no rules or standards for the over-one-billion-dollars the state shovels into its private schools: while public schools must disclose their graduation rates, how they spend their money, and let anybody examine their curriculum, private academies have no such rules in many Republican-controlled states, even though they’re receiving public monies.

Many private schools across the country operate with untrained and uncertified “teachers,” have no clear standards for graduation, and refuse to teach “controversial” subjects like evolution, climate science, and the racial history of America.

Which brings us to organized religion, the other recipient of big bucks because of the school voucher movement. Schools affiliated with churches are now raking in billions every month across the US, and Republicans — who continue to push for unconstitutional things like mandatory public school prayer — pander daily to fundamentalists who don’t want their kids exposed to science or history.

Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized this practice of shoveling taxpayer funds to churches and religious schools in their notorious Carson v Makin decision last year. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:

[In just five short years this Court has] “shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars.” This decison “continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Which is exactly what the GOP wants. As SenDem recently wrote for Daily Kos:

“Laura Ingraham claimed that ‘a lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents.’ Fox’s Greg Gutfeld similarly declared that private school vouchers are needed because public schools are ‘a destructive system’ and described teachers as ‘KKK with summers off.’

“Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has called public schools ‘a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.’ Donald Trump declared, ‘public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs.’ And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called them taxpayer-funded indoctrination centers that need to end, which is a bit ironic since she is the poster child for the necessity of funding public education.”

Sweden has been flirting with libertarianism for a few decades and was the first developed country to offer American-style school vouchers to all kids so they could attend private, for-profit public schools. Just a month ago, their government proclaimed the experiment a disaster and is trying to figure out how to shut down the private schools and re-establish a public education system.

Public schools were the great social and economic leveler for the last century of American history; Republicans want to end that and instead advantage wealthy children over their lower-income peers, particularly those whose skin is darker than Trump’s spray tan.

Public schools (and free college) made it possible for America to produce an explosion of invention and innovation throughout the mid-20th century; now other countries are surpassing us, as the dumbing-down of our kids has become institutionalized in Red state after Red state.

And public schools gave many students their first experience of interacting with people who look different from them and grew up under different circumstances, awakening many young people to the discrimination and unfairness inherent in how America has historically treated minorities.

All of which explains why Republicans so badly want to put an end to public education in America.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools

Newly Surfaced “Moms for Liberty” Video Shows Their Religious Extremist Agenda

By dianeravitch

December 23, 2023 //

Moms for Liberty pretends to be about freedom, idealism, and parental rights. What could be more American than respecting the right of everyone to practice the religious faith of their choice or none at all?

That’s not what M4L wants.

This recently discovered video reveals their religious agenda.

Jennifer Cohn reported in The Bucks County Beacon:

On February 14, 2021 (Valentine’s Day), Moms for Liberty (M4L) advisory board member Erika Donalds stood with her husband, Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL), on a brightly lit stage inside a darkened Florida church. Clutching a microphone, Erika declared that, “We will … rise up as the most powerful voting bloc and political force in the entire world as Christians!”

The event was hosted by Truth and Liberty Coalition, a Colorado-based Christian Right nonprofit that seeks to take over public school boards in Colorado and beyond. The video from the event (which I recently unearthed) began with an announcement: “We believe we have a mandate to bring godly change to our nation and the world through the seven spheres or mountains of influence.”

M4L is a nationwide “parental rights” organization. Like Truth and Liberty, M4L strives to take over and transform public school boards in their own Christian “conservative” image. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated M4L as an extremist group due to their anti-LGBTQ+ policies and ties to the Proud Boys, which led the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The organization’s ties to religious zealotry, however, have received less attention.

“Truth and Liberty,” the nonprofit that hosted Mr. and Mrs. Donalds, was founded by pastor Andrew Wommack, who has said that gay people should wear warning labels on their foreheads. Its board of directors includes Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist, who said in 2020 that America “must destroy the public education system before it destroys us.”

Wallnau also popularized the “seven mountains” mandate trumpeted by Truth and Liberty. The mandate is a supposedly divine strategy used by Christian supremacists in order to achieve societal dominion for God, as I’ve reported previously. They seek control over these seven “mountains” or “spheres”: business, government, family, religion, media, entertainment, and education.

In addition to Wallnau, Truth and Liberty’s board of directors includes David Barton, a “seven mountains” proponent with a dubious “doctorate” whose books and lectures teach that the separation between church and state is a myth. Barton had one of his books pulled in 2012 because the “basic truths just were not there,” according to the publisher.

Barton interviewed M4L co-founder Tina Descovich last year. His son, Tim Barton, spoke during M4L’s 2023 summit.

The younger Barton has said that “God never intended education to be secular.”

How does Tim Barton know what God intended?

Please open the link and read the article, then watch the video.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Religion, Separation of church and state

Ohio: Fund Public Schools, Not Vouchers

Ohio: Charters and Vouchers Defund the Public Schools

Ohio: After GOP Lifts Income Caps on Vouchers, Enrollments and Costs Soar

Unity Group of Chattanooga Protests Vouchers

ProPublica: Private Schools in Ohio Urge Parents to Get a Voucher

Oklahoma: Should the Public Fund a Religious Charter School?

Thom Hartmann: What Did the Founders Say About Separation of Church and State?

Arkansas: Governor Assures Christian Schools That They Can Continue to Discriminate

Thom Hartmann: Why Rightwingers Oppose Public Schools

Newly Surfaced “Moms for Liberty” Video Shows Their Religious Extremist Agenda

Search All Posts

Previous posts

Recent posts

Top posts

Follow blog via email

Follow blog via RSS reader

Blog Stats

Search All Posts

Previous posts

Recent posts

Blog Topics

Top posts

Follow blog via email

Follow blog via RSS reader

Blog Stats