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Chris Tomlinson: Making Texas a Christian State

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2025 //
8

Chris Tomlinson is an award-wining columnist for The Houston Chronicle. Whatever he writes is worth reading. In this post, he describes the State Legislature’s eagerness to promote Christianity as the one true faith in Texas. He calls these Bible-thumpers the “Texas Taliban.”

He writes:

The Ten Commandments will hang in every public school classroom, teachers will set aside time for prayer, books that undermine the white patriarchy will be hard to find and access to sex toys will be strictly controlled if Texas’ Christian nationalist lawmakers get their way.

Republican state Sen. Phil King of Weatherford’s Senate Bill 10 would require public schools to display a 16-by-20-inch framed poster of the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in every classroom.

Never mind that a similar law passed in Louisiana is blocked while the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals considers arguments that the Constitution’s First Amendment forbids schools from promoting Christianity. Religious texts have been explicitly banned in public schools since 1980 under a Supreme Court ruling.

Right-wing lawmakers keep insisting the United States is a Christian nation, no matter what history tells us the founders intended.

“Our schools are not God-free zones,” state Sen. Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican, declared. His Senate Bill 380 would allow schools to organize prayer and scripture-reading sessions.

Sen. Angela Paxton, wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, authored Senate Bill 13 to ban more books from public schools because past bans did not go far enough. The bill would create “Local School Library Advisory Councils to oversee school districts’ procurement of new library materials.” I can imagine who will volunteer for that duty.

It’s not just the Senate where Lt. Gov. Dan “I’m a Christian first” Patrick sets the agenda. Republicans in the House want to control retail stores.

Sex toys would only be available for sale in sexually oriented businesses, such as strip clubs, under House Bill 1549 by state Rep. Hillary Hickland of Belton. Gov. Greg Abbott handpicked her to oust an incumbent Republican who opposed school vouchers.

At the Texas Capitol, the fight to be free from religion never ends.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

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

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

Tennessee: Legislature Passes Universal Vouchers, State Will Pay for All Students

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2025 //
13

Governor Bill Lee was determined to get a universal voucher bill, regardless of which families get the money or what it costs the state. Since Republicans control the legislature, he got what he wanted. The plan will be phased in.

The legislature knows that most vouchers will subsidize private school tuition. They probably know that vouchers don’t raise academic achievement. They surely know that Tennessee students did well on the national test, NAEP, compared to most other states. And they know that paying the tuition of all the students who attend religious schools and private schools will be a heavy financial burden.

The only thing that is not clear is which billionaire or billionaires was behind the state Republicans’ readiness to sabotage their public schools.

None of that matters.

Marta A. Aldrich reported for Chalkbeat:

Tennessee lawmakers on Thursday approved Gov. Bill Lee’s universal private school voucher bill, creating a new track for educating K-12 students statewide.

The 54-44 vote in the House, where Democrats and some rural Republicans joined to oppose the program, came after four hours of debate, including dozens of failed attempts to add amendments aimed at strengthening accountability and protections for students with disabilities, among other things.

The Senate later voted 20-13 to pass Lee’s Education Freedom Act.

The Republican governor called the bill’s passage “a milestone in advancing education in Tennessee.” He is expected to quickly sign his signature education bill.

“I’ve long believed we can have the best public schools & give parents a choice in their child’s education, regardless of income or zip code,” he said on social media.

Tennessee joins a dozen states that have adopted similar programs allowing families, regardless of their income, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public education for their children.

President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that frees up federal funding and prioritizes spending on school choice programs.

Lee’s office did not immediately respond when asked if the federal order has implications, financial or otherwise, on Tennessee’s Education Freedom Act.

Also this week, results of a major national test show that Tennessee students held their ground in math and reading, in a year when average student test scores declined nationwide.

The new voucher program is scheduled to launch in the upcoming school year with 20,000 “scholarships” of $7,075 each to aid families toward the cost of a private education. Half of them will be for students whose family income is below a certain threshold — $173,000 for a family of four. Those income restrictions will be lifted during the program’s second year. The number of available vouchers can grow by 5,000 each year thereafter.

About 65% of the vouchers are expected to be awarded to students who already attend private schools, with 35% going to students switching out of public schools, according to the legislature’s own analysis of the proposal….

The packages will cost almost $1 billion this year in a state that has seen its revenues drop because of tax breaks for corporations and businesses enacted in 2024 under another initiative from the governor.

The Education Freedom Act itself will cost taxpayers at least $1.1 billion during its first five years, state analysts say, under a provision that allows the program to grow by 5,000 students annually.

In addition to providing some families with vouchers, the legislation will give one-time bonuses of $2,000 each to the state’s public school teachers; establish a public school infrastructure fund using tax revenues from the sports betting industry that currently contribute to college scholarships; and reimburse public school systems for any state funding lost if a student dis-enrolls to accept the new voucher.

Categories Disruption, Ethics, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

Pete Hegseth’s Un-American Religious Views

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2025 //
21

The Founding Fathers were unequivocally opposed to creating a theocracy. The Constitutuon they wrote provided that there would be no religious tests for any government office. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religion and asserted that Congress would make no law to establish any religion. They did not want the new United States of America to be a Christian nation.

Yet there has always been a vocal minority that does want the U.S. to be a Christian nation.The more diverse we are, the more these extremists want to impose their religion on everyone.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s new Secretary of Defense, is apparently a Christian nationalist. He has Christian nationalist tattoos. Too bad for non-Christians and atheists. He will probably assume that every woman and person of color I a high-ranking position is a DEI hire. Only straight white men, he assumes, are qualified. Like him.

The Guardian reported:

In a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of “sphere sovereignty”, a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson.

In the recordings, Hegseth rails against “cultural Marxism”, feminism, “critical race theory”, and even democracy itself, which he says “our founders blatantly rejected as being completely dangerous”.

For much of the over five hours of recordings, which were published over February and March 2024, Hegseth also castigates public schools, which he characterizes as implementing an “egalitarian, dystopian LGBT nightmare”, and which the podcast host Joshua Haymes describes as “one of Satan’s greatest tools for excising Christ from not just our classrooms but our country”.

Elsewhere in the recordings, Hegseth expresses agreement with the principle of sphere sovereignty, which, in CR doctrine, envisions a subordination of “civil government” to Old Testament law, capital punishment for infringements of that law such as homosexuality, and rigidly patriarchal families and churches.

Julie Ingersoll, a professor and director of religious studies at the University of North Florida who has written extensively about Christian reconstructionism and Christian nationalism, told the Guardian: “When these guys say they believe in the separation of church and state, they’re being duplicitous. They do believe in separate spheres for church and state, but also in a theocratic authority that sits above both.”

Hegseth’s far-right beliefs have garnered attention as his nomination to lead the world’s largest military has proceeded. The former Fox News television star and US National Guard officer, decorated after deployments that included special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has also garnered negative attention over media reports on his allegedly excessive drinking and allegations of sexual assault.

On Hegseth’s probable assumption of a high-ranking cabinet position in the Trump administration, and how he might view his constitutional role, Ingersoll said: “These folks are not particularly committed to democracy. They’re committed to theocracy.”

She added: “If the democratic system brings that about, so be it. If a monarchy brings it about, that’s OK, too. And if a dictatorship does, that’s also OK. So their commitment is to theocracy: the government of civil society according to biblical law and biblical revelation.”

Logan Davis, a researcher, consultant and columnist from Colorado, grew up in a reformed Calvinist church similar to Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which Hegseth now attends, and spent middle and high school in a classical Christian school affiliated to the one Hegseth’s children now attend.

In November he wrote a column entitled “Pete Hegseth and I know the same Christian Nationalists”.

Asked how Hegseth would understand his oath if sworn in as secretary of defense, Davis said: “Hegseth will be swearing to defend the constitution that he, to the extent he is aligned with Doug Wilson, does not believe includes the separation of church and state.”

Asked if Hegseth’s performance of his duties might be influenced by the belief that, as Wilson put it in a 2022 blogpost, “We want our nation to be a Christian nation because we want all the nations to be Christian nations,” Davis said: “I can tell you that the reformed leaders around him … are all sincerely hoping that that is how he will view his mandate.”

Open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Democracy, Freedom, History, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump

U.S. Supreme Court Will Decide Case of Oklahoma Religious Charter School: CODE RED!

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2025 //
40

The U.S. Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will rule on whether Oklahoma taxpayers should pay for a religious charter school. The Court has been inching closer to shattering the wall of separation beteeen church and state. Its 6-3 rightwing majority seems to be eager to find a case where they can rule that states that refuse to pay tuition at religious schools are denying freedom of religion.

Is this the case?

If the Court does decide that Oklahoma must pay tuition for students at religious schools, the majority will have to stop claiming that they are Originalists, bound by the original intent of those who wrote the Constitution. It has never been the policy of any state to pay tuition at any religious school. The Supreme Court has issued a long line of decisions that rule against taxpayer responsibility for religious school tuition.

The effects of such a ruling would be to reduce funding for public schools, which enroll 85-90 percent of all students, to promote racial and religious segregation, and to endorse discrimination since religious and private schools are exempt from federal laws requiring the admission of students without regard to race, religion, gender, or disability.

Troy Closson of The New York Times reported:

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to consider a high-profile case that could open the door to allowing public dollars to directly fund religious schools.

The widely watched case out of Oklahoma could transform the line between church and state in education, and it will come before a court whose conservative majority has broadly embraced the role of religion in public life.

The case centers on a proposal for the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The school would be online, and its curriculum would embed religious teachings throughout lessons, including in math and reading classes.

As a charter school, it would be run independently from traditional public schools. But public taxpayer dollars would pay for the school, and it would be free for students to attend.

The question of whether the government can fully finance a religious school has proved especially divisive within the school choice movement and across Oklahoma. Some conservative Christian leaders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt and Ryan Walters, the firebrand state superintendent who has sought to require teaching from the Bible in public schools, have backed St. Isidore’s creation.

They urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, believing the conservative-leaning court would decide in the school’s favor.

A coalition of religious leaders, advocates of public schools and some other state Republicans say the proposal is unconstitutional. Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, argued it would “open the floodgates and force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination, including radical Islam or even the Church of Satan.”

After St. Isidore was approved by a state board in June 2023 in a narrow 3-to-2 vote, the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked its creation. The justices wrote in a majority opinion that the school would “create a slippery slope” that could lead to “the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.”

Still, as more Republican state legislatures move to support school vouchers and other options for parents to use public money to educate their children in private schools, including religious schools, some legal experts believe that charter schools would become another major arena in the debate.

Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, said that a Supreme Court decision that allows religious charter schools “would represent nothing less than a sea change in constitutional law.”

“It is difficult to overstate the significance of this opinion for our constitutional order and the larger American society,” Mr. Driver said.

The case will present new education questions for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority, which has shown an openness to religion in the public sphere. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the conservative bloc, recused herself from the case but did not explain why.

In a 2022 ruling, the court ruled that a high school football coach had the right to pray on the field after his team’s games.

Other recent cases have barred Maine and Montana from excluding religious schools from state tuition programs or scholarships to students in private schools. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in both cases that states are not required to support religious education, but that those that opt to subsidize private schools cannot discriminate against religious ones.

Supporters of St. Isidore argue that blocking a religious charter school from receiving funding violates the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom. Jim Campbell, the chief legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group representing the Oklahoma state charter board, praised the court’s decision to hear the case.

“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” Mr. Campbell said in a statement. “There’s great irony in state officials who claim to be in favor of religious liberty discriminating against St. Isidore because of its Catholic beliefs.”

The school was initially set to open in August and would be managed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. Leaders of the school say it would accept students of all faiths.

But opponents say that it would run into conflict with the constitutional prohibition on government establishment of religion, infringing on religious freedom. “Converting public schools into Sunday schools would be a dangerous sea change for our democracy,” several organizations, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a joint statement on Friday.

For decades, the hybrid nature of charter schools — sharing features of both public schools and private institutions — has made it difficult for courts to determine how different education issues should apply to them, according to Preston Green, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies educational law.

Still, Mr. Green said he believes St. Isidore’s argument “could be very attractive” to the conservative justices — and that if the court ultimately sides with the charter school, “the implications are potentially huge.”

In the movement to remove barriers to funding religious education, “charter schools are really the next frontier,” Mr. Green said. “And it doesn’t end here.”

Categories Disruption, Extremism, Religion, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Texas Adopts Bible-Based Lessons for K-5 Classes

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2025 //
9

Texas is offering a curriculum for K-5 classrooms that is infused with Biblical stories. It is called the Bluebonnet Learning Materials. Its proponents contend that this cultural knowledge will prepare students to understand art, literature, and history, but the children are way too young to absorb the religious lessons as part of their lifelong knowledge. Critics also complain that one religion is favored above all.

The Houston Chronicle reported:

Controversy has surrounded new state-approved lessons referencing the Bible that are being offered as part of the Texas Education Agency’s elementary reading curriculum, with some confusion on financial incentives to adopt the materials. Months after the State Board of Education approved the materials created through House Bill 1605, some districts still don’t know exactly how the funding will be used and what the limitations are….

The TEA’s Bluebonnet Learning materials are free educational resources owned by the state of Texas. The resources Texas has commissioned include textbooks for grades K-5 in reading and math materials through algebra.

The bill bans materials associated with “Balanced Literacy.”

All materials approved had to meet certain requirements, such as being free of three-cueing content in kindergarten through third grade, the practice of using context clues to find the meaning of unknown words before sounding them out. The law also mandated that materials not be obscene or include harmful content, as delineated in the Texas Penal Code, and that they have parent portal compliance. ..

The resources were built off materials from Amplify, a New York-based publisher, that were purchased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Amplify declined to supply further revisions, according to a story from The 74, after they were allegedly asked to create lessons around certain stories from the Bible but not other world religions. TEA officials said this claim was “completely false” and the material “includes representation from multiple faiths…”

If districts choose a resource from the State Board of Education’s approved list for high-quality instructional materials, they receive an extra $40 per enrolled student on top of the instructional materials and technology allotment, or IMTA, of $171.84 per student. If the district chooses to adopt Bluebonnet, they would also receive an extra $20 for printing the materials, totaling $60 per student…

Both Republicans and Democrats have condemned the Bluebonnet resources for their inclusion of certain Bible-specific lessons and stories. Other religions are referenced in the resources, but according to a study commissioned by the Texas Freedom Network,the religious source material addressed is overwhelmingly Christian. Hinduism is briefly mentioned, despite the significant population of Hindus in Texas. Buddhism and Sikhism are also briefly mentioned. The first version of the Bluebonnet Learning did not include references to Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism, and some deities were characterized as “mythical,” while the truthfulness of the Christian God was not qualified. 

In one kindergarten lesson, students are asked to use sequencing skills to order the creation events as portrayed in Genesis. 

Critics also had concerns that the textbooks whitewashed historical events by using gentler language to describe colonization, such as “share” or “introduce.” In some units, the lessons teach students that abolitionists used their beliefs in Christianity to argue against slavery, without noting that Christianity was also used as a justification for slavery in U.S. history. 

“I really struggled with the Bluebonnet materials, especially on the (English Language Arts) side of things, because, while there was representation from other religions, other faith-based communities, it was overwhelmingly written with Christian bias,” Perez-Diaz said. 

Texas law does require districts to include “religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature” in curricula, but critics felt that the reliance on Christianity at an early age for students goes beyond what the law requires. Conservative critics had said that the interpretation of certain Bible passages was not in-line with all Christian belief systems and that only parents should have the right to teach their children about their religion. 

Categories Bias, Curriculum, Ethics, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Texas

Will New Hampshire Undermine Its Public Schools by Expanding Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2025 //
5

Gary Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, reports on the Legislature’s pending decision on expanding vouchers. It is astonishing that any state is still considering universal vouchers, in light of what we have learned from the experience of every state that has done so.

We know now that the overwhelming majority of vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private and religious schools. In other words, they are for the most part a subsidy for families already able to pay tuition.

We know now that universal vouchers bust the state budget by offering to pay private school tuition.

We know now (see Josh Cowen’s recent book The Privateers) that when poor kids leave public schools for voucher schools, their academic performance declines, often dramatically.

We know now, based on state referenda, that the public opposes vouchers.

Gary Rayno writes about what’s happening in New Hampshire:

The advocates for opening the state’s school voucher program, Education Freedom Accounts, to all students in the state regardless of their parents’ income did a massive public relations and organization effort before the public hearing last week on House 115, which would remove the salary cap from the four-year old program.

While many parents with their children turned out for the public hearing that needed three rooms in the Legislative Office Building to hold the attendees, the people responding electronically —many posting testimony — on the bill were opposed by a more than four-to-one margin, 3,414-791.

Groups like the Koch Foundation funded by Americans for Prosperity sent out at least three email “urgent” messages to its followers encouraging supporters to attend the public hearing.

Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut sent out a press release the day before the public hearing with the headline “New Hampshire’s cost per pupil continues upward trend,” indicating the state’s average per-pupil cost increased from $20,323 last school year to $21,545 this school year and noting the enrollment has been trending down.

In his press release he also noted the average national cost per pupil at $15,591, while noting that New Hampshire’s largest school districts were the cheapest with Manchester at $17,734, Nashua at $18,270, Bedford at $18,498 and Concord at $23,159, while rural Pittsburg, at the very top of the state, has the highest cost at $44,484.

“The taxpayers of New Hampshire have worked hard to support students, families and our public schools, increasing funding by more than $400 million since 2021, resulting in a record high cost per pupil,” Edelblut said. “New Hampshire remains dedicated to continuing efforts to expand educational opportunities and pathways to help every child succeed in a fiscally responsible approach. The persistent trend of declining student enrollment combined with rising costs creates substantial financial strain on school districts, taxpayers and communities, necessitating new and creative approaches to educating our children in a system that can be sustained over the long term.”

In other words these skyrocketing public education costs cannot be sustained, and efforts like the EFA program is the wave of the future for taxpayers and students, although the program offers no guarantees the state money flowing into the program is being used for what it was intended or wisely by parents.

He does not mention that New Hampshire is either 49th or 50th in financial support for K to 12th grade public education, while cities and towns are picking up over 70 percent of the costs of public education and yet their residents are the ones approving the budgets that increased per-pupil spending.

Edelblut also doesn’t mention that the state downshifted the obligation of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 15 years to school districts, municipalities and counties when it stopped paying 35 percent of the retirement costs for employees, or that he has failed over the last five years to request additional money for the special education catastrophic aid program although costs have been rising substantially further downshifting millions more in costs to local school districts.

And the public hearing on the bill was held on one of the earliest days in the session, which says the Republican leadership wants to separate this bill from the state budget as much as possible.

A trend of declining revenues, the drying up of the federal pandemic aid and past surpluses, along with the elimination of the interest and dividends tax, which is a huge benefit to the state’s wealthiest residents, and business tax rate cuts will make difficult work for lawmakers and new Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who gives her first budget address next month.

The GOP leadership doesn’t want to discuss the $100 million in new expenses in HB 115 when budget discussions hit snags over what to fund.

During the public hearing, a number of parents brought their children with them to talk about the wonderful things they have been able to accomplish by using the state taxpayer money for alternative education settings.

Many also trashed public schools saying they failed their children although the public schools continue to serve about 90 percent of the state’s students.

Some of the parents noted public schools don’t align with their beliefs or political philosophies, which really says they do not want their children to be exposed to different beliefs or cultures.

David Trumble of Weare noted that some of the private and religious schools don’t take LGBTQ+, special education or English-as-a-second language students.

“There is nothing universal about universal vouchers. The only universal option is the public schools because they accept every single child and give every one of them a good education. That is why you have a constitutional duty to fund them. You have no obligation to fund the private schools,” Trumble told the House Education Funding Committee.

“Our first obligation is to fund the public schools.”

Under the EFA program, 75 percent of the students did not attend public schools when they joined the program, meaning that neither the school districts nor the state was paying for their education, their parents were.

In other states where universal vouchers have been approved almost all of the new money goes to families currently sending their children to private or religious schools or being homeschooled, which is a new expense to those states just as it would be in New Hampshire, where the potential for additional costs is over $100 million annually.

The money for New Hampshire EFA program comes from the Education Trust Fund which also provides almost all of the state education aid to public schools including charter schools.

The trust fund once had over a $200 million surplus, but ended the last fiscal year June 30, 2024 at $159 million, and is projected to drop to $125 million at the end of this fiscal year.

If the bill passes, it won’t be long before money is drained and the squeeze is on public education because of the new education system set up by the legislature that many told the committee last week lacks accountability and transparency.

Many of the people in opposition to the bill said the state first needs to meet its constitutional obligation to pay for an adequate education for the state’s children before setting up any new program costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

But universal vouchers are not only a priority for New Hampshire Republicans, it is a priority at the national level as well.

It continues a movement begun in the late 1950s and 1960s advised by James Buchanan, an economist from the University of Chicago, who was influenced by Frank Knight as was Milton Friedman.

The plan was to both develop more conservative Republicans through the education system and through state legislatures.

One of the targets was public education and reforming it into a private system where if you have the money you can receive a good education, but if you don’t, well too bad.

While the EFA program was touted as helping lower income parents find an alternative education setting for their children who did not fare well in a public education environment, it has essentially been a subsidy program for parents whose children were already in private and religious schools or homeschooled.

Many of the parents speaking in favor of expanding the EFA program said they wanted every child to experience what they experienced.

Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare, told the committee why should the EFA program be means tested, when public schools don’t require wealthy parents to pay for their children to attend.

That was one of the catch phrases uttered several times during the hearing along with “support for the student not the system.”

Someone had distributed the talking points.

But several opponents noted the program would not help eliminate educational inequity, it would exacerbate it, because a lower-income parent would not be able to afford to send their child to one of the private schools where the average tuition is over $20,000 with a $5,200 voucher, while those already able to send their child to a private school will be able to cut their costs by the same amount.

Once again New Hampshire is a great place to live if you have money, if you don’t, not so much.

The EFA program is part of the push for individual rights over the common good. You see it in education where parents want to remove their child from those who do not have the same beliefs or philosophies, you also see in health care with the establishment of specialty and boutique practices where if you have the money you receive the best care, and in the judicial system where if you have enough money you never have to be accountable for your crimes.

If HB 115 passes, and it probably will, the legislature will have created a situation where the public schools including charter schools will face operating with less state aid, not more as the courts said the state needs, and that will impact many sectors including businesses who will not know if the state has a sufficiently educated workforce or not.

The state should not want businesses asking that question.

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

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Koch Brothers, Lies, New Hampshire, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

The Nation: Linda McMahon’s Very Important Rightwing Think Tank

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2025 //
2

Trump selected Linda McMahon to be the next Secretary of Education. She is well known for making it rich in the world of wrestling entertainment, in partnership with her husband. Less well known is her role as Chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Trump is close to AFPI, which promotes school choice and the “parental rights” movement, which promotes censorship of books and curriculum about racism and LGBT topics. They oppose any teaching that might make students “uncomfortable,” like learning about the history of racism, or that might teach students that LGBT exist.

The Nation published an article by Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza. The article tells the story of the think tank McMahon leads. It was launched after Trump’s loss in 2020 and its policy agenda defines Trump’s plans. To understand what Trump intends to do, learn more about AFPI.

Lewis and Plaza write:

Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)

Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affair

As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.

McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.

Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.

AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.

School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.

What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.

AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.

ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.

For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter systemcaptained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers
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