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Texas: State Board Likely to Approve Biblical Lessons in Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2024 //
33

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle reports that the Texas State Board of Education is on track to approve Bible-based teaching in public schools. The Christian evangelicals are running the show in Texas, with help from Governor Gregg Abbot. They are knocking down the wall of separation between church and state with a sledgehammer. What about the rights of children whose parents are secular or not Christian?

He writes:

The Texas State Board of Education appeared on track to endorse a controversial set of new state-written lesson plans after narrowly defeating an effort to block it on Tuesday.

The lessons and textbooks, known collectively as Bluebonnet Learning, were drafted by the Texas Education Agency. The reading and language arts lessons integrate Biblical stories and characters and are viewed by many as connected to a national effort to return Christianity and prayer into public schools. 

They would likely face a legal challenge if adopted. The SBOE will vote on the curriculum as one of more than 100 sets of lesson plans and textbooks later this week. 

If approved, schools would have the option to use the plans and would receive extra funding if they do. 

The lesson plans have faced criticism from Democrats and some Republicans. Academics have warned that they include teachings from the Bible without contextualizing them as religious beliefs and downplay the role of racism and slavery in American history, while some on the right have argued they teach material too advanced for younger children.

But proponents say the materials are based on a scientific understanding of the best way to teach reading and they believe it will lead to higher standardized test scores.

“There’s a line between indoctrination or evangelism and education. In my view, these stories are on the education side and are establishing cultural literacy,” said Will Hickman, a Houston-area Republican who supported the Bluebonnet curriculum. Hickman added that districts can still choose whether or not to use the lesson plans….

The Bluebonnet curriculum covers kindergarten through 5th grade mathematics and reading, as well as middle school math and algebra…. 

A report from religious scholar David Brockman and the Texas Freedom Network, which has been critical of the lesson plans, said they could effectively turn public schools to Sunday schools by introducing Christian stories and ideas to young kids without contextualizing them properly as religious beliefs. There’s far more focus on Christianity and Jesus Christ than on other world religions, the report says. 

The lesson plans also faced criticism for their teaching of history and downplaying the role of slavery and racism in American history and to the founding fathers and other important American figures. 

Categories Curriculum, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

Kentucky Catholic School Student: Vote NO on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2024 //
4

This post appeared originally in the Louisville Courier-Journal. It has since been posted by The Network for Public Education, whose contents are curated by Peter Greene.

Liam Amick: Trinity won’t let me write about Amendment 2. Here’s why I’m against it.

Liam Amick is a senior at Trinity High School, a Catholic school in Kentucky, where vouchers are on the ballot next week in Amendment 2, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would okay vouchers. Trinity has made support of the Amendment mandatory. Amick would like to disagree, and does so in the Courier Journal.

Every day when I drive into school, I’m greeted by yard signs blazing with the message “YES on 2!” To see these put up at Trinity, a school that generally requests little political discussion at school, was quite a shock.

I’m a “private school kid.” I went to St. Francis of Assisi for first through eighth grades, and I am now a senior at Trinity High School. I will always be indebted to those schools for providing me with fantastic educations and experiences in the most formative years of my life. But to say I am disappointed with Trinity’s stance on Amendment 2 — a Kentucky ballot measure that would allow public tax funding to be used for private schools — would be an understatement.

An even bigger disappointment has been Trinity’s and the Archdiocese of Louisville‘s responses to criticism of their position. When both Trinity’s Student Government and Faculty Senate asked if the “YES on 2!” signs could be taken down, they were told that the archdiocese had asked us to put them up and there was absolutely no chance of them being taken down. Also, the administration doesn’t allow our school journalism program to report on any political topics and or criticisms of Trinity and its policies, so I felt that to share my views I had to look outside of the school.

In my opinion, the desire of non-public schools to support Amendment 2 is logical, but closed-minded. What’s important to remember is that, in Kentucky, 65% of non-public schools are found in Louisville, Lexington and the general Northern Kentucky area. Out of 120 counties in Kentucky, 89 have no access to a non-public school, and well-run, accredited non-public schools aren’t going to magically appear in those counties after the passage of Amendment 2. So, the “school choice” amendment would in fact offer students in these areas no “choice” to go to a different school.

Supporters of Amendment 2 often bring up Kentucky’s 2023 $1 billion budget surplus, claiming that that money will be used to provide funding to public schools and said schools will lose no money. However, that surplus money already has a destination. According to House Appropriations and Revenue Chair Jason Petrie, the extra money has “provided the opportunity to invest more than $2.7 billion over the next two years to improve road, rail, river, air, and water infrastructure.” Although Petrie claims they are also making “targeted investments in school facilities,” the bottom line is that significantly fewer tax dollars would go to public schools, leaving no replacement funding in their wake.

Read the full op-ed here. You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/liam-amick-trinity-wont-let-me-write-about-amendment-2-heres-why-im-against-it/

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Religion, Separation of church and state, Students, Vouchers

Brookings Institution: What Project 2025 Means for Education

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
6

A group of scholars at the Brookings Institution analyzed Project 2025’s proposals for education and their implications.

What struck me as most bizarre about Project 2025 was not its efforts to block-grant all federal funding of schools, nor its emphasis on privatization of K-12 schools. (Block-granting means assigning federal funding to states as a lump sum, no strings attached, no federal oversight).

No, what amazed me most was the split screen between the report’s desire to hand all power over education to states and communities, and the report’s insistence on preserving enough power to punish LGBT students, especially trans students and to impose other far-right mandates, like stamping out critical race theory. You know, either you let the states decide or you don’t. The report wants it both ways.

It’s also astonishing to realize that the insidious goal of the report is eventually abandon federal funding of education. That’s a huge step backward, taking us to 1965, before Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose purpose was to raise spending in impoverished communities. I essence, P2025 says that decades of pursuing equitable funding “didn’t work,” so let’s abandon the goal and the spending.

Here is the Brookings analysis:

Project 2025 outlines a radical policy agenda that would dramatically reshape the federal government. The report was spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and represents the policy aims of a large coalition of conservative activists. While former President Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, many of the report’s authors worked in the previous Trump administration and could return for a second round. Trump, himself, said in 2022, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

In other words, Project 2025 warrants a close look, even if the Trump campaign would like Americans to avert their gaze.

Project 2025’s education agenda proposes a drastic overhaul of federal education policy, from early childhood through higher education. Here’s just a sample of the Project 2025 education-related recommendations:

  • Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED)
  • Eliminate the Head Start program for young children in poverty
  • Discontinue the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children
  • Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
  • Undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law
  • Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools
  • Promote universal private school choice
  • Privatize the federal student loan portfolio

It’s an outrageous list, and that’s just the start of it.

We’ve reviewed the Project 2025 chapter on education (Chapter 11), along with other chapters with implications for students. We’ve come away with four main observations:

1. Most of the major policy proposals in Project 2025 would require an unlikely amount of congressional cooperation

Project 2025 is presented as a to-do list for an incoming Trump administration. However, most of its big-ticket education items would require a great deal of cooperation from Congress.

Proposals to create controversial, new laws or programs would require majority support in the House and, very likely, a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate. Ideas like a Parents’ Bill of Rights, the Department of Education Reorganization Act, and a federal tax-credit scholarship program fall into this category. Even if Republicans outperform expectations in this fall’s Senate races, they’d have to attract several Democratic votes to get to 60. That’s not happening for these types of proposals.  

The same goes for major changes to existing legislation. This includes, for example, a proposal to convert funding associated with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to no-strings-attached block grants and education savings accounts (with, presumably, much less accountability for spending those funds appropriately). It also includes a proposal to end the “negotiated rulemaking” (“neg-reg”) process that ED follows when developing regulations related to programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA). The neg-reg requirement is written into HEA itself, which means that unwinding neg-reg would require Congress to amend the HEA. That’s unlikely given that HEA reauthorization is already more than a decade overdue—and that’s without the political baggage of Project 2025 weighing down the process.

The prospect of changing funding levels for existing programs is a little more complicated. Programs like Title I are permanently authorized. Eliminating Title I or changing the formulas it usesto allocate funds to local educational agencies would require new and unlikely legislation. Year-to-year funding levels can and do change, but the vast majority of ED’s budget consists of discretionary funding that’s provided through the regular, annual appropriations process and subject to a filibuster. This limits the ability of one party to make major, unilateral changes. (ED’s mandatoryfunding is more vulnerable.)

In sum, one limiting factor on what an incoming Trump administration could realistically enact from Project 2025 is that many of these proposals are too unpopular with Democrats to overcome their legislative hurdles.

2. Some Project 2025 proposals would disproportionately harm conservative, rural areas and likely encounter Republican opposition

Another limiting factor is that some of Project 2025’s most substantive proposals probably wouldn’t be all that popular with Republicans either.

Let’s take, for example, the proposed sunsetting of the Title I program. Project 2025 proposes to phase out federal spending on Title I over a 10-year period, with states left to decide whether and how to continue that funding. It justifies this with misleading suggestions that persistent test score gaps between wealthy and poor students indicate that investments like Title I funding aren’t paying off. (In fact, evidence from school finance reforms suggests real benefits from education spending, especially for students from low-income families.)

The phrase “Title I schools” might conjure up images of under-resourced schools in urban areas that predominantly serve students of color, and it’s true that these schools are major beneficiaries of Title I. However, many types of schools, across many types of communities, receive critical support through Title I. In fact, schools in Republican-leaning areas could be hit the hardest by major cuts or changes to Title I. In the map below, we show the share of total per-pupil funding coming from Title I by state. Note that many of the states that rely the most on Title I funds (darkest blue) are politically conservative.

[Open the link to see the map.]

Of course, the impact of shifting from federal to state control of Title I would depend on how states choose to handle their newfound decision-making power. Given that several red states are among the lowest spenders on education—and have skimped on programs like Summer EBT and Medicaid expansion—it’s hard to believe that low-income students in red states would benefit from a shift to state control.

What does that mean for the type of support that Project 2025 proposals might get from red-state Republicans in Congress? It’s hard to know. It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that the GOP’s push for universal private school voucher programs has encountered some of its fiercest resistance from rural Republicans across several states.

3. Project 2025 also has significant proposals that a second Trump administration could enact unilaterally

While a second Trump administration couldn’t enact everything outlined in Project 2025 even if it wanted to, several consequential proposals wouldn’t require cooperation from Congress. This includes some actions that ED took during the first Trump administration and certainly could take again.

Here are a few of the Project 2025 proposals that the Trump administration could enact with the authority of the executive branch alone:

  • Roll back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
  • Roll back Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination
  • Dismantle the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus
  • Eliminate current income-driven repayment plans and require higher monthly payments for low-income borrowers
  • Remove protections from predatory colleges that leave students with excessive debt

Federal education policy has suffered from regulatory whiplash over the last decade, with presidential administrations launching counter-regulations to undo the executive actions of the prior administration. Take, for example, “gainful employment” regulations that Democratic administrations have used to limit eligibility for federal financial aid for colleges that leave students with excessive loan debt. A second Trump administration would likely seek to reverse the Biden administration’s “gainful employment” regulations like the first Trump administration did to the Obama administration’s rules. (Then again, with the Supreme Court striking down Chevron, which provided deference to agency expertise in setting regulations, the Trump administration might not even need to formally undo regulations.)

Other Project 2025 proposals, not explicitly about education, also could wreak havoc. This includes a major overhaul of the federal civil service. Specifically, Project 2025 seeks to reinstate Schedule F, an executive order that Trump signed during his final weeks in office. Schedule F would reclassify thousands of civil service positions in the federal government to policy roles—a shift that would empower the president to fire civil servants and fill their positions with political appointees. Much has been written about the consequences of decimating the civil service, and the U.S. Department of Education, along with other federal agencies that serve students, would feel its effects.

4. Project 2025 reflects a white Christian nationalist agenda as much as it reflects a traditional conservative education policy agenda

If one were to read Project 2025’s appeals to principles such as local control and parental choice, they might think this is a standard conservative agenda for education policy. Republicans, after all, have been calling for the dismantling of ED since the Reagan administration, and every administration since has supported some types of school choice reforms.

But in many ways, Project 2025’s proposals really don’t look conservative at all. For example, a large-scale, tax-credit scholarship program would substantially increase the federal government’s role in K-12 education. A Parents’ Bill of Rights would require the construction of a massive federal oversight and enforcement function that does not currently exist. And a proposal that “states should require schools to post classroom materials online to provide maximum transparency to parents” would impose an enormous compliance burden on schools, districts, and teachers.

Much of Project 2025 is more easily interpretable through the lens of white Christian nationalism than traditional political conservatism. Scholars Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry describe white Christian nationalism as being “about ethno-traditionalism and protecting the freedoms of a very narrowly defined ‘us’.” The Project 2025 chapter on education is loaded with proposals fitting this description. That includes a stunning number of proposals focused on gender identity, with transgender students as a frequent target. Project 2025 seeks to secure rights for certain people (e.g., parents who support a particular vision of parental rights) while removing protections for many others (e.g., LGBTQ+ and racially minoritized children). Case in point, its proposal for “Safeguarding civil rights” says only, “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

These types of proposals don’t come from the traditional conservative playbook for education policy reform. They come from a white Christian nationalist playbook that has gained prominence in far-right politics in recent years.

At this point, it’s clear that the Trump campaign sees Project 2025 as a political liability that requires distance through the election season. Let’s not confuse that with what might happen during a second Trump administration.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Disruption, Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, Elections, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Equity, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Special Education, Vouchers

Tennessee: Governor Lee Demands Vouchers for All Students, Rich and Poor Alike

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2024 //
5

Marta W. Aldrich reported in Chalkbeat that Governor Bill Lee will make universal vouchers his top priority in education this coming year. Tennessee currently has a voucher program that is limited to three urban districts and is not fully enrolled. The Governor, who is a graduate of public schools, wants all students, rich and poor alike, to have a public subsidy to pay for private and religious schooling.

Republicans have made universal vouchers a high priority, knowing that it will drain students and funding from their local public schools.

Governor Lee’s effort to pass universal vouchers failed last year because of opposition by urban Democrats and rural Republicans. However, some of the Republican opponents were defeated with the help of out-of-state money spent to elect voucher-friendly Republicans who were willing to undercut their local public schools.

The extremist Republicans were funded by an organization called 1776 Project PAC, whose purpose is to elect school boards who will oppose “woke” policies and support privatization. Its leader is a GOP operative named Ryan James Gidursky. Here is a video where he discusses “the Marxist takeover of America’s schools.” Check out the merchandise on their website, which says more about their purposes than the other parts of the website. The 1776 Project PAC was funded by a rightwing billionaire, Richard Uihelein, who wants to destroy public schools because they are “woke.”

From what we already know about vouchers, we can predict that the great majority of them will be used by affluent families whose children are already enrolled in nonpublic schools. In his recently published book, The Privateers, Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has shown that the low-income students who transfer to nonpublic schools do not make academic gains and frequently experience “catastrophic” declines in their outcomes.

A new universal school voucher proposal will be the first bill filed for Tennessee’s upcoming legislative session, signaling that Gov. Bill Lee intends to make the plan his No. 1 education priority for a second straight year.

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson said this week that he’ll file his chamber’s legislation on the morning of Nov. 6, the day after Election Day. He expects House Majority Leader William Lamberth will do the same.

The big question is whether House and Senate Republican leaders will be able to agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly convenes on Jan. 14 as Lee begins his last two years in office.

During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in finance committees over disagreements about testing and funding, despite a GOP supermajority, and even as universal voucher programs sprang up in several other states….

Similar to last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide about $7,000 in taxpayer funds to each of up to 20,000 students to attend a private school beginning next fall, with half of the slots going to students who are considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all of Tennessee’s K-12 students, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, though the number of recipients would depend on how much money is budgeted for the program.

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

Categories Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

Founding Fathers: Why the U.S. is NOT a Christian Nation

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2024 //
13

The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to separate church and state. They knew the history of religious wars in Europe, and they wanted the new nation to be free of such rivalries. They inserted into the Constitution the clear mandate that there would be no religious test to hold office. They added in the First Amendment to the institution that Congress was not allowed to establish a state religion and guaranteed freedom to practice one’s own religion.

Someone created this handy compilation of quotes from some of our most prominent men of the Founding era:

Categories Extremism, History, Religion, Separation of church and state

Indiana: Vote for Jennifer McCormick for Governor

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2024 //
0

Jennifer McCormick was the last elected state superintendent of schools. She switched parties because of the Republicans’ hostility to public schools.

She is running for Governor of Indiana against Senator Mike Braun, who is a far-right Republican. Braun and his running mate, an evangelical extremist, want to get rid of public schools.

The 74 reports:

U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, a conservative Republican, is still ahead in the state’s gubernatorial race but his lead among Indiana voters over Democrat Jennifer McCormick has shrunk in recent weeks.

Polling released this week by the Democratic Governors Association shows Braun just three points in front of McCormick, 44% to 41%. That’s a dropoff from the Sept. 17 results of an Emerson College Polling/The Hill voter survey that had Braun with roughly 45% of the vote and McCormick with 34. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater also picked up more support but less dramatically so, going from 5.8% to 8%.

Indiana has not elected a Democratic governor since 2000 and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a comfortable 14 percentage point lead, 57% to 43%, over Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an ActiVote poll released Tuesday.

If elected to succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, Braun and his running mate, pastor, podcaster and far-right Christian nationalist Micah Beckwith, have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety. 

McCormick, a career educator, was the last person elected to the superintendent of public instruction’s office before it became an appointed position in 2021. She seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula. 

She also wants to place limits on the state’s private school voucher initiative: The program grew to encompass more than 70,000 children in 2023-24, a 31% increase from the year before. The state allocated $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools last year — up from nearly $312 million the year before.

McCormick said the program, which might have been intended for lower-income children, is often utilized by white suburban families and is too expensive. 

“We can’t afford it,” she told The 74, “and it is sucking the resources out of our traditional schools.” 

Braun, 70, wants to expand school choice by removing the $220,000 annual family income cap from the voucher program, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, and doubling the $10 millionallocated to the state’s Education Scholarship Account Program. The program, which has also seen tremendous growth in participation, gives special education students and their siblings funds for tuition and support services. 

Braun did not make himself available for an interview and attempts to reach various supporters were not successful.

“School choice programs put parents in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose schools that prioritize their children’s needs,” he states in his education plan. “Providing universal school choice will ensure every Hoosier family has the same freedom to choose their best-fit education.”

A former school board member, Braun also wants to create an Indiana Office of School Safety to streamline the efforts of several departments, including the state police — and implement age-appropriate cyber training for students regarding online safety. He said, too, that the state should limit cellphone use on campus. 

Braun wants to increase Indiana’s public teacher base salary — and financially reward educators whose students perform well. 

Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said his group endorsed McCormick, 54, because of her commitment to funding traditional public schools. 

He noted she did not have the group’s endorsement when she initially ran for the state superintendent’s office as a Republican. But, Gambill said, after filling the role and understanding the state’s educational needs, she switched parties and her values more closely aligned with the union’s. 

“She really stood up to members of — at that time — her own party in working toward what was best for our schools,” he said, speaking of her time in office. “And, of course, as soon as they were challenged, they didn’t like that. She realized that if she was going to make a difference in public education, she would have to move in a different direction.”

McCormick aims to secure a minimum base salary of $60,000 for pre-K-12 educators, and adjust veteran teacher salaries to reflect their non-educator peers. She wants to increase academic freedom, safeguard university tenure and protect the ability of teachers unions to collectively bargain for wages and benefits. 

Her running mate, Terry Goodin, a former state representative, was a teacher, assistant principal and public school superintendent at Crothersville Community Schools.

Braun, in his education plan, said he wants schools to notify parents about their child’s request to change their name or use different pronouns on campus. He has denounced gender-affirming surgery for minors and opposes transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams. Braun has the backing of Americans for Prosperity and CPAC — and maintains high ratings from the NRA. 

Braun was endorsed by Trump in 2023 and won his party’s nomination for governor in May after beating out a crowded field of GOP contenders. He acknowledged last month, according to Axios, that Harris’s presence at the top of the presidential ticket has complicated down-ballot races, including his own.

“I think that’s had an impact,” he said, “but I’m going to plow through that because this is a lot about kitchen table issues once you’re starting to run for governor.”

 Jo Napolitano is a senior reporter at The 74.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Elections, Indiana, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Mother Jones: A Former Christian Nationalist Recants

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
12

Mother Jones published an excellent article by Reverend Rob Schenck about how he became a leader of the Christian nationalist movement and why he decided to leave it. He recalls when real estate developer and playboy Donald Trump was first introduced to the world of evangelicals. And he describes his own role in connecting rich donors to Republican Supreme Court justices.

Reverend Schenck begins:

In 2014, at an elegant gala inside the Supreme Court’s gilded Great Hall, a tuxedoed Justice Clarence Thomas turned to me and voiced his approval for my work. I glanced over to where Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife, Jane, were entertaining two of my associates, trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a private, nongovernmental entity for which Roberts served as honorary chair. At that moment, I knew the secretive operation I had run, aimed at emboldening Thomas and his conservative colleagues to render the strongest possible decisions in favor of our right-wing Christian agenda, had succeeded.

My organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, had created an initiative we called “Operation Higher Court” that trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries,” befriending Thomas and his wife, Ginni; Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito; and Antonin and Maureen Scalia—­lavishing­ them with meals at high-end restaurants and invitations to luxurious vacation properties. Alongside these amenities, our ministry offered prayers, gift Bibles, and the assurance that millions of believers thanked God for the decisions this trio of justices rendered on abortion, health care, marriage, and gun ownership….

But Reverend Schenck began to understand that his activities and beliefs were toxic to democracy. What triggered his change? Perhaps it was his late-in-life doctoral studies, when he read about the German Christian movement in the 1930s, which supported the Nazi party. He wrote: One of the most respected Bible scholars of that period, Paul Althaus, declared Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship to be a “gift and miracle from God.”

He was shaken by his research. He began to change his views. He wondered whether Christian evangelicals in the U.S. were on the same dangerous path.

Following the insurrection of January 6, when Christian banners, Bibles, and prayers in Jesus’ name appeared in the assault on the Capitol, I felt even greater urgency in warning my fellow evangelicals of the grave danger Trump and his MAGA cult posed to Christianity and US democracy.

My change of course so late in life has been painful, disorienting, and costly. Besides losing decades-long friendships and enduring menacing threats, my wife and I have faced a significantly reduced income. I’ve even driven Uber to cover household expenses. One night, I picked up an organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event in which I had once played a significant role. I was wearing a mask and said little, but then, with trepidation, I realized I would be dropping him at the home of a congressman I had worked with closely for more than 20 years. When my passenger got out, I was relieved to have gone unrecognized. Still, I’ve never questioned the decisions that brought me to that moment.

In my third conversion, I realized that when religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will for the body politic is a form of anti-Christian idolatry. To elevate one set of spiritual beliefs above another and do it by force of law removes a nonnegotiable tenet of evangelical faith—free will. We are born again when we choose to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, not when we’re forced to do so.

Because it is immoral, I believe Christian nationalism is inevitably doomed. But in the meantime, the pain, suffering, and injury it will inflict will be enormous—just consider women facing difficult pregnancies, trans children seeking care, librarians attacked for certain books. “We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.” This may sound familiar—maybe some overheated Republican talking points. In fact, it’s what Adolf Hitler promised the German people in 1933.

Categories Courage, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Religion, Separation of church and state

Ohio Is Funding the Construction and Renovation of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2024 //
4

In an unprecedented move that shatters the historic wall of separation between church and state, Ohio has passed legislation to fund the construction and renovation of religious schools. It also directly violates the explicit language of the Ohio state constitution.

ProPublica reports on the latest move to defund public schools and divert money to religious schools.

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.

They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.

“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.

With this latest move, though, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious system of education, Pepper said, adding that if no one takes notice, “This will happen in other states — they all learn from each other like laboratories.”

The Ohio Constitution says that the General Assembly “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.”

Yet Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network — several of whose schools received the new grants — recently told the Lima News that part of the reason for spending these public dollars on the expansion of private schools is that “we want to make sure that from our perspective, Christian school options are available to any kid who chooses that in the state.”

Ohio started funding vouchers in Cleveland only. They were supposed to “help poor kids escape failing public schools.” Initially, vouchers were only for kids already enrolled in public schools and only for kids from low-income families.

When they were implemented in the 1990s, vouchers in Ohio, like in many places, were limited in scope; they were available only to parents whose children were attending (often underfunded) public schools in Cleveland. The idea was to give those families money that they could then spend on tuition at a hopefully better private school, thus empowering them with what was called school choice.

Over the decades, the state incrementally expanded voucher programs to a wider and wider range of applicants. And last year, legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine extended the most prominent of those programs, called EdChoice, to all Ohio families.

Now, vouchers subsidize the children of families who never attended public schools, including affluent families. They have become a welfare program for families who previously paid their full tuition. As in every other voucher state, most students who take vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Encouraged by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers political advocacy group, the Ohio legislature added the religious school funding bill to the state budget.

Led by Huffman, Republicans slipped at least $4 million in grants to private schools into a larger budget bill. There was little debate, in part because budget bills across the country have become too large to deliberate over every detail and, also, Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers in Ohio.

According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission report, the grants, some of them over a million dollars, then went out to various Catholic schools around the state. ProPublica contacted administrators at each of these schools to ask what they will be using their new taxpayer money on, but they either didn’t answer or said that they didn’t immediately know. (One of the many differences between public and private schools is that the latter do not have to answer questions from the public about their budgets, even if they’re now publicly funded.)

The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.

“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”

The total grant amount of roughly $4 million this year may seem small, said William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. But, he noted, Ohio’s voucher program itself started out very small three decades ago, and today it’s a billion-dollar system.

“They get their foot in the door with a few million dollars in infrastructure funding,” Phillis said. “It sets a precedent, and eventually hundreds of millions will be going to private school construction.”

The only statewide evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice voucher program was published in 2016. The evaluation was funded by the choice advocacy group, The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. TBF has a special relationship to Ohio Republicans in the legislature because it originated in Ohio and maintains an office in Ohio. It also authorizes charter schools in Ohio.

The evaluation concluded that students who left to use vouchers in a private school performed worse than their peers who remained in public schools.

So, the Republican supermajority has known for at least eight years that vouchers don’t “save” poor kids; in fact, those kids are likely to fall farther behind. Now that the Republicans have adopted universal choice, they know that they are helping kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. So now, it’s a logical step to throw in millions more for construction and renovation of voucher schools.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

NCPE: Voucher Costs Are Rising Dramatically Above Budget Projections

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
5

The National Coalition for Public Education published valuable information contrasting the actual cost of vouchers to overly optimistic projections by their advocates. In every state that has adopted vouchers, most vouchers are used by students already enrolled in private schools. In states such as Florida and Arizona, vouchers are “universal,” meaning there are no income limitations or other restrictions on their accessibility. In essence, vouchers provide public dollars to subsidize the tuition of students in private and religious schools. They are a welfare program for the affluent.

The NCPE concluded:

When lawmakers consider expanding or creating private school voucher programs, their projections often drastically underestimate the actual costs. They sell a false promise that vouchers will save money, do not budget adequate funds, and then wind up with million dollar shortfalls, necessitating cuts from public education and even tax increases. 

Some voucher advocates incorrectly claim that if the amount of the voucher is less than the average expenditure spent to educate a student in public school, the state will save money. Existing voucher programs prove this false.  

First, it costs less than the average expenditure to educate some students, and much more to educate others who need additional support and services–like those with disabilities, English language learners, and low-income students. The students who are most expensive to educate, however, tend to remain in public schools  because they cannot find a private voucher school willing to accept them. Yet, because of the voucher program, the public schools are left with fewer resources. Furthermore, in a voucher program, the state now pays tuition for private school students who never attended public schools, which is an altogether new cost for taxpayers.

This all adds up to more, not less, spending.

Here are several examples of the skyrocketing costs of voucher programs:

ARIZONA’S VOUCHER IS COSTING 1,346% MORE THAN PROJECTED, CONTRIBUTING TO A $400 MILLION BUDGET DEFICIT.

  • The fiscal note attached to Arizona’s universal voucher program projected the program would cost the state about $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But once students’ applications started to come in, state leaders realized these estimates were woefully inadequate. The Arizona Governor’s Office now estimates that the price tag is more than 1,346% higher at a cost of $940 million per year. This is one of the main causes of a $400 million budget shortfall in the state’s general fund, which funds the state’s public schools, transportation, fire, police, and prisons.

THE FLORIDA VOUCHER IS ALREADY MORE THAN $2 BILLION OVER BUDGET IN YEAR ONE.

  • The Florida Senate projected that its voucher expansion would cost $646 million. But independent researchers estimated that the program would actually cost almost $4 billion, and actual costs are already approaching that amount—$3.35 billion in the first year. In just one county, Duval, school officials report a $17 million budget shortage due to funds lost to the vouchers.

WEST VIRGINIA’S VOUCHER DRAINS MORE THAN $20 MILLION FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS PER YEAR.

  • During the 2024 – 2025 school year, the West Virginia voucher program is expected to funnel $21.6 million away from the state’s public schools–enough to pay the salaries for 301 professional teachers and 63 school service workers. As a result of the voucher and other declines in enrollment, multiple school districts are already warning residents that they need to impose property tax increases in order to continue to pay current teachers’ salaries.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Webinar: Public Funding for Religious Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
14

The National Education Policy Center is hosting a webinar on the implications of federal funding of religious schools. Actually, two webinars, on September 26. Sign up here.

NEPC writes:

Should religious schools be publicly funded? And what are the implications when they are?

These questions have become increasingly relevant in the United States in the wake of Espinoza v. Montana (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022), two U.S. Supreme Court cases that forced states, under certain circumstances, to provide public funding to private religious schools. But questions raised by such public funding are not unique to our nation. In fact, many of the issues currently confronting the United States have already been wrestled with in other countries around the world.

On September 26th, two back-to-back webinars will explore these trends and issues, with an eye to helping parents, teachers, administrators, scholars, advocates, journalists, and other education stakeholders better understand the history and impact of state-funded religious education in the U.S. and abroad.

The webinars, which are free to register for and attend, feature the authors of articles in a new special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education, a peer-refereed publication. This special issue on publicly funded religious schools considers research findings around equity, segregation, and discrimination as they relate to state-funded religious education. Studies presented in the special issue were conducted in Canada, Spain, and the U.S., and they examine how state-funded religious education has shifted over time as a result of factors such as legal rulings, politics, demographic changes, global migration, and education privatization.

The webinars are sponsored by NEPC, which invites the public to attend either or both.

Law and Public Discourse is the title of the first webinar in the series, which runs from noon to 1 pm Eastern Time.

Kathleen Sellers of Duke University will moderate. Panelists are Sue Winton of York University in Canada and NEPC Fellows Bruce Baker of the University of Miami, Suzanne Eckes of the University of Wisconsin, Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, and Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado.

The second webinar, Catholic Culture and Market Concerns, will be held right after the first one, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern on September 26th.

Joel Malin of Miami University will moderate. Panelists will be James Coviello, Stephen Kotok, and Catherine DiMartino, all of St. John’s University, Clara Fontdevila of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Adrián Zancajo and Antoni Verger of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Ee-Seul Yoon of the University of Manitoba, Canada.

Click here now to register for one or both of these two webinars.

For those interested in reading the underlying articles in the Peabody journal, they’re available (although some are behind a paywall) as follows:

Fontdevila, C., Zancajo, A., & Verger, A. (2024). Catholic Schools in the Marketplace: Changing and Enduring Religious Identities

Green, P., Baker, B., & Eckes, S. (2024). The Potential for Race Discrimination in Voucher Programs in a Post-Carson World

Kotok, S., DiMartino, C.C., & Coviello, J. (2024). New York City Catholic Schools Operating in the Public Space in a Post-Makin World

Welner, K. (2024). Charting the Path to the Outsourcing of Discrimination Through School Choice

Winton, S. (2024). Same Arguments, Different Outcomes: Struggles Over Private School Funding in Alberta and Ontario, Canada

Yoon, E.S. (2024). Unequal City and Inequitable Choice: The Neoliberal State’s Development of School Choice and Marketization in the Publicly Funded Catholic School Board in Toronto, Canada

Yoon, E.S., Malin, J.R., Sellers, K.M., & Welner, K.G. (2024). Should Religious Schools Be Publicly Funded? Issues of Religion, Discrimination, and Equity

Categories Catholic Schools, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state
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