Steve Hinnefeld: The Supreme Court’s Mistaken View of American History in the Espinoza Decision

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
2

Steve Hinnefeld blogs about education. He is based in Indiana, which has funded charters and vouchers, the latter despite a state constitution that bans funding religious schools.

He writes here about the Supreme Court’s Espinoza decision that held that religious schools must be included in state programs that fund private schools (almost all state voucher programs already fund religious schools, in fact, I can’t think of one that does not do so).

Hinnefeld interviewed a legal scholar, who explained how misinformed the Court was:

The majority opinion — and especially concurring opinions by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — framed the decision as a blow against anti-Catholic bias enshrined in state constitutions via 19th century “Blaine amendments.” But that view papers over complex history, said Steven K. Green, a legal scholar at Willamette University and a leading expert on church-state issues.

Green told me it was disappointing that the court, in a highly consequential decision, “relied, to a certain extent, on a shortsighted view of history, not recognizing the nuances behind the development of the no-aid provisions.” Green elaborates on that history in an amicus brief submitted to the court on behalf of several Christian religious organizations that supported Montana’s position.

Blaine amendments get their name from James Blaine, a Maine congressman and senator and U.S. secretary of state in the late 1800s. In 1875, Blaine introduced a constitutional amendment to prohibit federal funding of religious institutions. It failed, but some states adopted similar provisions for state funding.

The late 1800s were a time of rising anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bias. In Indiana, the nativist Know-Nothing Party gained a large following. But restriction on state funding of religion “predates the Know-Nothings and the Blaine amendment,” Green said. “And it occurred in places where there was not that much religious strife.

“Without a doubt, a lot of people, during the Blaine amendment arguments, certainly raised anti-Catholic rhetoric,” he said, “But that misunderstands the origins and purpose of the no-funding provisions. The nuance is just left out.”

For one thing, 15 of the state Blaine amendments predated Blaine and his proposal. Michigan was the first state to put a ban on state funding for religion in its constitution – in 1835, when Blaine was 5 years old.

Wisconsin followed in 1848 and Indiana in 1851. I’ve read the notes from the Indiana constitutional convention, and there is no anti-Catholic animus there. In Indiana and in other states, the primary concern was to ensure adequate funding for the public schools they were beginning to establish.

Green said the Supreme Court also ignores history when it downplays the importance of keeping church and state separate.

The First Amendment includes two clauses concerning religious freedom: it forbids “the establishment of religion” and bans laws that prohibit “the free exercise” of religion. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were deeply concerned that state support for religion would entangle government with churches: hence the establishment clause and Jefferson’s famous words about “a wall of separation” between church and state.

“The court seems to say the provision on establishing religion has to take a back seat to the free exercise clause,” Green said.

Consequential Court decisions based on misinformation and error should be overturned.

Categories Accountability, History, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Derek Black: Untangling the Supreme Court’s Espinoza Decision

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
25

Derek Black is a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in education, civil rights, and equity. His new book, which I have read and intend to review here, is Schoolhouse Burning. It is phenomenal. It is a new history of American education that documents the historic role of public education in our democracy from the Founding Fathers to the recent past.

Black writes:

Through a political lens, the Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana requiring the state to include religious schools in its voucher program makes perfect sense. Conservatives have long decried the fact they must foot tuition at their private religious schools while other students receive free education at public schools. Today they got their shot at fixing that.

But through a constitutional lens, the decision can be confusing to all but the constitutional experts.

First is the question of “mootness.” The dissent argues that the case should never have been decided at all because Montana’s voucher program is no longer in operation, but the majority decided the case anyway, reasoning that but for a flaw— the lower court’s flaw in striking the entire program down—the program would be operating to exclude religious groups.

With that out of the way, the majority hinges its opinion on the notion that a refusal to fund religious education is the same thing as religious discrimination. That logic, however, dismisses the tension between the constitution’s competing religious clauses: one barring the establishment of religion and the other guaranteeing the free exercise of religion. Because a state cannot establish or promote religion, it is understandable why it would not want to fund religious education–and that decision is distinct from actively discriminating against or limiting religious activities or adherents. The Court recognized as much in Locke v. Davey in 2003, when it held that Washington did not have to fund college scholarships for students pursuing degrees in devotional theology just because it provided scholarships to other students.

The majority in Espinoza acts as though it is flummoxed in understanding what Montana was trying to achieve. It cannot imagine any legitimate reasons. The most the Court can discern is that Montana’s bar on funding religious education is a hold-over from an anti-Catholic period in history. But there, too, the Court is overly simplistic. Without question, nativist and Protestants were hostile toward Catholics during the second half of the 19th century and hoped to “Americanize” them in public schools. But reducing states’ prohibitions on funding religious institutions solely to anti-Catholicism or nativism ignores the development of public education against the backdrop of religious education.

These no-aid rules also coincided with the rise of formal systems of public education. Prior to those systems, states had funded and relied on religious institutes for education. The patchwork of religious schools, however, eventually proved insufficient to meet the nation’s vast and growing educational needs. Public education at public expense was the solution.

When states like Pennsylvania, for instance, included public education obligations in their state constitutions, many began cutting ties with private institutions. They did not want to, in effect, finance the competition. Of course, the only notably private institutions out there were religious ones—hence the laws that prohibited aid to religious schools rather than the broader category of private schools.

In fact, when Montana revised its constitution in 1972, it made its shift away from any prior questionable motives clear. As the 1972 Constitutional Convention delegates explain in their amicus brief, Montana sought to build a wall around public funds because the “breathtakingly ambitious goals for Montana’s educational system—guaranteeing equal educational opportunity—required strict protection of the State’s funds for its public schools.” As to the specific prohibition on funding religious schools, the delegates wrote that “[r]ather than being motivated by anti-religious animus, many delegates urged adoption of the no-aid clause to protect religious institutions from government interreference” that would follow from becoming entangled with religious education.

Therein lies an important lesson for us: states’ prohibition on financing religious education represents the broader principle that government should not be in the business of financing private education—religious or not. And now that states are crossing that line, they are getting themselves into all sorts of legal problems, including finding themselves on the wrong side of a Supreme Court predisposed to find religious discrimination. And this is to say nothing of the fact that they are asking their public schools and students–which their state constitutions obligate them to support–to make sacrifices so that they can pursue policy fads in the form of vouchers. This, I explain in Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy (https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/derek-w-black/schoolhouse-burning/9781541774384/), endangers not only public education but core values of American democracy.

All these flaws aside, the case immediately impacts only a few states because most of the states currently operating voucher and tax credit programs already permit their use at religious schools. But the case does portend another set of legal problems. Those states that don’t fund religious education have valid reasons. Staying true to those reasons demands that those states must regulate religious schools. As a result of Espinoza, they now have to worry about what is being taught in religious schools and how students are being treated. One way to fix that is to require that religious schools comply with all the same anti-discrimination protections that public schools do—the exact type of “interference” Montana’s 1972 Convention sought to avoid. This, of course, will open new debates about whose values should control—those of the wider public and government or those of religious schools–and further test our democratic values. The other easier fix is to just end their voucher programs altogether.

Categories Accountability, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Woman, Know Your Place. I Don’t.

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
87

I saw this a long while ago and thought it was wonderful social satire.

It reminded me just a little of myself after my college graduation in 1960, when women’s voices were devalued. That was before the feminist movement. I married right after I graduated college and aspired to be the perfect wife. I wasn’t very good at it but it took a long time to figure that out. I identified with the woman in this video.

It is funny. You deserve a laugh today.

Categories Humor

My Knee, and Why I Can Walk Again

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
29

Six years ago, I fell and broke my knee. That event changed my life in unexpected ways. For the first time in my life, I felt physically unsteady and vulnerable. My sense of invincibility disappeared. After a lifetime of bounding up and down stairs, I learned to hold onto a railing and watch my step.

In April 2014, I was running to the postoffice on a Saturday, hoping to get there before it closed, and I tripped down the stairs outside my house. My left knee landed on a flagstone, and I felt a horrible crushing sensation. I was alone at the time. My partner Mary was in Georgia, visiting with her college classmates. I just lay there on the ground for about five minutes, waiting to see how bad it was.

I was on Long Island, and none of my neighbors was home. I tried to stand but I couldn’t. I dragged myself on my back up the stairs (three of them) and into the house. I pulled down the phone and called a neighbor who lived a few doors away and she called an ambulance. I was transported to the closest hospital, in the small town of Greenport. They couldn’t help me. The next day my son took a bus out to pick me up and bring me to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. There, the doctor x-rayed my knee and told me I had well and truly broken it and needed a total knee replacement. Mary had already had double knee surgery, and I had some idea of what was in store for me.

I had to wait two weeks to get into surgery, and during that two weeks I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, using a walker, to receive the Grawemeyer Award for my 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I walked to the podium at the University of Louisville to accept my award, I did not use a crutch or a walker, and I thought maybe the diagnosis was wrong. But when I got home, I was dressing to go out, lost my balance, and almost crashed through a wall. Surgery it would be.

After the surgery, I went to rehab diligently, but my leg simply would not straighten out. It was bent. The physical therapist assured me I would wake up one morning and it would be straight, but day after day I felt my leg locked into a bent shape. I could not straighten it. I fell into the deepest depression of my life. I believed I would never walk again without a walker.

Then a dear friend from college days told me to go at once to a different physical therapist. I did, and the therapist told me that my knee was encased in scar tissue. I went back to the surgeon, and he performed a “manipulation.” That means that I was given morphine, knocked out, and while I was unconscious, he forced my leg straight. He took pictures to show me that my leg was straight. But when I woke up, my leg almost immediately sprung back into a bent position.

Back to the physical therapist, who said there were only two people who could help me: One was a sports medicine doctor in Vail, the other was a sports medicine doctor in Cincinnati. I chose the latter because the flight was nonstop and closer. I went to Dr. Frank Noyes at the Noyes Knee Institute at Mercy Hospital. As it happened, he literally wrote the book on scar tissue (arthrofibrosis). He told me I was too old for surgery but that he could fix my leg. We went into a small room, where I sat on the edge of a table and stretched my bent knee so that my heel was on another table. Then two very large men on either side of me pressed my leg down until it was straight. The pain was intense, and I was crying, but while they forced my leg straight, they quickly built a plaster cast around it, then cut the cast open, filled it with cotton and gauze, put it into a large box, and presented it to me. Dr. Noyes told me to wear it eight-ten hours a day for at least six weeks, wrapping it tightly with ace bandages.

After six weeks, the cast straightened my leg. I was able to walk again. I could no longer run or even walk fast, but I could walk without any help.

I asked my surgeon why no one in New York City was able to perform such a simple procedure. He explained that he was a surgeon not a rehabilitation specialist.

I mention this story not to share my personal pain, depression, and recovery but to share the understanding that there are sometimes ways to fix what seem to be impossible physical conditions. Not always. I thought I would never be able to walk again without a walker. My gait is somewhat stilted, but I walk without crutches or a walker.

If you need the same kind of help, you now know where you can get it. Dr. Noyes may have retired by now, but he trained others in his methods. Every time I see someone with a bent knee, on a walker, I long to tell then this story. That’s why I’m telling it now. It might help someone else.

Categories Health, Personal

Maria Popova on Keith Haring, Art, Love and Courage

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
5

I chose to include this link on my birthday because it gave me an hour of aesthetic joy, following its links.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born polymath who lives in Brooklyn and reads voraciously with deep understanding and love of knowledge.

On June 26, she wrote about the artist Keith Haring and his love of life and art, and how his art inspired her and others, and how his life demonstrated “the courage to be yourself.”

As I began reading, I started opening links, one of which sent me to her archive (not easy to find), and I was soon reading about Mary Wollstonecraft, the world’s first radical feminist, who died giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who survived the death of three of her children and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Reading Maria Popova is sheer bliss and an invitation to share her joy of reading. I signed up to send her a small monthly gift, to sustain her as she pursues knowledge and shares its fruits.

Categories Art, Joy, Literature

It’s My Birthday So I Write What I Choose

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
50

That’s a joke headline. True that it’s my birthday but I write what I choose every day. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong, but I write what I choose. This is a freedom I gained when I realized that I’m free from ambition. At my exalted age (82), there is nothing to tempt me. I don’t yearn for a job or an appointment to anything. I don’t seek money. I have enough.

So I will share some hard-earned lessons.

Do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may.

Don’t worry if you have enemies. If you stand on principle, it will confuse some people and anger others. Don’t let the naysayers turn you round or intimidate you. In my case, they are paid to try. No one pays me, so that’s a source of freedom too.

Don’t be too certain. Listen and learn. Weigh the evidence. You might be wrong.

If you realize you are wrong, apologize and make it right. When you have made a mistake, don’t dig in. Admit it. Apologize.

It’s okay to change your mind when you learn new things. Emerson said that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”

Stand up for people who don’t have a voice. If you have a megaphone, as I do, share it. Use it to protect the weak and vulnerable.

Don’t be afraid. Illegitimi non Carborundum. It’s a fake Latin phrase but it makes sense.

During a global pandemic, wear a face mask. Only fools refuse to wear a mask to protect themselves and others. The Lone Ranger and Batman wore masks. Wonder Woman didn’t but she would have if it were necessary to save lives.

Read myths to your children and grandchildren. I read D’Aulaires’ myths to my children and grandchildren. Read the myths of many cultures to broaden your children’s understanding and appreciation of others and to see the oneness of humanity.

Read poetry. I have a long, long list of my favorite poets. I read poetry for solace and inspiration.

If life gives you lemons, you know what to do with them.

If you want to help me celebrate this milestone, make a donation to the Network for Public Education. That’s where it will do the most good. I don’t want for anything. I would like to get rid of every worldly possession except the clothes on my back, a change of clothes for the sake of hygiene, my cellphone, a few books, soap, and a toothbrush. After months without a haircut, I am tempted to shave my head. But I don’t have enough courage to be that bold. Maybe next year.

Categories Personal

Dana Milbank: America Slides Back to the Medieval Era

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
54

My favorite Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank summarizes where our “leaders” are in responding to the global pandemic. No wonder the EU won’t allow Americans to enter its borders.

Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher.

“Hayek had it right!” Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic.

“Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.”

Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. “Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,” Paul complained. “All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.”

Fauci assured Paul that “I never said we can’t play a certain sport.”

Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: “We just need more optimism.”

So that’s what we need. The United States is hitting new records for infection, largely because President Trump and allied governors across the South and Southwest ignored public health guidance. While other countries beat back the virus, we’re on course to have 100,000 new cases a day, Fauci said, and doing little about it. But we just need to be more upbeat!

Not for the first time, it feels as though 21st-century America is 14th-century Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the plague: balancing ill “humors” and dispelling evil “vapors” caused by planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of “abracadabra.”

Now, we have science to tell us how to beat the coronavirus — with face masks and social distancing. Yet our response is resolutely medieval.

The president ridicules mask wearing as politically correct and unmanly. His campaign staff tears down social distancing signs at his mass rally. Governors of hard-hit states tamper with data, sideline public health experts and blame the spread on Latino farmworkers, civil rights demonstrations and increased testing — anything but their reckless and premature relaxing of restrictions.

And then there’s Vice President Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force. “I’d just encourage every American to continue to pray,” he said at Friday’s task force briefing.

I’m all for prayer. But prayer without face masks won’t defeat the virus.

“The attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific data is very concerning,” Fauci told senators Tuesday, bemoaning a “lack of trust” in government. “We’re in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”

A lack of urgency about the virus caused the testing debacle. A lack of regard for science caused the hydroxychloroquine debacle. A contempt for public health advice caused the reopening debacle. A president’s vanity caused the anti-face-mask debacle. An immunology debacle likely comes next: If Trump rushes out a vaccine before the election, would anybody believe it’s safe?

Belatedly, more than a dozen states have paused or scaled back their rash plans to reopen without heeding public health guidance. But we still have the White House proclaiming “remarkable progress” against the pandemic because the latest victims are younger — as though they won’t infect the old and the sick. Trump insists he wasn’t joking when he said he told health officials to “slow the testing down” to suppress the number of reported cases. He’s proceeding with plans for an in-person, mask-optional convention in Florida, now a virus hot spot.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blames street protests (even though New York, Washington and Minneapolis experienced no such surge in cases) and “overwhelmingly Hispanic” workers, and as cases spiked last week, he claimed that “nothing has changed.” Like other GOP governors and the Trump administration, he also blames an increase in testing — which doesn’t explain the higher rate of positive tests.

Pence, too, rejects the obvious conclusion that “the reopening has to do with what we’re seeing” in the viral spread. (It’s the evil vapors!) He said Sunday that it’s a “good idea” to wear face masks — just after attending a church event at which half the 2,200 people, including the choir, eschewed masks.

At Tuesday’s committee hearing, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who is retiring, urged Trump to “occasionally wear a mask” so his admirers “would follow his lead and help end this political debate.”

But neither Alexander’s pleadings, nor those of the various health officials testifying, are likely to break down America’s medieval resistance to science. Paul, citing the successful reopening of schools in Europe, demanded U.S. schools reopen (ignoring that Europe has contained the virus). Invoking the superiority of Hayek’s theories to the findings of public health officials, Paul said “we shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best.”

Categories Education Reform, Health, Ignorance, Science

Pastors for Texas Children Speaks Out Against the Espinoza Decision

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
8

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states with private school scholarships must provide similar funding to religious schools. This was bizarre because the Montana Supreme Court had already banished the state’s private school scholarship program, which offered $150 to families that chose private schools and sought a state scholarship. So the state of Montana will not owe $150 to the Espinoza family.

Pastors for Texas Children criticized the ruling:

For Immediate Release June 30, 2020

Statement on the Supreme Court Decision in Espinoza

Contact Charlie Johnson, Executive Director charlie@pastorsfortexaschildren.com 210-379-1066 Cameron Vickrey, Associate Director cameron@pastorsfortexaschildren.com 704-962-5735

Fort Worth, TX – The Supreme Court decision today in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue is an attack on God’s gift of religious liberty for all people.

In ruling that states must allow religious schools to take part in programs that provide state-sponsored scholarships, the freedom of religion for us all is jeopardized.

“For the State of Montana, or any governmental authority, to divert money from public schools to underwrite religious schools is patently wrong,” said the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director for Pastors for Children.

A tuition tax credit for religious school scholarships takes dollars away from the state treasury for public schools and diverts those dollars to subsidize private religious schools.

Why does the State of Montana, or any state, have any role or agency whatsoever in religious schools?

Public schools accept all children regardless of race, class, status, disability, sexual orientation, and religion. They are where students of all faiths and no faith encounter one another in mutual understanding, where our nation’s constitutional values of religious liberty and respect across lines of difference are lived every day. They protect marginalized students, especially poor students, disabled students, students of color, and LGBTQI+ students.

That’s why the taxing authority of state government supports them.

And why it should stay out of our church schools.

Will Montana religious schools now be required to accept all students who apply?

It is the very nature of a private school to be exclusive. Private religious schools were not formed to be religiously neutral. They are voluntary assemblies protected by the First Amendment to advance and establish religious conviction and teaching. These religious schools constitute a core religious mission. They should be protected from government intrusion.

Let private schools remain private, public schools remain public. Common sense Americans know this. Such wisdom that has sustained our country since its inception escaped the Supreme Court today.

###

About Pastors for Texas Children:
Pastors for Texas Children works to provide “wrap-around” care and ministry to local schools, principals, teachers, staff and schoolchildren, and to advocate for children by supporting our free, public education system, to promote social justice for children, and to advance legislation that enriches Texas children, families, and communities.

Categories Freedom, Religion, Separation of church and state

Laura Chapman: The Espinoza Decision Was a Farce, Because It Was Moot!

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
13

Our reader Laura Chapman read the Supreme Court decision in the Espinoza case, both the majority decision and the dissents. The majority decision said that if a state offers a scholarship program for private schools, it must include religious schools. The dissenters, Chapman noted, pointed out that the Montana Supreme Court had already invalidated the private scholarship program. So the case was already moot because Montana no longer has a scholarship program for private schools! The Espinoza family will not get $150 (the amount that used to be paid to families that sought help in paying private school tuition) because Montana no longer offers scholarships to private schools, and thus will not be affected by today’s decision!

She wrote:

I downloaded the text of ESPINOZA ET AL. v. MONTANA DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE ET AL and read the dissents. Here are a few gems, all noting that the scholarship in question had already been made invalid by Montana’s Supreme Court !!

BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN, J., joined as to Part I.

I shall assume, for purposes of this opinion, that petitioners’ free exercise claim survived the Montana Supreme Court’s wholesale invalidation of the tax credit program. (This is a feature in all of the dissents. Essentially, the dissenters claim there is no case because the program was made vaporware by the Montana Supreme Court.)
Breyer then begins an extended discussion of “entanglements” of the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause: and concludes that “The majority’s approach and its conclusion in this case, I fear, risk the kind of entanglement and conflict that the Religion Clauses are intended to prevent. I consequently dissent.

Well, that is the summary, but it is followed by at least 6000 words, as if prepared to show his colleagues that he had considered a lot of precedents that had no direct bearing on the case, these dating back to Madison and Jefferson’s Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia, along with hypothetical questions about state funding for charter schools (with a 2003 citation).

GINSBURG, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN, J., joined.

Recall that the Montana court remedied the state constitutional violation by striking the scholarship program in its entirety. Under that decree, secular and sectarian schools alike are ineligible for benefits, so the decision cannot be said to entail differential treatment based on petitioners’ religion.

Put somewhat differently, petitioners argue that the Free Exercise Clause requires a State to treat institutions and people neutrally when doling out a benefit—and neutrally is how Montana treats them in the wake of the state court’s decision. Accordingly, the Montana Supreme Court’s decision does not place a burden on petitioners’ religious exercise. Petitioners may still send their children to a religious school. And the Montana Supreme Court’s decision does not pressure them to do otherwise.

SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

The majority holds that a Montana scholarship program unlawfully discriminated against religious schools by excluding them from a tax benefit. The threshold problem, however, is that such tax benefits no longer exist for anyone in the State. The Montana Supreme Court invalidated the program on state-law grounds, thereby foreclosing the as-applied challenge petitioners raise here.

Indeed, nothing required the state court to uphold the program or the state legislature to maintain it. The Court nevertheless reframes the case and appears to ask whether a longstanding Montana constitutional provision is facially invalid under the Free Exercise Clause, even though petitioners disavowed bringing such a claim. But by resolving a constitutional question not presented, the Court fails to heed Article III principles older than the Religion Clause it expounds.

Laura Chapman added: I am not a lawyer, but I cannot understand why this case even got on the docket of the US. Supreme Court. It was settled in the Montana Supreme Court, made invalid, struck entirely.

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, Montana, Privatization, Vouchers

Randi’s Take on the Supreme Court Decision in Espinoza Case

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2020 //
5

Randi Weingarten is not only president of the AFT, she is a lawyer. Below is her reaction to the Supreme Court ruling. She calls it a “seismic shock.” She sees the decision as one more step in the relentless rightwing effort to defund and privatize public schools. She thinks the decision set the stage for an even more radical decision, one that requires states to fund religious school tuition as some states (think Florida, Indiana, Ohio) currently do.

Randi is right, but I was actually relieved that the decision was not far worse. I was afraid that the current Supreme Court, with Trump’s addition of two super-religious justices (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh), would overturn all Blaine amendments and require states to pay religious school tuitions in full. But the decision was far narrower. It said that any state that has a program to fund private schools must admit religious schools to the same program. So Montana, which has a private scholarship program, must include religious schools on the same footing as other private schools. That means that the Espinoza family has won $150 per year for all their troubles.

People like Betsy DeVos and her American Federation for Children, Jeanne Allen and her Center for Education Reform must be terribly disappointed that the decision did not tear down Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between state and church,” thus compelling states to pay full tuition for students at religious schools, regardless of their ideology, their quality, or their lack of certified teachers. That didn’t happen, thank God!

The public schools, the schools that nearly 90% of all American families choose, the schools that educated the overwhelming majority of the American people, have survived a close call. If Biden wins in November and Ruth Bader Ginsburg remains healthy until Biden’s inauguration, we will in time have a Supreme Court that supports public schools.

Randi warns:

WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue:

“This ruling in the Espinoza case is a seismic shock that threatens both public education and religious liberty. It is a radical departure from our Constitution, American history and our values. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissent, this ruling is ‘perverse.’

“Never in more than two centuries of American history has the free exercise clause of the First Amendment been wielded as a weapon to defund and dismantle public education. It will hurt both the 90 percent of students who attend neighborhood public schools, by siphoning off needed funds, and, in the long term, those who attend religious schools by curtailing their freedom with the accountability that comes with tax dollars.

“The court’s narrow conservative majority joined with Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, and other wealthy donors and special interests to attack public education and turn the First Amendment on its head. What’s even more disturbing is that some justices wanted to go even further.

“While the court didn’t invalidate the 38 state constitutional provisions that preclude public money from going to religious schools, it came very close. The financial backers of this case will now use it to open the floodgates to litigation across the country.

“I hope the court and the plaintiffs understand that by enabling this encroachment on religious liberty, they are also opening up religion to state control and state interference. With public funding comes public accountability. Upending the carefully constructed balance of free exercise and separation of church and state not only undermines public education, it is a grave threat to religious institutions and organizations.

“In this time of national crisis, we have seen the importance of our public schools. Children across the country rely on public education for far more than just academics: Thirty million kids eat lunch in school, 12 million eat breakfast in school, and schools provide millions more with their healthcare. We should be prioritizing additional resources for public education and other vital social programs, not diverting them to private purposes.

“We are not going to give up. In fact, we are only going to fight harder. Parents, teachers and their unions stood up and fought back—and we will continue to do so each and every day, whether in court, in Congress, in state legislatures or at the ballot box.

“When it comes to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’ attacks on public education, we will see them in November.”

Categories Biden, Education Reform, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers
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