THE SET-UP: Of course Texas is spearheading the drive to put Christianity into public schools. And of course Greg Abbott is pushing both that and school vouchers. His voucher plan is still a work in progress. Christianity, though, has scaled the Wall of Separation, but it didn’t quite stick the landing on the other side. That’s the takeaway from a State Board of Education meeting on September 10, where critics weighed-in on the complicated effort to inject the Bible into state-developed textbooks. Here’s just one of the “complications” aired at the meeting:
The materials feature biased and sometimes racist depictions of Jewish people, according to Jewish advocacy groups and religious leaders. A proposed second grade lesson discusses the Book of Esther, which tells the story of a Jewish woman who stops a plot to kill all the Jewish people in Persia.
The lesson “specifically talks about how Jews looked different, and they talked different. They were different from other people,” said former state Rep. Paul Colbert, who is Jewish. “That is a common anti-semitic trope... Jews as the other.”
A teacher’s guide describes how Haman, an adviser to the Persian king, rolled dice to determine when he wanted to attack the Jewish people. The guide instructs teachers to roll dice to demonstrate Haman’s decision.
“This is shocking, offensive and just plain wrong,” said Sharyn Vane, a Jewish parent. “Do we ask elementary schoolers to pretend to be Hitler?”
Republicans in Texas may eventually find they’ve been building the wrong wall. - jp
TITLE: Why Some Christians Don’t Want to Bring the Bible Into Public Schools
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/christians-bibles-public-schools-oklahoma-texas.html
EXCERPTS: Over the last several years, some conservative Christian politicians and organizations have sought to accelerate a national movement to bring prayer and religious texts into classrooms. Many evangelicals and Catholics oppose what they view as liberal orthodoxy in school curriculums. They would like the country’s democracy to be explicitly grounded in Christian values.
The movement has often cast divisions over their goals as partisan. Ryan Walters, the Republican schools chief in Oklahoma who directed public schools to teach the Bible, said: “The left does not like it, but it will be taught.”
But the resistance — or at times, indifference — challenges the idea that incorporating the Bible in the classroom is an issue that breaks cleanly along party or religious lines. It also reveals a surprising obstacle to the viability of these efforts.
National polling on expanding religious instruction in public schools is limited. But one survey conducted last year by The Associated Press and a nonpartisan research institution showed a divide over the intersection of religion and public education.
Among the U.S. adults who responded, 37 percent said religion has too little influence over what children are taught, 31 percent said it has too much, and 31 percent said it has the right amount.
The push to bolster teaching on the Bible has certainly won favor among many parents and congregations. While few administrators across Oklahoma publicly announced that they will change their curriculums, for example, local superintendents said they have heard of several districts that are welcoming Mr. Walters’s mandate.
Still, clashes over the role of religion in public schools have long divided Christians, even when the Bible was a centerpiece of American education.
In the 19th century, Catholics in Philadelphia fought against students reading the King James Version of the Bible, after Protestants helped bring it into schools as a common textbook. Believers across the ideological spectrum later battled over whether science classes would teach the theory of evolution or the creation story from the Book of Genesis.
Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said continued disagreements across the faith help explain “why we do see pushback against these initiatives from people at different points on the theological spectrum.”
“Not just liberal Christians,” he said. “But also often more conservative Christians who recognize that once you introduce this type of teaching about the Bible, there is the opportunity for people to promote their own religious beliefs over others.”
Mr. Chancey added: “That’s a well-founded fear.”
In some school districts, anxieties over giving teachers broad license to analyze Scripture — potentially drawing the ire of parents with different beliefs — are adding to the unease.
Rob Miller, the superintendent of Bixby Public Schools, in a suburb of Tulsa, said at a public event last week on the Oklahoma mandate that he struggled with the myriad ways that educators might explain the same biblical lesson or rituals.
“I, as a Christian myself who raised my children as a Christian, would be pretty skeptical of how that might look in various classrooms,” he said.
One of Mr. Miller’s sons attended vacation Bible school at a Baptist church in the summer, the superintendent said. At 10, the child was told by an adult there that “he would not be able to enter the kingdom of God” because he was baptized only as an infant.
Lutherans like Mr. Miller believe that newborns can be baptized as a means of grace, while the Baptist tradition says the ritual should be reserved for believers making a conscious decision.
“There are different interpretations of the word of God even within the Christian faith,” Mr. Miller said. “So we have to be really careful. Who’s going to dictate what the appropriate interpretation is?”
The push to teach a Christian historical perspective in public schools also comes as some religious conservatives have joined with free-market advocates to expand opportunities for parents to use public money to attend private religious schools through voucher programs.
That movement also does not sit well with some Christian educators.
Brandon Dennard, the superintendent of the Red Lick Independent School District in northeast Texas, told The Texas Tribune that the calls for more religious instruction in the state were “just one more idea that is clouding the line between private schools and public schools.”
“I’m a conservative Christian man,” said Mr. Dennard, who did not respond to requests for comment. “But I’m in public education because I want to serve all kids.”
TITLE: In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools
https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-taxpayer-money-funding-private-religious-schools
EXCERPTS: “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.
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.
It was the ultimate victory for Ohio’s school-choice advocates. The problem, though, was that in many parts of Ohio and other states, especially rural areas, parents can’t spend this new voucher money because private schools are either too far away or already at capacity.
This, in turn, has become a major political liability for voucher advocates in many states, with rural conservatives becoming increasingly indignant that their tax dollars are being spent on vouchers for upper-middle-class families in far-off metropolitan areas where there are more private schools.
In April, the Buckeye Institute, an Ohio-based conservative think tank affiliated with the Koch brothers’ political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, recognized the problem. In a policy memo, the institute said that it was offering lawmakers “additional solutions to address the growing need for classroom space” in private and charter schools, “given the success of the Ohio EdChoice program.” Among its recommendations: draw funding from the Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, which provides grants of state money for the construction and repair of buildings, as well as other “capital projects.”
Within months, the Legislature did precisely that. 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.
TITLE: How Private School Choice Complicates Public School Budgets
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/how-private-school-choice-complicates-public-school-budgets/2024/09
EXCERPTS: [T]he proliferation of private school choice programs has injected uncertainty and volatility into the already-chaotic school budgeting process. Districts in states including Indiana, Iowa, and Florida have reported losing millions of state dollars as students exit their schools for state-funded voucher and ESA offerings.
Others are bracing for fiscal storms to come as the number of students eligible for newly created and expanded private school choice programs grows, with future prospects for enrollment and financial viability becoming harder than ever to predict. Ohio districts saw increases of up to 600 percent in voucher participants after state lawmakers in 2023 expanded eligibility for the program to all students.
More than half of states have at least one private school choice program, and 12 have one that is on track to be accessible to all K-12 students in the state or already is, according to Education Week’s private school choice tracker.
“Even the existence of these programs introduces a lot of uncertainty into the K-12 school budgeting or district budgeting process, both for revenue this year and/or revenues next year and beyond,” said Ashlee Gabrysch, who helps analyze school districts’ financial health in her role as an analyst at the credit rating firm Fitch Ratings.
Proponents of private school choice acknowledge the effects these programs have on district operations. But they argue those impacts are relatively insignificant and worth the benefits that private school choice affords parents and students.
“Districts might be put in a position to make tough decisions that officials may not want to make or want to deal with” about budget cuts or tweaks, said Marty Lueken, the director of fiscal policy and analysis for EdChoice, the leading nonprofit advocating nationwide for private school choice. “That’s just an uncomfortable reality that I think all actors in the economy have to face.”
At the state level, eye-popping budget investments in private school choice have public school advocates worried that cuts may be on the horizon.
Some private school choice proponents counter that vouchers and ESAs represent a separate line item from public education and thus don’t pose an existential threat to public schools.
“That’s like me saying gas prices haven’t impacted my ability to pay my mortgage,” said Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who recently published The Privateers, a book detailing the private school choice movement’s trajectory and outlining his case against it. “State budgets don’t work that way.”
Arizona, Florida, and Ohio each spent at least $1 billion on their respective private school choice programs during their most recent budget cycles.
“States that size can’t fund other things when you’re spending a billion dollars on private schools,” Cowen said.
North Carolina’s state budget office this month released a nonpartisan analysis showing that funding vouchers for all this year’s applicants will lead to $75 million in cuts to state aid for public schools. Lawmakers reached a spending deal last week to appropriate more funds to clear the existing waitlist for vouchers.
Discussions of ramping up investment in existing private school choice programs, or creating new ones, are underway among lawmakers in states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
SEE ALSO:
Millions in Utah school vouchers have already been spent. Why details on where it went are not yet public.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2024/09/17/utah-school-voucher-program-how/
Democrats Want More Transparency as Vouchers Subsidizing Private Schools Hit State Budget
https://flaglerlive.com/democrats-want-more-transparency/
Florida families say school voucher reimbursements worse than ever
https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2024/09/17/florida-families-say-school-voucher-reimbursements-worse-than-ever/