Seventy Years After “Brown v. Board” Decision, School Segregation Keeps Growing

This coming Friday marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared:

“Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Reading the honest assessment by Gary Orfield and Ryan Pfleger at the UCLA Civil Rights Project of growing school segregation across U.S. public schools is at the same time helpful and sobering as we mark 70 years since America began grappling with the decision that banned racially segregated schools and declared that public schooling should be provided for all students on equal terms as the foundation for democratic citizenship:

“Segregation of U.S. schools continues to increase, especially intense double segregation by race and concentrated poverty. As we have passed through a vast transition in the racial composition of the society and our metropolitan communities, there has been a serious failure to develop policies to foster positive and equitable race relations. Segregation is harming the segregated students including the whites. We’ve given up the best chance we have to prepare all of our students for the very diverse society they will be living and working in.  The deepening isolation has been spurred both by a Supreme Court hostile to desegregation, and the changing population of the U.S., with its historically low birth rates and several decades of overwhelmingly Latino and Asian immigration. Our unequal society has become more complex but there has been a policy vacuum.”  (The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, p. 75)

Orfield and Pfleger continue: “This report shows that the pattern of intensifying segregation was continuing into the 2021-22 school year, nearly 70 years after Brown. It shows that, in spite of the accumulation of powerful evidence that segregation harms the education and life chances of students of color, the major integration efforts have been halted and reversed. The basic stance of state and local educational leaders has been to let segregation return and to do nothing about it, acting as if high stakes test-based educational reform or school choice could actually solve the racial problem.” (The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, p. 76)

Finally, Orfield and Pfleger reject any hope that today’s U.S. Supreme Court will protect attempts to reduce racial segregation: “There has been a vacuum in federal desegregation policy since the 1980s when the last substantial desegregation aid programs were shut down. Given the consolidation of highly conservative control of the Supreme Court under President Trump, it’s very likely that leadership in this generation will have to come from other levels of government or from public interest or private institutions. Civil rights organizations can play an important role and so could universities. There are no universal solutions, but many things still permitted could make a difference… If the courts are not to order desegregation, it is now much more in the hands of educators and local communities and some state governments. So, it is important to think not only about what could work but also about what could pass in a legislative body or a school board.” (The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, pp. 77-78)

Orfield and Pfleger suggest a mix of state and school district policies to support already diverse schools and incentivize diversity in schools that are now segregated. They add further recommendations for the adoption of housing policies that would integrate communities racially and economically.  One specific suggestion is to “require charter schools to show strategies and progress in reflecting the broader diversity of their region.” Other suggested strategies are to expand diverse magnet schools and within- and cross-district transfer policies despite the restrictions imposed by the 2007, U.S. Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved that banned explicitly balancing within-district voluntary programs using data about race itself.

To mark the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Stanford University education sociologists Sean Reardon and Ann Owens have launched a new, Segregation Explorer Website  to provide searchable data on racial and economic school segregation in states, counties, metropolitan areas, and school districts from 1991-2022.  I have not been able to locate the posting of what is reported to be a new paper to accompany the launch, but reporters received an early release of the paper and have covered it: Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat; Laura Meckler, Washington Post; Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report; and Carrie Spector, Stanford Graduate School Press Release.

Reardon and Owens’ study examines big data showing that racial segregation in public schools has increased significantly since court ordered busing was ended and since many voluntary within-district  busing programs based on race ended.  This report identifies growing segregation and at the same time changing segregation patterns as white students now make up 45 percent of the nation’s public school population, with Hispanic students now making up 30 percent.

Chalkbeat’s Meltzer emphasizes that despite these changes, intense segregation of Black students has increased significantly across U.S. big cities: “Between 1991 and 2019, Black-white segregation increased by 3.5 percentage points in the 533 districts that serve at least 2,500 Black students, an increase of 25% from historically low levels.  But in the 100 largest school districts, which serve about 38% of all Black students, the analysis found segregation increased 8 percentage points—a 64% increase.” At the same time, “Economic segregation increased considerably…. In 2019, the average Black student attended a school where the rate of students receiving free-or reduced-price lunch was 18 percent higher than in schools attended by white students in the same district.”

The Washington Post‘s Meckler explains that Reardon and Owens blame growing segregation on education policy choices: “The study finds that the rise nationally was not driven by increasing housing segregation.  Housing segregation certainly helps explain school segregation. But since 1991, housing has become less segregated.  The study also finds that rising school segregation is not driven by racial economic inequality because racial economic inequality has also declined over this period.”

Like Meckler, the Hechinger Report‘s Barsahay reports that Reardon identifies two causes for the persistent increase in racial segregation: “The expiration of court orders that mandated school integration and the expansion of school choice policies, including the rapid growth of charter schools, explains all of the increase in segregation from 2000 onward, said Reardon. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were released from desegregation orders from 1991 to 2009, and racial segregation in these districts gradually increased in the years afterward. School choice, however, appears to be the dominant force. More than half of the increase in segregation in the 2000s can be attributed to the rise of charter schools, whose numbers began to increase rapidly in the late 1990s. In many cases, either white or Black families flocked to different charter schools, leaving behind a less diverse student body in traditional public schools.”

As Reardon and Owens update their data in upcoming months and years, it will be important to pay attention to the impact of the continued impact of school privatization on segregation as we watch the current explosive growth of private school tuition vouchers across a number of states. Reporters seem to indicate that Reardon and Owens used charter school enrollment as a proxy for school privatization, but they did not factor in the effect of the growth of vouchers.

On the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, the bleak news is that our society continues to retreat from Brown‘s promise of equal opportunity for the students in our nation’s public schools. However, the Civil Right’s Project’s Orfield and Pfleger make a strong case for advocates to develop strategies—however modest—at the state and local level to desegregate our schools: “The (current) trends are toward increasing double segregation, by both race or ethnicity and poverty, segregation that channels most Black and Latino students away from our strong educational opportunities and keeps them isolated from the middle class in a time when employers are requiring higher and higher education credentials than ever before, and networks and relationship skills built in strong schools lead to opportunities.” (The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, p. 11)  “Segregation produces inequality. When you build a barrier separating the more powerful and resource-rich part of society from groups with far less, the schools reflect those differences. In our society with racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools, persisting discrimination… perpetuates inequality… Failure to bring diverse children together in schools is a lost opportunity to lower prejudice and stereotypes and help students learn to function effectively in our profoundly multiracial society.” (The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, p. 10)

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Here is Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon describing in rather technical language what his research has shown for decades about a school or school district’s standardized test scores as an accurate indicator of student demographics but not a good measure of school quality:

This blog will take a two week break.  Look for a new post on Tuesday, May 14.

“I use standardized test scores from roughly 45 million students to construct measures of the temporal structure of educational opportunity in over 11,000 school districts—almost every district in the U.S.  The data span the school years 2008-09 through 2014-15.  For each school district, I construct two measures: the average academic performance of students in grade 3 and the within-cohort growth in test scores from grade 3 to 8.  I argue that average test scores in a school district can be thought of as reflecting the average cumulative set of educational opportunities children in a community have had up to the time when they take a test.  Given this, the average scores in grade 3 can be thought of as measures of the average extent of ‘early educational opportunities’ (reflecting opportunities from birth to age 9) available to children in a school district.  Prior research suggests that these early opportunities are strongly related to the average socioeconomic resources available in children’s families in the district.  They may also depend on other characteristics of the community, including neighborhood conditions, the availability of high-quality child care and pre-school programs, and the quality of schools in grades K-3.”

Back in 2011, Reardon documented another important trend that describes aggregate test score variation across school districts. “In 1970 only 15 percent of families were in neighborhoods that we classify as either affluent (neighborhoods where median incomes were greater than 150 percent of median income in their metropolitan areas) or poor (neighborhoods where median incomes were less than 67 percent of metropolitan median income). By 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods,” and fewer families lived in mixed income neighborhoods.  What we have watched for fifty years across America’s metropolitan areas is school resegregation by family income. As quickly growing suburbs attract families who can afford to move farther from the central city, urban and inner ring suburban school districts enroll greater concentrations of poor children.

Unfortunately U.S News and local newspapers publish competitive high school rankings as though they are a measure or school quality.  A week ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer treated readers to another one of these misguided reports by quoting this year’s U.S News ranking of the nation’s best high schools.  Reporter Zachary Lewis explains that that top high schools in greater Cleveland this year are in Solon and Rocky River. “Other Greater Cleveland high schools in the top 25 in Ohio are Chagrin Falls (no 7), Hudson (No. 9), Brecksville-Broadview Heights (No. 15), Kenston (No. 15), Aurora (No. 20), and Bay High School (No. 24).

Lewis continues: “Common traits among the highest-ranked schools are those whose students scored high on state assessments for math, reading and science. These schools also had strong results for underserved student performance, focusing on students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households, performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams, curriculum breadth and graduation rates, U.S. News said.”  There is a serious problem with this statement: none of these high schools serves many students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households.

The point here is not that these are bad high schools. Each one is the comprehensive high schools that serves its suburban community. The point is that they serve wealthy, homogeneously white communities whose test scores are a mark of privilege, and that schools are far more complicated institutions than can be judged by the kinds of data—test scores, graduation data, and numbers of AP classes and AP exams passed—that are indicators of privilege.

In their book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain:  “Schools differ from other kinds of goods because they take time to understand and experience fully… Education, the quality of which is… difficult to assess, is what’s known as a ‘credence good.’ It can take months, or even years, to figure out the quality of a school… Exacerbating the issue is the fact that schools are highly complex institutions.” (A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, (pp. 146-148)

The 2002, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) established the idea of judging schools by comparing their aggregate standardized test scores.  Education historian Diane Ravitch describes how schools in impoverished communities were punished because NCLB’s operational strategy of comparing test scores as an indicator of school quality  “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”

The Harvard University expert on the appropriate use of standardized tests Daniel Koretz wrote a book to expose the problems with the NCLB testing regime and with judging schools by their test scores and related numerical indicators: “Used properly… tests are very useful for describing what students know. On their own, however, tests simply aren’t sufficient to explain why they know it…. Of course the actions of educators do affect scores, but so do many of the other factors both inside and outside of school, such as their parents’ education.  This has been well documented at least since the publication more than fifty years ago of the ‘Coleman Report,’… which found that student background and parental education had a bigger impact than schooling on student achievement.” (The Testing Charade, pp, 148-149)

Koretz explains further: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

Reporters often tell readers that school ratings are based on other factors besides test scores, but it turns out that many of the other factors states consider when they do the ratings are in fact based mostly on school districts’ aggregate scores. The Ohio Department of Education’s guide to understanding the state school report cards lists five areas on which the state rates public schools and school districts: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing,  Early Literacy, and Graduation. Four of the five categories in Ohio’s system depend on a school’s or a school district’s aggregate test scores, which have for years been highly correlated with a school population’s overall family income.

Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes his own academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

Arizona State University emeritus professor and former president of the American Educational Research Association, David Berliner is blunt in his analysis: “(T)he big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

How Book Bans, Threats to Honest Teaching of History, and “Don’t Say Gay” Bills Harm Our Children and Undermine Education for Citizenship

Public schools, which serve more than 50 million of our nation’s children and adolescents, are perhaps our society’s most important public institution. Unlike private schools, public schools guarantee acceptance for all children everywhere in the United States, and they protect the rights of all children by law. And unlike their private school counterparts, public schools are also required to provide services to meet each child’s educational needs, even children who are disabled or who are learning the English language.

Today’s culture war attacks on public education drive fear of “the other” and attempt to frighten parents about exposing their children to others who may come from other countries, from other cultures, from a different race or ethnicity, from a different religion, or from a gay or lesbian family.

The idea of insulating children is, however, counter to the whole philosophical tradition that is the foundation for our system of public schooling.

More than a century ago, education philosopher John Dewey declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself,” (The School and Society, p. 5)

For Dewey, however, educating all children together without insulating them was important as more than an abstract principle. Dewey believed that the experience of school was itself a way of learning to live in a broader community: “I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life… I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects… the school as a form of community life… I believe that… the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought.” (My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897)

A hundred years later, in 1998, the political philosopher Benjamin Barber defended the idea of public schools as a microcosm of the community: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity.  If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness.”( “Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p.231).

And in the same year, another philosopher of education, Walter Feinberg explained that in public school classrooms students should learn to tell their own stories, to listen and respect the stories of others, and through that process prepare for democratic citizenship: “That there is an ‘American story’ means not that there is one official understanding of the American experience but, rather, that those who are telling their versions of the story are doing so in order to contribute to better decision making on the part of the American nation and that they understand that they are part of those decisions. The concept is really ‘Americans’ stories.’” (Common Schools: Uncommon Identities, p. 232) (emphasis in the original)

Today, of course, the culture wars attacks on public education seek to reshape the curriculum, silence controversial discussion, and ban books.

Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham explains that well-funded advocates for reshaping school curricula—including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Council for National Policy and a number of dark money groups—are spending millions of dollars to fan the fears of parents by supporting local advocates in organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The goal is to agitate against overly “woke” public school curricula and to frighten parents by telling them that teachers are frightening children by including the nation’s sins as well as our society’s virtues as part of the American history curriculum, and by encouraging children to listen to the voices of people who have traditionally been marginalized.  There is, however, no evidence that our children have been personally or collectively frightened when they learn about slavery as the cause of the Civil War or when they learn about gender identity as part of a high school human sexuality curriculum. Accurate and inclusive curricula and open class discussion where all voices are heard and considered are essential for truly public education.

Robert Samuels’ When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Culture Wars profoundly explains the damage wrought by book banning, Samuels, a Washington Post reporter and his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, had just won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction last fall when they were invited to a Memphis high school to discuss their new book, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  Samuels describes why he wanted to share his book with the Memphis high school students: “I had once been told that the answer to anything could be found in a book… One day, during my senior year, I was browsing an airport bookstore when I saw Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography, “Ready for Revolution.” A whole chapter was devoted to Bronx (High School of) Science, which he had also attended. I was riveted. It started with an officer hassling him on the street, only to be stunned when Carmichael shows him a book with the school’s logo. Although our time there was separated by four decades, we both had the same confusion upon discovering that white classmates had grown up reading an entirely different set of material….  We were both surprised by how little dancing there was at white classmates’ parties. ‘It was at first a mild culture shock, but I adapted,’ he wrote. I, too, had to learn to adapt, to not be so self-conscious about getting stereotyped because of my speech, my clothes, my interests. It was the first time I had ever truly felt seen in a book that was not made for children.”

Samuels and Olorunnipa received a call just before their Memphis visit warning them they could not read from the book and that the school could not distribute copies to students. And during their visit, it became evident that students’ questions had even been carefully edited by their teachers.  Then, in the weeks after the visit, the Memphis-Shelby County school staff and event sponsoring organization stepped all over themselves trying to apologize to Samuels and Olorunnipa.  It became evident that school staff had been frightened and intimidated by school district regulations; the penalties were severe while the rules themselves remained unclear.

Samuels describes what happened: “(T)he spokesperson for the school district e-mailed… to apologize for the miscommunication and misinformation ‘surrounding your recent visit’… (She) defended prohibiting the book itself, on the ground that it was not appropriate for people under the age of eighteen… (She) then admitted that no one involved in the decision had actually read it. The district’s academic department didn’t have time… A staff person in the office searched for it in a library database, noting that the American Library Association had classified it as adult literature.” There was one positive result of the whole fiasco:  with a donation from Viking Books, the publisher, a Memphis community development group, promised any student from Whitehaven High School a free copy of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Philosophers of education, academic researchers, educational psychologists, and the students in America’s classrooms all tell us that young people are hurt when the school is forced to remove the books that tell students’ own stories.

Young people are made invisible when state laws suppress accurate teaching about all the strands of the American story including slavery, and what happened during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. Children who are gay or lesbian learn that they should withdraw and hide when the words that describe them are banned. Experts also tell us that the other children in the classroom are not frightened when, for example, a classmate shares the challenges his or her family faced as immigrants trying to find a place to feel welcome.

A large body of education theory confirms that honest and accurate curricula and supportive, respectful classrooms create safe spaces where immigrant children, white children, Black children, Hispanic children, LGBTQ+ children, and children whose families practice different religions or no religion are able to be themselves. Such classrooms model the ideal of inclusive public schooling where children comfortably come together to see each other, hear other, respect each other, and learn how to be citizens of our diverse democracy.

State Support for Pre-Kindergarten Is Another Victim As Vouchers Drain State Tax Dollars

Yesterday, the Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reported some troubling numbers about Ohio children’s access to early childhood education:

“The National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual ‘state of preschool’ report showed nationwide disparities in access, quality, and funding for preschool, with Ohio sitting at 43rd in total reported spending on early education… Ohio has a total of 18,000 children enrolled in pre-K education, with 35% of the school districts offering a state-funded program… In terms of access, Ohio ranked 36th for 4-year-olds and 26th for 3-year-olds.”  Its overall investment is among the lowest of the states.

Sadly, while the new FY 24-25 state budget increased funding for preschool by $122 million over two years, the increase was not sufficient to build enrollment significantly: “Last year’s report saw Ohio in 36th for 4-year-old enrollment, but slightly lower at 27th for three-year-old enrollment.”  And, “The boost followed a reduction in the 2022-2023 school year, when state spending dropped $268 per student from the 2021-2022 year.”

Tebben adds that neither did Ohio meet the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) quality benchmarks in its requirements for “learning and development standards, curriculum supports, minimum class size and staff-to-child ratios… An associate degree is required in the state for pre-K teachers, but the NIEER benchmark is a bachelor’s degree.  For assistant preschool teachers, the Ohio requirement is a high school diploma, though NIEER sets a benchmark of a child development associate credential or equivalent credential.”   While NIERR recommends class size in pre-K to be limited to 20 students, Ohio permits a class size of 28 for 4-year-olds and 24 for 3-year-olds.

Research has shown quality pre-K programs to be transformational, especially for children living in poverty.  Clearly the availability of quality pre-K in Ohio is inadequate.  Professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, David Kirp reviews the research about the kind of programming needed to help prepare students socially and developmentally for Kindergarten: “A high-quality program, according to early childhood education experts, features small classes and low student-teacher ratios, with well-trained teachers, an evidence-based curriculum that emphasizes hands-on learning, not eat-your-spinach instruction in the ABC’s or coloring inside the lines, and lots of time for play. The focus is on kids’ physical, social and emotional growth as well as their cognitive development. In that setting, youngsters, preferably from different social backgrounds, are solving problems together, while their teachers talk with, not at, them.”

As we read this news about Ohio’s paltry investment in pre-Kindergarten programs for children who desperately need early childhood enrichment, it’s important to consider the context.

Late in March, the Plain Dealer’s Laura Hancock reported: “As of March 18, state spending on all five scholarship (private school tuition voucher) programs was $980.4 million, with several months yet to go in the state’s fiscal year.” “State spending on private school scholarships (vouchers) has exceeded estimates by over $15 million and is inching toward the $1 billion mark.”  That’s a diversion of a billion dollars for vouchers in just the first year of the budget biennium.

Who are the students receiving these vouchers? In a March 2 report, Hancock explains that they are not poor students exiting their public schools looking  for greater opportunities.The legislature expanded the EdChoice program in the state budget by raising family income eligibility for a full voucher to 450 percent of the federal poverty level and making all Ohio children eligible by offering children in families with even higher incomes a partial private school tuition voucher. Ohio’s diversion of tax dollars from public schools is now covering private school tuition for middle and upper income students who were already enrolled in private and parochial schools with tuition previously paid by their parents.

Underfunded pre-Kindergarten programs are only one of the victims of the drain of state funding into vouchers for the wealthy.

What is White Christian Nationalism and How Is It Affecting Public Education Today?

Our politics and our national ethos seem to have gone awry, and a lot of people blame it on something called Christian nationalism or white Christian nationalism. And yet, the book bans, the efforts to prohibit honest teaching about slavery, and the attempts to quash equity and inclusion seem to have nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, embodied, for example, in the Great Commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 39) If, like me, you have been confused by the seeming contradictions, I recommend a book that begins: “This book is a primer on white Christian nationalism, what it is, when it emerged, how it works, and where it’s headed. White Christian nationalism is one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 1)

The book is The Flag and The Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, by two professors of the sociology of religion, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma. The book is short, readable, and extremely relevant to the political maelstrom in today’s United States.

The authors trace the existence of white Christian nationalism back to the introduction of slavery to Virginia; the subjugation of American Indians beginning in Massachusetts and then westward through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Civil War and subsequent collapse of Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow; the Mexican American War; and the Spanish American War with the establishment of an American empire including the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

So… what is white Christian nationalism? “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it it should be…  America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)

Gorski and Perry continue: “Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy ‘us,’ the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving ‘them’ who conspire to take what is ours. Sometimes the conflicts culminate in violence—violence that restores white Christians to what they believe is their rightful place atop America’s racial and religious hierarchy… But this story is a myth… At this point, the skeptical reader might wonder what’s ‘Christian’ about this deep story.  It is ‘Christian’ because the vast majority of those who believe this story identify as such.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 4-5)

Why has white Christian nationalism exploded in recent years? “The source of the growing pressure is a set of slow-moving changes in American society.  The United States has slowly become less white, less Christian, and less powerful; more diverse, secular, and cosmopolitan. And this collided with a certain conception of America as a white Christian nation favored by God and ruled by white Christian men ready to defend freedom and order with violence.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 103) Gorski and Perry describe the January 6th insurrection as a symbol of the conflict.

After defining “white Christian nationalism,” Gorski and Perry explain what it is not: “(W)hite Christian nationalism is not ‘Christian patriotism’; white Christian nationalism…. is rooted in white supremacist assumptions and empowered by anger and fear. This is nationalism, not patriotism… Second, white Christian nationalism is not synonymous with white evangelicalism per se, even if there is considerable overlap… Third and finally, white Christian nationalism is not just a problem among white American Christians. There are secular versions of white Christian nationalism that claim to defend ‘Western Culture’ or ‘Judeo-Christian civilization.’ And there are secular white Americans who know how to leverage white Christian nationalist language. For such Americans, the ‘Christian’ label simply signals shared tribal identity or veils political values that would otherwise be socially unacceptable. That is certainly how Trump himself used the label—as a rallying cry and a fig leaf—and one reason why so many white Christians have been attracted to him: not because he himself is an exemplar of Christian piety, but because he waved the Christian flag and announced his willingness to ‘fight’ for it.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 8-10)

The book is not principally about the institution of public education, but it says a lot about today’s assault on inclusive public schools. The authors name some of what’s been happening in recent years and in addition create a theoretical scaffolding to help us understand attacks on public education as part of a scheme to use public schools to protect the dominant culture.  Here are four threats to public education that reflect white Christian nationalism:

• opposition to teaching about racism in American history, and the passage of state laws to ban multicultural education, and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion;’ (The Flag and The Cross, p. 14);
•  efforts to permit religious education at public expense—promotimg the beliefs of specific faith traditions and undermining the protection of religious liberty (The Flag and The Cross, p. 16);
• efforts to block school integration after Brown v. Board of Education (The Flag and The Cross, p. 69); and
• the recent proposal by the Heritage Foundation of a strategy to overturn Plyler v. Doe to exclude from public schools undocumented students who cannot afford to pay tuition.

All  of these attacks exemplify pushback against inclusion and welcome for ‘the other’: “The first and most fundamental way in which white Christian nationalism threatens American liberal democracy is that it defines ‘the people’ in a way that excludes many Americans. White Christian nationalism is a form of what is often called ‘ethno-nationalism.’ Liberal democracy rests on what is usually called ‘civic nationalism’ It defines the nation in terms of values, laws, and institutions.'” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 114)

Throughout the book the authors explore and re-explore the meaning of the deep story of white Christian nationalism: “White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened…. (T)he term Christian in white Christian nationalism is often far more akin to a dog whistle that calls out to an aggrieved tribe than a description of the content of one’s faith.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 44)

Heritage Foundation Wants to Deny the Right to Public Schooling for Undocumented Immigrant Children

I like to think I know enough about awful public policy that it would be hard to surprise me, but I confess that the beginning of Kalyn Belsha’s new report for Chalkbeat describes a politics so indecent that I was shocked:

“An influential conservative think tank has laid out a strategy to challenge a landmark Supreme Court decision that protects the right of undocumented children to attend public school. The Heritage Foundation, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to craft a policy playbook for a second Trump presidential term… released a brief calling on states to require public schools to charge unaccompanied migrant children and children with undocumented parents tuition to enroll.”  (You can look at the Heritage Foundation’s very short  policy brief which is part of Heritage’s Project 2025 that lays out an extremely conservative platform.)

Belsha explains Heritage’s reasoning for this cruelty: “Such a move ‘would draw a lawsuit from the Left,’ the brief states, ‘which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision’—referring to the 1982 ruling that held it was unconstitutional to deny children a public education based on their immigration status.”

We like to think we are kinder and more civilized in America than we used to be in the days of slavery,  Jim Crow, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, but I guess the Heritage Foundation feels comfortable taking us back to 1975, when Texas passed a law to deny undocumented children the right, enjoyed by all children in the United States, to a free public education.

Belsha explains: “Texas passed a law in 1975 saying that public schools would not receive state funding for the education of undocumented children and that districts could bar these students from attending public school for free. Two years later, the Tyler Independent School District started charging undocumented children $1,000 a year to attend school—a sum district officials knew would be unaffordable for the area’s immigrant families who often worked in Tyler’s famous rose industry, along with meat-packing plants and farms.”

A lawsuit challenging the Texas plan eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in 1982, declared the Texas statute unconstitutional.  The Court also defined the public purpose of our system of public schools, accessible to all children. In the majority opinion in Plyler v. Doe, Justice William Brennan wrote:

“A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment… (T)he Texas statute imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status. The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage: the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”

Brennan is careful not to contradict the precedent in San Antonio v Rodriguez—that public education, never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, is not protected as a federal fundamental right—but he comes as close as possible when he declares that for children brought into the United States by undocumented immigrants: “(W)hen the State provides an education to some and denies it to others, it immediately and inevitably creates class distinctions of a type fundamentally inconsistent with those purposes, mentioned above, of the Equal Protection Clause. Children denied an education are placed at a permanent and insurmountable competitive disadvantage, for an uneducated child is denied even the opportunity to achieve. And when those children are members of an identifiable group, that group—through the State’s action—will have been converted into a discrete underclass.”

In his decision in Plyler v. Doe, Brennan identifies the defining principles of our nation’s education system: guaranteeing free public schooling (1) to prepare every child to achieve and (2) to prepare all children to contribute socially, economically, intellectually and politically as part of our democracy.  That the Heritage Foundation has developed a strategy to threaten these rights for immigrant children confirms the abyss toward which many of us fear the far right is driving our society.

There are, however, people from all corners of our nation who are pushing back. We need to highlight their work and join them. A lot those people are public school teachers whose life work is to nurture their students.

For example: NEA Today‘s Tim Walker profiles Missy Testerman, the 2024 National Teacher of the Year: “A Tennessee native and first-generation college graduate, Testerman has been teaching for 31 years.” “The rural Appalachia town in Tennessee where Missy Testerman teaches is home to families who have been there for generations. But a growing number of students are from families who are newer to the area, representing diverse cultures from around the world. Many in the community view these newcomers with suspicion, but Testerman has dedicated herself to building bridges and ensuring that every student, no matter their background or circumstances has a chance to succeed.”

Walker describes how Testerman has continued throughout her career to expand her skills: “In 2022, as she approached her third decade teaching, Testerman added an English as a Second Language (ESL) licensure to her credentials…. Testerman currently serves as the district ESL specialist and ESL program director. She works with 21 children who hail from five different countries on four continents and speak five different languages. Wanting to ensure that immigrant students and families had an advocate in their small town, Testerman is determined to see everyone succeed in school.” “In a small town like Rogersville, with a poverty rate well above the national average, a good education can be the foundation for a brighter future. ‘Our schools enabled us to help students change the trajectories of their lives, ‘ Testerman said.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, congratulates Testerman: “Every student in every public school in this country deserves a teacher like Testerman. She stands up for those students who feel unseen, unheard, unappreciated, and undervalued in America. On behalf of the NEA’s more than three million members, we congratulate Missy for creating an inclusive environment where every student feels welcome, no matter their race, background or ability.”

Chicago Begins the Hard Work of Dismantling Neoliberal School Reform

Right now we are watching in real time as Chicago tries to figure out how to undo the consequences of a catastrophic, two-decades long experiment in marketplace school reform.

Chicago’s Board of Education has voted to implement an important first step in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed school district overhaul: the elimination of student based budgeting.

Mayor Johnson seeks to restore equal opportunity across a school district that has become marked by magnet schools, charter schools, elite and selective public schools, struggling neighborhood schools, and neighborhoods without a a public high school or even a traditional public elementary school.

Johnson has prioritized major changes in the Chicago Public Schools, whose problems became especially obvious in June of 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 neighborhood public schools because, as he claimed, they were under-enrolled. Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist explains that, “80 percent of the students who would be affected were African American… and 87 percent of the schools to be closed were majority black.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 54)

Chicago was an early experimenter with school reform. Brandon Johnson, the city’s elected mayor, leads Chicago’s schools as part of the 1994 mayoral governance plan imposed on the public schools by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Illinois legislature. The Chicago Public Schools adopted universal, districtwide school choice, and the launch in 2004 of Renaissance 2010 (led by Arne Duncan) that involved the authorization of a mass of new charter schools and the subsequent closure of so-called failing neighborhood public chools. Chicago adopted a strategy called “portfolio school reform,” described in a National Education Policy Center brief: “The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager. If a stock is low-performing, the manager sells it.  As a practical matter, this means either closing the school or turning it over to an charter school….”

Then in 2014, Mayor Emanuel added a districtwide funding plan called student based budgeting. In a 2019 report, Roosevelt University professor Stephanie Farmer explained: “Student Based Budgeting fundamentally remade the approach to funding public schools. Student Based Budgeting is akin to a business model of financing public schools because funds are based on student-consumer demand and travel with the student-consumer to the school of their choice.  (The plan contrasts with)… the old public good approach to financing public schools that ensured a baseline of education professionals in each school.”

Because it is known that aggregate school test scores correlate primarily with poverty and wealth, it was predicable that student based budgeting would put schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom, leading to schools with tragically limited programming for the city’s most vulnerable students and more school closures.  Farmer concludes: “Our findings show that Chicago Public Schools’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. The clustering of low budget schools in low-income Black neighborhoods adds another layer of hardship in neighborhoods experiencing distress from depopulation, low incomes, and unaffordable housing.”

In late March of this year, WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported that the Board of Education voted to launch a new plan to determine how much each school has to spend on teachers and programming: “Chicago Public Schools is officially moving away from a school funding formula that pitted schools against each other as they competed for students… District officials… announced (on March 21, 2024) they are implementing a formula that targets resources for individual schools based on the needs of students, such as socioeconomic status and health. They will abandon student based budgeting—a formula unveiled a decade ago under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel that provided a foundational amount of money based on how many students were enrolled…. Under the needs-based formula, every school will get at least four foundation positions, including an assistant principal, plus core and ‘holistic teachers.’… Schools will then get additional funding based on the opportunity index, which looks at barriers to opportunity including race, socioeconomic status, education, health and community factors.”

While undoing a market-based scheme for school funding and operations is clearly a moral imperative, the challenges appear daunting.  Karp continues: “This change was expected as Mayor Brandon Johnson and others have sharply criticized student based budgeting. However, it was unclear how it would play out, especially as the district faces a $391 million deficit for the next school year.  The shortfall is the result of federal COVID relief funds running out… District officials offered no information at a Board of Education meeting… on how the district will fill the budget hole.”

In addition to the threat of a serious financial shortfall, another challenge is the outcry from parents who have over the past two decades become a constituency for charter schools, magnet schools and selective high schools.  Mayor Johnson has tried to reassure parents: “(L)et me assure people that—whether its a selective enrollment school or magnet school—we will continue to invest in those goals… (A)ll I’m simply saying is that where education is working in particular at our selective enrollment schools and our magnet schools, my position is like any other parents in Chicago: that type of programming should work in all of our schools. And that has not been the case. Neighborhood schools have been attacked, they have been demonized, and they’ve been disinvested in, and Black and brown parents overwhelmingly send their children to those schools. So it’s not just demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown schools, it’s demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown people—and not under my administration.”

Although school choice plans like Chicago’s were originally premised on the idea of providing more choices for those who have few, in her profound book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing explains that families in Chicago do not have equal access in today’s school system based on school choice: “While choosing the best option from a menu of possibilities is appealing in theory, researchers have documented that in practice the ‘choice’ model often leaves black families at a disadvantage. Black parents’ ability to truly choose may be hindered by limited access to transportation, information, and time, leaving them on the losing end of a supposedly fair marketplace.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 23) Families dealing with poverty and its challenges are more likely to select a neighborhood school within walking distance of their home.

Mayor Johnson and his school board are facing a fraught political battle in the midst of severe budget challenges. Chicago school reform has exacerbated inequality. The families whose children remain in traditional neighborhood schools that have been undermined by school choice and student based budgeting have watched their their schools lose staff and programs their children need. At the same time, families who have benefited from charter schools, magnet schools and selective-enrollment high schools have now become strong supporters of the programs they have come to take for granted.

Mayor Johnson has been very clear, however, about what the past two decades of portfolio school reform, school choice and student based budgeting have meant for Chicago: “What has happened in the city of Chicago is selective enrollment schools go after students who perform academically on paper.  It’s a very narrow view of education. Let’s also ensure that other areas of need are also highlighted and lifted up.  That’s arts, our humanities, technology, trades…  It’s not like we’re asking for anything radical. We’re talking about social workers, counselors, class sizes that are manageable. We’re talking about full wraparound services for treatment for families who are experiencing the degree of trauma that exists in this city.”

Today’s Bitter Divide—in Our Society and in Our Public Schools

In America Has Legislated Itself into Competing Red, Blue Versions of Education, the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson and her colleagues identify the growing divide between red states—whose legislatures are banning school curricula that recognize the history of racial inequity, intentionally include the stories and histories of Black, Brown, and American Indian students, and cover human sexuality—and blue states whose curricula aim to reflect on and correct our society’s history of racism, exclusion, and homophobia.

Certainly the Post’s reporters are correct to acknowledge the growing political divide in public school curricular policy across the states, but they misdiagnose the cause. They explain that online programming during COVID alarmed parents when they saw what their children were being taught, and caused frightened parents to begin organizing: “(T)he onslaught of restrictive legislation in red states began in 2021… inspired in many cases by parent concerns over curriculums…. as some mothers and fathers—granted an unprecedented glimpse into lessons during the era of school-by-laptop—found they did not like or trust what their children were learning. Soon, some parents were complaining that lessons were biased toward left-leaning views and too focused on what they saw as irrelevant discussions of race, gender, and sexuality—laments taken up by conservative pundits and politicians. National groups like Moms for Liberty formed to call out and combat left-leaning teaching in public schools.”

This explanation distorts what happened. Natanson and her colleagues present the emergence of groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education as spontaneous grassroots uprisings of disgruntled parents who didn’t like what they watched when their children’s schools went remote during COVID. These organizations did not just spring up as parents met over coffee or argued in PTA meetings. The organizations are instead offshoots of national networks funded by well known far-right philanthropists and resourced by staff at right-wing think tanks.  Moms for Liberty and the rest are Astroturf—fake grassroots—organizations.

Education writer Jeff Bryant names some of the groups and traces their operating money: “According to an analysis by NBC News, there are ‘at least 165 local and national groups’ connected to protests and incidents of threats and violence directed at public schools. Many of these groups have connections to prominent national rightwing advocacy organizations and think tanks, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and FreedomWorks. In a study of the funding sources for Moms for Liberty, retired University of Massachusetts professor Maurice Cunningham linked the group’s financial records to conservative dark money organizations such as the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Leadership Institute (LI).”

Cunningham traces the money behind what may appear to be a spontaneous emergence of parents’ groups—Parents Defending Education, Moms for Liberty, and No Left Turn in Education. Cunningham points to clues that these are not local grassroots groups of parents; their websites, for example, betray a big investment in communications. And while the founders of Parents Defending Education (PDE) claim to be a bunch of working moms, Cunningham explains: “PDE took in $3,178,272 in contributions and grants in 2021… Donor’s Trust, a dark money donor associated with the Koch network donated $20,250 to PDE in 2021. The Achelis & Bodman Foundation which funds voucher and charter school programs and targets public education, contributed $25,000. Searle Freedom Trust, another right-wing donor with ties to Donors Trust, contributed $250,000 in 2021. We don’t know all the names on the checks, but we do know that those checks had to be pretty large, that the attorneys and consultants sit at the hierarchy of right-wing operatives, and that the board members and staffers are connected to the highest levels of conservative donors including the Koch network.”

In January,  the NY Times‘ Nicholas Confessore profiled another sponsor of far right attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and in American higher education: “Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against ‘the leftist social justice revolution’ by eliminating ‘social justice education’ from American schools.”  When Confessore asked the Claremont Institute for a statement of its policies, he received the following: Claremont is: “proud to be a leader in the fight against D.E. I., since the ideology from which it flows conflicts with America’s Founding principles, constitutional government and equality under the law.” He continues: “By 2022, as Claremont and allies like the Maine Policy Institute and a Tennessee group called Velocity Convergence rolled out early research… (t)heir public reports began to borrow from Mr. (Christopher) Rufo’s rhetoric, attacking ‘critical social justice’ or ‘critical social justice education.”  Confessore adds: “Claremont officials would partner with state think tanks, and with hundreds of former fellows scattered through conservative institutions and on Capitol Hill. They would catalog the D.E.I. programs and personnel honeycombed through public universities. Then they would lobby sympathetic public officials to gut them.”

Not only do Natanson and her colleagues neglect to consider the funding behind the anti-D.E.I. campaign, but they also fail to notice a much broader surging of the open expression of racism and homophobia that seems to have culminated in today’s MAGA era.

In a profound column in the March 2024, Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s President and CEO, Dr. John Jackson and Nicole Rodriguez Leach, the  Executive Director of Grantmakers for Education, explore profound social and demographic trends  that predate COVID: “First, the American classroom has changed… Data from the National Center for Education Statistics tells us that as of 2021, public school students in the U.S. are now majority non-white…. Second, the education justice movement has changed…. As the public school community has diversified, parents, young people, and educators have increased their demands for equitable funding, an end to discriminatory and punitive school discipline policies and (for) the wraparound services and supports needed to make the promise of quality education real for every child…. (Third) the larger racial justice movement, too, has changed… reaching its most recent peak in the summer of 2020 after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Institutions large and small have shifted their rhetoric, and to a lesser extent their practices, in response to their members, customers, donors, and constituents. The fourth factor is a backlash to the first three, in a pattern that extends back to the Reconstruction Era…. Advances in racial justice are being met with harsh reaction from the radical right.” Perhaps what we have been watching is the culmination of a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement itself.

What we see happening today in the fight about the social studies curriculum in our public schools is mirrored in the nation’s political partisan divide. Last week, Washington Post columnist  Eugene Robinson declared: “The rest of us… should take a moment to ponder the bridge the American right has crossed—a bridge leading to the Jim Crow past. It would be wrong to blame all this on Donald Trump. But by bulldozing the guardrails that used to delimit our political rhetoric, he has given permission for quiet racism to be shouted.”

Robinson highlights the attacks he has heard and received in e-mail responses to his writing about the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. After Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott made a public statement on the collapse of the bridge, Robinson received this comment: “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.” Robinson explains: “‘DEI’ is diversity, equity and inclusion. For the unhinged far right, however, ‘DEI’ has come to mean ‘any Black or brown person who holds a position of authority that we think should have gone to a white man.’… I don’t need to defend Scott; he’s perfectly capable of defending himself: ‘We’ve been the boggeyman for them since the first day they brought us to this country,’ he said on MSNBC of his racist critics… ‘We know what they want to say. But they don’t have the courage to say the N word.'”

Robinson adds: “They might not say it out loud, yet. But the racists now hurl that word to me, in emails and other communications, with a gusto I haven’t seen since the days of Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond.”

The battles happening in local school board meetings and the attacks on the honest teaching of American history, didn’t all just well up because parents watched online lessons during COVID. In a political climate where people feel freer to express their biases, racism and homophobia have surfaced in a widespread reaction to what has been our society’s greater acceptance and inclusion of formerly excluded groups of people. And since the police killing of George Floyd, the fire of bigotry has also been intentionally fanned by think tanks lavishly funded by the far right. The battle about whether our diverse society should be more inclusive and equitable is not merely an education battle, but that broader fight sure is affecting the public schools.

Retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, William Ayers describes how public schools, as a core social and civic institution, reflect our society: “Schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. Schools serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore, what is precious and what is venal.”  (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

Oklahoma Supreme Court Justices Appear to Question Constitutionality of Religious Charter School

On Tuesday, the  Supreme Court of the state of Oklahoma heard oral arguments in a case filed by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond versus the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board, which approved a religious charter school last June. The case challenges whether the establishment of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School can be legal under the provisions of the Oklahoma Constitution.  If the school is permitted to open in August, it will be operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa.

The Oklahoman’s Murray Evans reports that during oral arguments on Tuesday, “Drummond told justices he sued the virtual-school board ‘to defend the separation of church and state’… Drummond said Article 2, Section 5 of the Oklahoma Constitution was at the heart of his case: ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary or sectarian institution as such.'”

There are two issues being tested in two cases challenging the establishment of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School: (1) protecting children from a charter school’s imposition of religious practice in violation of the constitutional protection of religious liberty, and (2) ensuring that government is not sponsoring charter schools that can select students according to the school’s religious affiliation or discriminate against students whose LGBTQ status (or other characteristic) may violate church strictures.

Drummond’s lawsuit, heard before the state’s supreme court this week, focuses on the protection of religious liberty by ensuring that public schools do not impose religion on their students—an issue with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School, which has clearly defined itself as a religious school.  For Education Week in 2023, Mark Walsh quoted the school’s application for approval by the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board: “‘To the extent permissible under the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act,’ the application says, the school’s purposes, activities, programs, and affairs will operate ‘in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church based on Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition.'”

A second lawsuit (which was not part of Tuesday’s oral arguments and awaits a hearing in a district court) has been filed by parents, faith leaders, and public school advocates—all part of the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee.  They are represented by attorneys from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union,  and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Plaintiffs’ primary argument is that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School will violate the civil rights of students based on the religious operation of the school.  Plaintiffs’ attorneys explain: “The plaintiffs… object to their tax dollars funding a public charter school that will discriminate against students and families based on their religion and LGBTQ+ status, fail to adequately serve students with disabilities, and indoctrinate students into one religion—all in violation of Oklahoma law and our country’s promises of the separation of church and state and public schools that are open to all.”

The Case Heard on Tuesday Is a Constitutional Test Case and Will Likely Be Appealed

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler explains that the case heard this week is part of a years-long series brought by the far right to undermine the U.S. Constitutional protection of citizens from the imposition of religion by the state: “In recent years, religious activists have succeeded in tearing down what had been a clear delineation between public funding and religious education. In three (of the most recent) significant rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court found that religious institutions may not be excluded from taxpayer-funded programs that were available to others.  In a 2017 case, the high court ruled that a church-run preschool in Missouri was entitled to a state grant that funded playgrounds. In 2020, the court ruled that Montana… include religious schools in a program giving tax incentives for supporting private-school tuition scholarships. And last year, the court said that a Maine voucher program that sent rural students to private high schools had to be open to religious schools.”  In today’s Oklahoma case, the issue is whether publicly funded charter schools can be religious under the state’s constitution.

For two decades now, conservative advocates have used far-right legal firms including the Institute for Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom (the attorneys defending St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School in the current case) to bring a series of test cases for the purpose of reframing the separation of religion from public education.  The strategy has been to reduce concern about the separation of church and state (a principle articulated in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause) and refocus on protecting religious free exercise in the form of guaranteeing religious private schools the right to the same public tuition vouchers available to other private schools (a First Amendment Free Exercise Clause argument). The contention in these lawsuits is that religious institutions cannot be denied the same public funding that is available to secular institutions because denying them these benefits is a violation of the free exercise of religion. The John Roberts Supreme Court has in all three recent cases endorsed Free Exercise Clause arguments over Establishment Clause arguments.

The Oklahoma Case Will Determine the Future of Charter Schools

Are charter schools public (state actors) or are they private schools?  That question is at the heart of the case that was heard on Tuesday in Oklahoma City. Juan Perez Jr. led POLITICO Morning Education this week with this declaration: “The future of American charter schools will be shaped in an Oklahoma courtroom this week.” And in a paper published in December, 2022 in the University of California Irvine Law Review, constitutional scholar Derek Black explains why: “A marriage of religion and state power in the form of public charter schools would practically, ideologically, and constitutionally transform public education as we know it. As a practical matter, religious schools will flood states with requests to convert into charter schools and thereby shift the cost of religious instruction onto taxpayers. Given the number of interested religious organizations, the impact on state public education budgets could be catastrophic. As an ideological matter, the existence of religious charter schools would eliminate the distinct mission and values that have long defined public schools. And as a constitutional matter, the federal and state constitutional rights that students currently enjoy in public schools would vanish.”

There has been confusion about the status of charter schools because over the years, attorneys representing charter schools have, in some court cases, defined the schools as private schools, and in other cases they have defined the schools as public schools.

Some attorneys like Preston Green III at the University of Connecticut law school and Suzanne Eckes at the University of Wisconsin law school argue that because court precedents fall both ways, it is time for state legislatures to “make charter schools ‘public’ for constitutional matters.” They explain: “Charter schools are publicly funded and operate under a contract (charter) with the state or a state authorized entity. Although charter schools are commonly understood to be public schools, they are really public-private hybrids. Like public schools, they are state financed, free, and open to all students. However, they are usually run by private board of directors instead of elected school boards.”

Derrick Black, at the University of South Carolina law school, on the other hand, told Patrick Wall and Cara Fitzpatrick at Chalkbeat: “‘I would say there’s 101 reasons why they are state actors… and none why they are not.’ He noted that charter schools and traditional public schools both receive public money, cannot charge tuition or turn students away, and must adhere to state academic standards. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools don’t answer to elected school boards, and they enjoy flexibility from some state regulations. But these qualities don’t make charter schools ‘private actors.’… ‘If Oklahoma were to approve the plan for a religious charter school, the state would essentially be endorsing the school’s religious beliefs… That is, the state adopting private religious beliefs as the state’s curriculum… That stamp all by itself is state action.'”

What Did We Learn from Tuesday’s Oral Arguments?

Writing for Oklahoma Voice, Nuria Martinez-Keel describes some of the interchange between Attorney General Drummond, who brought the lawsuit to block the opening of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s justices.  She recounts:

“Drummond said…. religious entities often receive taxpayer funds to help them offer a public benefit, such as a church-affiliated hospital, but he said public education is a core service the state provides.  St. Isidore is a joint venture between the church and the state—two entities who agreed to enter into a charter contract with each other to found the school….”

“Vice-Chief Justice Dustin P. Rowe asked whether taxpayers are not ‘indirectly supporting the Catholic Church’ by funding the school and questioned how this would not violate the state Constitution.”

“Justice Noma Gurich seemed skeptical of the idea that a state-funded charter school is free of constitutional obligations. ‘Where is the choice for Oklahoma taxpayers not to support the Catholic Church?'”

“The Court’s most experienced justice, Yvonne Kauger, asked bluntly, ‘Are we a test case?'”

It would appear that several of the justices showed themselves sympathetic to Drummond’s argument that opening St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School as a public and explicitly religious charter school would violate the Oklahoma Constitution’s protection of the separation of church and state.  Many hope the Court will reach a decision before the school is set to open on August 12.  An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely.

Education Philanthropists Respond When Challenged to Increase Investment in Projects for Racial Justice in Public Schools

The Schott Foundation for Public Education recently released Justice Is the Foundation, a new report that lifts up the need for increasing philanthropic support for racial justice in American public education. Here is how the report begins:

“Concentrations of wealth are both created by and reinforce the historic and present hierarchies of race, gender, and class. As many philanthropic leaders and advocates have stressed, what matters now is not just to recognize that extreme inequality, but to help resolve it through shifting power and resources from the few to the many… The Schott Foundation for Public Education worked with Candid, a center for nonprofit resources and tools… to critically examine K-12 education philanthropy’s grantmaking priorities. Our project, Justice is the Foundation, assesses the collective philanthropic impact of giving in the education sector through the lens of racial equity and racial justice. We believe that education philanthropy has an important and irreplaceable role to play in building a more just and equitable society: public schools touch 90% of students in the U.S….”

In the new report, the Schott Foundation defines what ought to be the two primary purposes of grants addressing racism and the culture wars in public schools: “Racial equity in education grants refers to grants designed to close the achievement gap that persists between racial groups… Racial justice in education grants refers to grants designed to address the larger systemic issues creating barriers to the ecosystem necessary to close opportunity gaps… (including) organizing… to change the systems and structures that generate and reinforce racial inequity.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The Justice is the Foundation report exposes a troubling decline since 2018 in the level of education philanthropy supporting racial equity and racial justice at school: “Both racial equity and racial justice remain drastically underfunded by the K-12 philanthropic sector… K-12 education philanthropy’s already scant investment in racial justice dropped sharply compared to 2018-2020. The $62 million recorded in 2019-2021—just 0.3% of grantmaking—pales in comparison  to the still-meager $105 million (0.7%) in 2018-2020…  Racial equity work is drastically underfunded by K-12 philanthropy… Investment in racial justice work—the efforts to solve the systemic inequities that racial equity work ameliorates—remains vanishingly small, especially compared to the scope of the challenge.”

In a March 2024 column in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Schott Foundation’s President and CEO, Dr. John Jackson and Nicole Rodriguez Leach explore the data: “The latest Justice Is the Foundation data, covering grants made from 2019-2021…. paints a stark picture. Between 2019 and 2021, racial equity grants were $2.7 billion, just 14 percent of the $18.9 billion granted by K-12 funders over that period.  Racial justice, the very category of funding that aims for the highest level of transformation, were a vanishingly small slice of the pie at $62 million, or 0.3 percent.  If there was a racial justice reckoning in 2020, K-12 education philanthropy as a sector was slow to act upon it.”

Jackson and Rodriguez Leach examine what has happened since 2018: “First, the American classroom has changed… Data from the National Center for Education Statistics tells us that as of 2021, public school students in the U.S. are now majority non-white…. Second, the education justice movement has changed…. As the public school community has diversified, parents, young people, and educators have increased their demands for equitable funding, an end to discriminatory and punitive school discipline policies and (for) the wraparound services and supports needed to make the promise of quality education real for every child…. (Third) the larger racial justice movement, too, has changed… reaching its most recent peak in the summer of 2020 after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Institutions large and small have shifted their rhetoric, and to a lesser extent their practices, in response to their members, customers, donors, and constituents. The fourth factor is a backlash to the first three, in a pattern that extends back to the Reconstruction Era…. Advances in racial justice are being met with harsh reaction from the radical right.”

In a separate column for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Jackson discusses the urgent importance of building up philanthropic investment in this work: “Our public schools are not only places of learning but also the place for the next generation to establish, co-create and evolve their civic governance and societal norms. This is what the far right knows and what philanthropies who won’t fund pubic education advocacy must reconcile. The drop in philanthropic support for racial justice work in education has left a void that those who oppose a multi-racial democracy are more than happy to fill. They spread narratives that public education is a failing effort and draft policy proposals designed to send public dollars to private schools. Groups like Moms for Liberty try to pass policies to ban books, whitewash curriculum….  What they frame as anti-CRT are a host of policies rooted in anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-democratic values. They are trying to weaponize public education to dismantle the values of a multi-racial democracy: equity, fairness, and inclusion.”

It is encouraging that the Schott Foundation and others are pressing for an increase in philanthropic funding for organizations supporting inclusive and equitable public schools. Inside Philanthropy‘s Connie Matthiessen reported last week on the launch of the Education Future Fund, a new philanthropic coalition that aims to cool the culture war flames and protect public schools.  Seven philanthropic foundations, each with a history of  funding pro-public schools initiatives, have announced the launch of the new campaign and a new website that centers “public education as the cornerstone of an inclusive, strong democracy” and condemns “politicized attacks on inclusive education.”  Joining in the new philanthropic initiative are the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lozier Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Charles and Lynn Shusterman Family Philanthropies, Spencer Foundation, and Pivotal Ventures. The seven philanthropies already have history of working together, but now declare their commitment to the joint initiative:  “Responding to the urgent needs raised by our partners in the field, we came together… to collaborate on an aligned strategy and grantmaking. We strive to support the field in advancing a proactive and positive agenda and narrative, in defending against censorship efforts, and in mitigating the chilling effect on educators and system leaders.”

The Schott Foundation for Public Education has been a leader in the effort to expand wider philanthropic investment to oppose the culture war disruption of public schooling and support racial justice. The Schott Foundation is a partner in H.E.A.L. Together (Honest Education Action & Leadership) , a project of Race Forward.  H.E.A.L Together’s website describes how the project supports work to overcome the culture wars: “By joining H.E.A.L. Together, you will receive tools and trainings to help you organize your school and community for educational equity — countering those bringing the culture wars to our schools under the guise of “Critical Race Theory,” by banning books and censoring educators who teach honestly about race, gender, and sexual orientation.”

In her report for Inside Philanthropy, Mathiessen quotes Dr. John Jackson about how the past year’s effort to rejuvenate philanthropy for racial justice in public schools made a difference in last November’s election in which the majority of Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates were defeated: “We haven’t been sitting on our hands… This happened because there were investments, many organizations and activists and racial justice organizations were pushing back … and engaging voters around elections. Moms for Liberty lost a lot of traction in the last election cycle, but they aren’t going to stop. Still, we are confident that if we have the infrastructure to elevate the truth and to engage a large base of voters, they will see the same level of defeat that they saw in the last election.”