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.

Cutting Through the Culture War Distractions to Preserve Public Education

In Schoolhouse Burning, the important recent book about the history of public education since the Civil War and the protection of public schooling by the provisions of the 50 state constitutions, Derek Black declares: “Public education represents a commitment to a nation in which a day laborer’s son can go to college, own a business, maybe even become president. It represents a nation in which every person has a stake in setting the rules by which society will govern itself, where the waitress’s children learn alongside of and break bread with the senator’s and CEO’s children. Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p. 250)

Right now, of course, Chris Rufo, the right-wing linguistic reframer and political provocateur, has taken upon himself the mission of undermining the very values Derek Black proclaims. Rufo and his political allies at the national level and across the statehouses are intentionally frightening parents—making them fear children who are different. They have made the topic of the day their hope to eliminate “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” to shut down any curriculum that honors the history and culture of children who are not part of the dominant culture, and to undermine our sense of responsibility for providing equal opportunity. Our statehouses and national politics are being sidetracked by ideologues seeking to silence classroom conversation about how our nation’s past has shaped the present moment and by lavishly funded lobbyists pushing politicians to grant families public tax dollars to pay for their children’s escape from the public schools. We are surrounded by a maelstrom of argument designed to make us forget about our responsibility to the public schools “where people from many different countries, religions, and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

Responding to the education culture war provocateurs is essential for those of us who care about public schooling, but it is also a distraction from the difficult essential issues we hardly see in the news anymore. I was jolted by Erica Frankenberg’s concise update last week about the persistence of racial segregation in public schools across the states.  My surprise wasn’t about the existence of continuing racial segregation and its contribution to inequality; I simply hadn’t noticed any attention to this reality for several months.

Frankenberg, a professor of education and demographics at Penn State University, begins: “Brown vs. Board of Education , the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.”  She continues with a concise history of the long resistance to compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision, and updates the situation as we begin 2024:

“Public school students today are the most racially diverse in US. history. At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black., Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% are Asian, 4% multiracial, and 1% are American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color. And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in high-poverty schools.”

What is the financial consequence of racial segregation? Frankenberg explains: “A 2019 report by EdBuild… found that schools in predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less in funding each year than schools in majority white districts. This equates to roughly $2,200 less per student per year.”

Every year the Education Law Center publishes the Making the Grade report on school funding fairness. The news in the most recent Making the Grade, released in December, compliments Frankenberg’s brief on the impact of racial segregation. Here is the this year’s brief summary of the situation at the end of 2023: “Vast disparities in per-pupil funding levels persist with the highest funded state (New York) spending two and a half times more per pupil than the lowest funded state (Idaho), even after adjusting for regional cost differences. Far too few states progressively distribute funds to high-poverty districts: more than half the states… have either flat or regressive funding distributions that disadvantage high-poverty districts… (T)he worst funded states are often guilty of low effort, indicating a failure to prioritize public education.”

And instead of raising their investment in schools, many states have reduced budgetary allocations for public education: “Nationally PK-12 education saw the smallest annual increase in combined state and local funding since the Great Recession. Fourteen states reduced total state and local revenue for education at exactly the moment when schools needed more resources to deal with the unprecedented challenges of interrupted learning, virtual or hybrid schedules, and health and safety concerns. In Alaska, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming, declining revenues disproportionately affected high-poverty districts and caused these states to become either less progressive or more regressive.”

The Education Law Center concludes the introduction to its comprehensive report with this warning: “A fair, equitable, and adequate (state) school funding formula is the basic building block of a well-resourced and academically successful school system for all students. A strong funding foundation is even more critical for low-income students, students of color, English learners, students with disabilities, and students facing homelessness, trauma, and other challenges.  These students, and the schools that serve them, need additional staff programs, and supports to put them on the same footing as their peers.”

Persistent racial and economic segregation in U.S. public schools and inequity and inadequacy of public school finance are merely two of today’s educational challenges, but they among the most serious causes of educational injustice. We can be sure, however, that the culture war missionaries who want to eliminate diversity and inclusion, are not worried about segregation. And as they openly state their opposition to equity, we can assume that public school funding is of little concern. The culture warriors and their political allies have been busy expanding all kinds of private school tuition vouchers and fighting for the right of parents to insulate their children (at public expense) from exposure to the rich diversity that defines our society.

Underneath the noisy distraction of the culture wars, however, serious structural challenges for public schooling require our attention. Only a public committed to public investment in the common good and expanding the opportunity to learn for every child can ensure the future of the public institution that Derek Black describes: “Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

Should Tax Dollars Pay for a Religious Charter School that Explicitly Evangelizes?

Last week, nine Oklahoma residents and the Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee—represented by a team of attorneys from the Education Law Center, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom from Religion Foundation—filed a lawsuit to block Oklahoma from launching an explicitly religious charter school.  The case is groundbreaking, because St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School would be the nation’s first religious public school. Charter schools are funded with tax revenue and unequivocally defined by Oklahoma law as  public.

The president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser explains why this lawsuit is urgently important: “The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious—what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding— violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.”

In a press release, the plaintiffs’ attorneys add: “The plaintiffs are faith leaders, public school parents, and public education advocates who 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 sponsors of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, have made no attempt to hide that their virtual charter school will be religious. Laser looked at the school’s website, which declares: “(S)tudents must ‘appreciate and desire a robust Catholic education,’ and students and families must have a ‘willingness to adhere with respect to the beliefs, expectations, policies and procedures of the school.’ St. Isidore also said that it will operate ‘in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magesterium of the Catholic Church based upon Holy Scripture and sacred tradition.'”

The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit declare: “(T)he Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board violated the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, and the board’s own regulations when it approved St. Isidore’s application for charter-school sponsorship… (because) St. Isidore plans to discriminate… based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other protected characteristics. Students could be denied admission, disciplined, or even expelled if they or their family members are LGBTQ+, a different religious faith, or do not otherwise conform to certain Catholic religious beliefs… St. Isidore plans to provide a religious education and indoctrinate its students in Catholic religious beliefs.”

It is important to recognize that many faith communities, including many Christian communions, Jewish synagogues, and Islamic organizations in the United States are among the primary defenders of religious liberty. These religious communities collaborate with organizations like the plaintiff attorneys in the Oklahoma case—the Education Law Center, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the American Civil Liberties Union—emphatically to support the separation of church and state in public schools. Their members do not want public school personnel imposing religious beliefs on their own or anyone else’s children.

The attack on the separation of church and state has been driven by religious organizations which seek public tax dollars to help support their sectarian schools. Their attorneys have methodically pursued a strategy of chipping away at the Constitutional protection of the separation of government and religion. More than 20 years ago and based on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, the Institute for Justice recruited plaintiffs to file a lawsuit for the purpose of testing the constitutionality of the Cleveland voucher program, which was designed to award vouchers to religious  as well as other private schools. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Zelman v. Simmons Harris, declared that if the voucher was awarded to the parent who could make a choice, not to the religious school itself, vouchers would pass U.S. Constitutional muster.

Now the battle is being fought around charter schools.  While in the early days, these cases were decided on the basis of the First Amendment’s ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE—that public funds may not be used to establish religion, today’s U.S. Supreme Court is basing religious liberty decisions on the First Amendment’s FREE EXERCISE CLAUSE—that the state may not violate anyone’s practice of religion by denying a church or synagogue or mosque the right to establish a religious school with access to the same government school funding that any private secular institution may qualify for.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler summarizes a series of legal challenges brought for the purpose of progressively weakening the protection of the separation of church and state: ”Over the past six years, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court has issued three rulings that religious institutions could not be excluded from taxpayer-funded programs that were available to others. In a 2017 case, the 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 could allow parents to use private school vouchers at religious and secular private schools. 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.” While the current lawsuit challenging St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School will test the school’s legality under the Oklahoma’s state constitution—not the U.S. Constitution, the sponsors of the school are trying to justify the new charter school using the Free Exercise Clause argument.

Why does a legal case about an Oklahoma virtual charter school matter to the rest of us?  A newspaper in Santa Fe, New Mexico editorialized about why Oklahoma’s approval of an explicitly religious charter school sets an alarming precedent: “Such a reality would be a loss for an important principle that has served this country well. The brilliance of the U.S. aversion to mingling church and state is that it allows the public sphere to remain secular—open to all—while protecting religious liberty in private life. In the case of the St. Isidore school, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City explicitly stated in its application: ‘The Catholic school participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church and is the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.’… (T)axpayer dollars should not pay for the Catholic Church’s evangelizing efforts.”

New Report: When Legislators Expand Vouchers, They Divert Dollars Desperately Needed in Public Schools

Politicians promoting publicly funded school vouchers to pay for private education tell us that increasing state spending on vouchers—whether old-fashioned private school tuition vouchers, tuition tax credit vouchers, or education savings account universal vouchers—won’t take money away from the public schools that serve the mass of American children. This is a case of pure political deception. Flat-out lying.

The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, a new report from Public Funds, Public Schools—a project of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center—addresses what it costs states to fund vouchers for private schooling and specifically what it costs the public schools themselves as states siphon out money for the vouchers.  Its authors are Samuel E. Abrams, the director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and his colleague Steven J. Koutsavlis.

Abrams and Koutsavlis begin: “Over half the states and the District of Columbia have enacted some type of voucher program. This report explores how voucher programs and spending have evolved in seven states that have operated these programs long enough to reflect on their track records: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin… In each of these states, the number of vouchers distributed climbed sharply from 2008 to 2019… At the same time… these voucher states’ efforts to fund public schools—which serve a significant majority of students—have declined. The portion of state gross domestic product (GDP) allocated to funding primary and secondary public education in all of the states we reviewed decreased, despite the fact that public school enrollment generally increased over the same period.” (emphasis in the original)

The number of students taking publicly funded vouchers for private schooling has increased rapidly: “The number of students using vouchers in the fall of 2012 was 212,000.  By 2021, that number had topped 600,000. While that sum in a country with nearly 50 million students in public PK-12 schools is small, the trend is significant…. The programs are expensive to operate, with studies showing they typically cost more per student than public schools. And many of the nation’s public schools remain chronically underfunded although they serve the vast majority of the nation’s children.”

Although politicians who promote vouchers often say that educating students with vouchers is cheaper, Abrams and Koutsavlis show why this is a lie: “The claim that it costs less to educate students with private school vouchers than in public schools ignores numerous realities. Voucher programs shift key expenses to parents; often subsidize private tuition for families who would never have enrolled in public schools; do not dilute fixed costs for public education systems, and concentrate higher-need, more-costly-to-educate students in already underfunded public schools.”

And voucher programs send students to schools where their rights are not protected: “(D)ata show that voucher programs exacerbate racial segregation. Moreover, private schools accepting vouchers are not subject to many of the anti-discrimination laws that protect students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and other vulnerable groups, who may—sometimes unknowingly—give up their rights when they move to private schools.”  Further: “Private schools participating in voucher programs are generally not subject to the same regulatory standards as public schools.”

The report describes the fiscal consequences of voucher expansion in each of the seven states, for example in Florida: “No state comes close to Florida in the allocation of public funds to private schools.”  Florida has a number of voucher programs; the authors focus on the three largest: “We focus here on the first three voucher programs—the McKay, Gardiner and Tax Credit Scholarship Programs.  In 2019, these served approximately 151,000 students.  This total represented 5.4 percent of the state’s 2.8 million PK-12 students.  In fiscal year 2008, total spending in Florida for its initial tax credit and conventional voucher programs amounted to $241,219,945. By fiscal year 2019, total spending for these two programs and the Gardiner ESA program had reached $996,257,636, an annual growth rate of 13.8 percent. While Florida increased its spending on these three programs by 313 percent from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2019, the state decreased its per-pupil funding for public education over this time period by 12 percent… This decline in per-pupil funding in Florida cannot be attributed to economic duress.  It coincided with a 3.4 percent annual growth rate in GDP for the state from 2008 to 2019…. In terms of educational effort, measured as the percentage of state GDP allocated to PK-12 funding, this decline shows Florida to be retreating significantly in its commitment to public education at the same time it substantially increased its funding of private schooling.”

In every one of the seven states, the report examines the rapidly growing investment of tax revenues into vouchers and the concurrent drop in public school spending.  Abrams and Koutsavlis conclude: “The pattern of education spending in these seven voucher states is unmistakable. Private school voucher programs are initially proposed as limited in size and scope, then grow as existing programs are expanded, and/or additional voucher programs are established.”

But as the vouchers grow, legislators’ fiscal support for public education drops: “As states transfer millions of dollars to private hands, there are fewer available state resources for projects that serve the public good, from mass transit to public parks, libraries, and schools.” And yet, “Voucher programs, even with significant expansion during the last one to two decades, still serve only a small percentage of the nation’s children.”

Watch Out for Ron DeSantis

The political commentators focus on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis more and more as a potential Republican presidential nominee in 2024—the best alternative, they say, to the other guy.  But never once have I heard the pundits who dominate TV news explore DeSantis’ record on public education.  I guess it will be up to us—parents, teachers, and concerned citizens—to set the record straight.  Here is a summary of the facts we should all have at the ready. (And just to be clear, this post is not an endorsement of Trump as the 2024 Republican candidate.)

Top Education Rating from the Heritage Foundation — Last month, the far-right Heritage Foundation ranked Florida, the state led by Governor Ron DeSantis, as the overall winner on its 2022 Education Freedom Report Card.  If your state gets the top prize in education from the American Legislative Exchange Council or the Heritage Foundation, it does not mean that you have an adequately and equitably funded state system of public schools, a system which requires careful credentialing of teachers.

Here is how the Heritage Foundation describes its 2022 winner: “The Sunshine State embraces education freedom across the board. Florida does exceptionally well in allowing parents to choose among private, charter, and district schools, is home to a strong Education Savings Account (voucher) program…. Among other protections, state lawmakers set a high standard for academic transparency, and reject critical race theory’s pernicious ideas.”  “To assess the regulatory freedom of a given state, we consider barriers to teaching, such as whether a state encourages alternative teacher certification and the number of teachers who have benefited, or whether a state largely requires aspiring teachers to attend university-based colleges of education….”

Writing for Salon, Katheryn Joyce summarizes the policies prioritized by the Heritage Foundation’s report card as “key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing, to the expansion of the Anti-CRT movement which now encompasses anything related to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.'”

Parent Organizing for Ron DeSantis himself along with His Far Right Causes — Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, recently published Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, to follow supposedly untraceable money invested by those who want to undermine public education. Cunningham’s primary focus has been his home state, but last week he tracked the money behind Moms for Liberty, the Florida-spawned group of organized parents known for loudly disrupting local school board meetings: “The group, which claims to be about ‘parent rights,’ has ties to the January 6 insurrection and is expected to provide ‘foot soldiers’ for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Moms for Liberty (M4L) claims the organization was started by moms. But it is hard to believe that three mothers in Florida could start up a grassroots group on January 1, 2021, and then, within a matter of weeks and months, wind up on Rush Limbaugh,Tucker Carlson’s show, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. However, there is a shadowy network of money and influence in right-wing political circles that could arrange that easily. Among M4L’s financial supporters and profile boosters are some of the most influential organizations, media operations, and wealthy donors in the vast theater of the right-wing propaganda machine.”

Cunningham traces funding for Moms for Liberty to the Council for National Policy, which Cunningham describes as “combining vast sums of conservative money, Christian nationalists and their communications networks, and activist groups like the National Rifle Association into a powerful organization.” Moms for Liberty also received a big donation from Betsy DeVos’s mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen. Another funder of M4L is the Leadership Institute, which was, “the largest donor for M4L’s 2022 national summit and the sole known $50,000 presenting sponsor.”  “The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America were (also) sponsors of M4L’s national summit.”

For NBC News, Tyler Kingkade describes Moms for Liberty and its July, 2022, first national summit: “The organization’s rapid ascension—its leaders say it has nearly 100,000 members across 195 chapters in 37 states—has been driven by the appeal of its core issues among conservatives, including battling mask mandates in schools, banning library books that address sexuality and gender identity, and curtailing lessons on racial inequity and discrimination….” At its Tampa summit in July, “Attendees… heard speeches from prominent Florida Republicans, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely considered a presidential candidate in waiting, as well as Sen. Rick Scott, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, who said Moms for Liberty-backed candidates are going to help the GOP win governor races and control the Senate in the midterm elections…”  Cunningham adds some of the event’s other speakers: Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, and Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” and Parents’ Bill of Rights Bill — On July 1, the Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss reported: “Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, popularly known by critics as the ‘don’t say gay’ bill, went into effect on Friday, restricting what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation… The law, signed March 28 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), is the first of its kind in the country… The law also legally empowers parents to sue school districts as a way to advance their ‘parental rights.’ It is part of a push by DeSantis to restrict what teachers can say—an effort that includes topics in race, racism, and U.S. history.”

The NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein summarizes the bill: “Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades… Schools would be required to notify parents when children receive mental, emotional or physical health services unless educators believe there is a risk of ‘abuse, abandonment, or neglect.’…Parents would have the right to opt their children out of counseling and health services… Parents could sue schools for violating the vaguely written bill, and districts would have to cover the costs… Florida would rewrite school counseling standards.”

Strauss responds to the Florida bill, which has become a model for legislation proposed in other states, by quoting a statement from the White House: “This is not an issue of parents’ rights. This is discrimination, plain and simple. It’s part of a disturbing and dangerous nationwide trend of right-wing politicians cynically targeting LGBTQI+ students, educators, and individuals to score political points. It encourages bullying and threatens students’ mental health, physical safety, and well-being. It censors dedicated teachers and educators who want to do the right thing and support their students.”

A Book Ban — Salon‘s Kathryn Joyce recently exposed another of Governor Ron DeSantis’s public education initiatives: “This March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a policy… that bans schools from using any books that are ‘pornographic’ or age ‘inappropriate,’ and allows parents broad access to review and challenge all books and materials used for instruction or in school libraries… In combination with other recent laws restricting public schools from discussing LGBTQ issues or racism—including Florida’s 2022 ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law… and ‘Stop WOKE Act’… and its 2021 ban on teaching ‘Critical Race Theory’—this has led some school districts to advise teachers to box up their classroom libraries until each book is vetted. Others have instructed teachers to stop buying or accepting donated books for their classrooms until at least January, to give the district time to hire mandatory new staff to serve as ‘media specialists’ who review each title.”

Florida State Public School Funding Dollars Flooding Out of Public Schools into Florida’s Huge and Growing Voucher Programs — In a collaborative report released in September, the national Education Law Center and the Florida Policy Center document that over a billion dollars is currently flowing out of Florida’s public school funding budget into vouchers.  And even more shocking, when students take a voucher the state sucks money right out of the already established school district budget: “School districts have no control over the number of students who apply for vouchers, which makes budgeting difficult. The expansion of voucher eligibility allows higher income families to qualify and removes the requirement for students to have previously attended public schools.”

Here is what has happened since Ron DeSantis was elected Florida’s governor in November of 2018: “Since 2019, the flow of public funds to private education dramatically increased after the State Legislature enacted the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) program. While voucher programs are often funded as line-item appropriations in the state budget or through state tax credits, the FES voucher is funded from the Florida Education Finance Program state allocations that would otherwise be directed to the student’s resident public school district.” “In 2022-23, an estimated $1.3 billion in funding will be redirected from public school districts to private education, representing 10% of the state K-12 education funds allocated through the Florida Education Finance Program, the state’s school funding formula.  This sum is in addition to a potential $1.1 billion taken from general revenue that would otherwise be used to support state services, including education, as a result of tax credits claimed by businesses that donate to voucher programs.”

Consider all these facts when you hear the political commentators describe Ron DeSantis as the best non-Trump.  The conditions of public schools across the fifty states—schools which serve roughly 50 million of our children and adolescents—hardly ever seem to be part of the national political conversation these days.  But far-right advocates and politicians, many of them operating quietly in the statehouses that set public school policy, are working hard to undermine our nation’s largest and one of its most important civic institutions.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a political leader actively working to undermine the institution of public schools and to threaten the work of school teachers. Beware!

Americans for Prosperity in Ohio: What is the Koch-Funded Buckeye Blueprint’s Education Plan?

We ought to suspect that someone has been investing heavily to push school privatization in Ohio. Last summer our legislature passed a budget that radically expanded state funding for private school tuition vouchers, allocated more money for charter schools, made every one of the state’s 610 school districts eligible for charter school operators to open schools, and allocated so much money for school privatization and tax cuts that legislators felt they couldn’t pass a stand alone bill that would have established the full six-year phase in of the Cupp-Patterson public school funding plan.

I cannot name all of the far-right organizations investing in the promotion of school privatization in Ohio, but one new initiative, launched in February, is Americans for Prosperity-Ohio’s Buckeye Blueprint.

The Buckeye Blueprint, describes itself in overblown hyperbole as, “a new grassroots campaign that seeks to build a bolder and better state by bringing people together to build bottom-up movements around policy priorities at the state and local levels. This will be accomplished by empowering concerned citizens to participate in the legislative process by building greater awareness of critical legislative opportunities for change…. Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is driving long-term solutions to the country’s biggest problems.”

In Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone, the Buckeye Blueprint campaign announces the campaign’s education agenda—beginning with a celebration of the Ohio Legislature’s expansion of publicly funded private school tuition vouchers last summer: “Governor DeWine, Speaker Cupp, and, most notably, Senate President Huffman, deserve credit for steps taken in the most recent Budget that increased educational opportunity through vouchers.”

Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone also plugs Ohio’s Backpack Bill, HB 290, a bill being discussed in the legislature to establish a universal Education Savings Account voucher program that would give every Ohio family public dollars to choose a school or spend the public dollars on any so-called educational activity the family prefers including home schooling. The Buckeye Blueprint website explains: “Passage of universal Education Savings Accounts… would put more parents in a better position to make the best choices for their kids.” Americans for Prosperity-Ohio wants us to follow the lead of our neighbors, Indiana and West Virginia, by expanding all kinds of vouchers: “Hoosier & Mountaineer families are feeling the benefit of bold reform in the last 12 months while Buckeye families seeking opportunity are currently under attack in our courts.”

Glowing language frames an individualistic agenda that claims its purpose is to expand educational opportunity, but the buzzwords show that Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is not a bit concerned about the needs of our state’s 1.8 million students in the public schools. Instead the Buckeye Blueprint demands that Ohio’s citizens pressure the legislature to: “Fund students, not schools,” for the purpose of unlocking “each individual’s unique potential.” The Buckeye Blueprint prescribes that, as an alternative to a system of public schools, the Ohio Legislature should offer, “credit for learning, wherever it occurs; (provide) the freedom to enroll in a variety of courses inside and outside of a child’s school; (provide) funded accounts that can be used for a variety of educational uses; (and ensure) public schools of choice.”

The Buckeye Blueprint refers parents and education advocates to another website: Yes. Every Kid, where we can find the “yes. policy framework”: “Does this policy contribute to a diversity of solutions?” “Does this policy empower families to choose what works best?” “Does this policy allow students to customize their education?” “Does this policy ensure funding is attached to the student?”

To refute this sort of slick, individualist appeal, it is helpful to remember that public education is designed to balance our society’s obligation to meet the needs of each particular student with the public responsibility for maintaining a system that secures the rights of all of our state’s students. Public schools are not only publicly funded, but they are expected to be universally available and accountable to the public by law and through the oversight of locally elected school boards.

In Consumed, the late political philosopher, Benjamin Barber explains precisely where campaigns like the Buckeye Blueprint go wrong in their individualist ideology and why school privatization will undermine our society and inevitably disadvantage the most vulnerable children:

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning.  I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones.  What do we get?  The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector.  As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it).” (Consumed, p. 132)

For all the specific reasons our society would be worse off with the expansion of vouchers at the expense of public schools and would be even more damaged by a universal Education Savings Account program like Ohio’s proposed HB 290 Backpack Bill, we can turn to the resources at Public Funds Public Schools, a collaboration of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Public Funds Public Schools has posted a catalogue of research, gathered into eight categories:

• Private School Vouchers Don’t Improve Student Achievement.
• Private School Vouchers Divert Needed Funding from Public Schools.
• Private School Voucher Programs Lack Accountability.
• Absence of Oversight in Private School Voucher Programs Leads to Corruption and Waste.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Help Students with Disabilities.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Protect Against Discrimination.
• Private School Vouchers Exacerbate Segregation.
• Universal Private School Voucher Programs Don’t Work.

Public Funds Public Schools summarizes this research into several two-page fact sheets:

• Research Shows Private School Vouchers Don’t Work for Students and Harm Public Schools.
• The Myth of Cost Savings from Private School Vouchers
• Vouchers for Private Virtual Education are Misspent Public Money.

Benjamin Barber precisely defines how privatization damages a society. His words perfectly describe what it will mean if states like Ohio continue to expand, at public expense, private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Account programs like Ohio’s proposed Backpack Bill:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Education Law Center and Southern Poverty Law Center Decry Inadequate and Inequitable School Funding Across Southern States

In his masterful book Schoolhouse Burning, published in 2020, Derek Black traces the history of racial injustice in America’s public schools—through Jim Crow and the efforts more recently to undermine the impact of Brown v. Board of Education.  He concludes by examining two parallel trends today across the Southern states: lagging public school funding and growing school privatization:

“The Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Northwest—the parts of America with the fewest racial minorities—have only suffered modest privatization. Their public school systems for the most part do not face major privatization threats… But the Southeast—the Confederacy’s old stronghold—tells the exact opposite story: (there are) large percentages of African American students and… their public schools are facing deep privatization forces… Public school funding, or the lack thereof, is the flipside of this privatization movement…  The deepest and most consistent school funding gaps are in the Southeast and Southwest, with far smaller funding gaps in the Upper Midwest and Northeast.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 239-242)

This week the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center together released Inequity in School Funding: Southern States Must Prioritize Fair Public School Spending, a school finance brief documenting the continuation in 2021 of the trends to which Derek Black called our attention. The brief examines the insufficiency and inequity of public school funding in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.

“A state’s funding level is measured by analyzing the combined state and local revenues provided through each state’s school finance formula… Even after adjusting for regional cost differences, all eight Southern states score in the bottom third of states nationwide, and four are in the bottom 10… Florida and Mississippi, ranking 45th and 46th, have per-pupil levels that are more than $4,000 below the national average ($15,114).”

“The hallmark of a fair school funding system is that it delivers more funding to educate students in high-poverty districts.” The eight states profiled in the brief persist in refusing to distribute state funding equitably to meet the additional needs in school districts with concentrations of “low-income students, students of color, English learners, students with disabilities and students facing homelessness, trauma and other challenges.” “Alabama, Florida and Texas have regressive funding, with high-poverty districts, on average, receiving less per-pupil funding than low poverty districts. Florida and Alabama both have an average funding disadvantage of 12% in high-poverty districts… In Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee there is no clear variation in funding relative to student poverty.”

The brief’s authors continue: “Fair school funding has particular significance in the South because the historical context of racial segregation and resistance to integration still permeates education politics and policymaking. The segregation academies designed to evade school integration, which flourished in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era, have left an undeniable legacy. Public schools today enroll a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx students, while white students are overrepresented in private schools. As Southern states dramatically increase funding for voucher programs, public schools remain drastically underfunded… The poverty rate among Black and Latinx families in the South is double that of white families, meaning they are more likely to bear the brunt of inequitable school funding.”

The brief’s authors are not optimistic.  They worry about barriers to addressing the needs of Southern states’ children in public schools: “Many Southern states are facing the expansion of school voucher programs that divert scarce public funds to unaccountable and discriminatory private institutions.”

Simultaneously, ugly politics are undermining the political will to do something about the injustice: “(P)olitical leaders are using divisive issues to undermine the viability of public schools (e.g., imposing bans on mask mandates and inclusive, culturally responsive curricula).  Such tactics should be called out for what they are: mere distractions that seek to undermine the critical role public schools play in shaping the economic and social health of the region.”

Strategic Advocacy Over Decades Brought Us an Expanded Child Tax Credit: Can the Same Kind of Strategic Organizing Produce School Funding Reform?

On Saturday, after the U.S. Senate joined the U.S. House of Representatives to pass President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, I started thinking about how a huge coalition and strong advocates can sustain support for an important reform even through times that feel bleak and hopeless. Now, as a result of persistent and strategic advocacy, suddenly an election of new leaders has on some level adjusted our society’s collective notion of the role of government.

Welfare reform imposed policies that punished parents who were not working by reducing their access to public assistance. In doing so, President Bill Clinton and the Congress that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families entirely neglected the needs of America’s poorest children. But as of this weekend, by expanding the Child Tax Credit, Congress accepted the idea that as a society we bear collective responsibility for the well-being of our children. And while the expanded Child Tax Credit is part of this year’s time-limited pandemic relief, my Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet have promised to try to make the changes permanent.

Back in 2004, I read Jason DeParle’s powerful book, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare, about how the 1996 welfare reform harmed children. Since then I have filled my clipping file with DeParle’s articles about our collective responsibility for poor children, most recently last summer, when DeParle pushed for expanding the Child Tax Credit in the NY Times and the New York Review of Books.  At the same time, I realized that powerful research and advocacy organizations—including First Focus on Children, the Center for Law and Social Policy, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Urban Institute, and the Brookings Institution—were working to expand the Child Tax Credit and make it fully refundable. But for years and years the matter of overturning welfare reform has felt hopeless.

In the NY Times this week, DeParle reminds us that an election can bring a turnaround not only in one piece of public policy but also much bigger shift: “Obscured by other parts of Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package which won Senate approval on Saturday, the child benefit has the makings of a policy revolution. Though framed in technocratic terms as an expansion of an existing tax credit, it is essentially a guaranteed income for families with children, akin to children’s allowances that are common in other rich countries. The plan establishes the benefit for a single year. But if it becomes permanent, as Democrats intend, it will greatly enlarge the safety net for the poor and the middle class at the same time when the volatile modern economy often leaves families moving between those groups. More than 93 percent of children—69 million—would receive benefits under the plan, at a one-year cost of more than $100 billion.”

DeParle continues: “While the proposal took center stage in response to the pandemic, supporters have spent decades developing the case for a children’s income guarantee. Their arguments gained traction as science established the long-term consequences of deprivation in children’s early years, and as rising inequality undercut the idea that everyone had a fair shot at a better life… Mr. Biden’s embrace of the subsidies is a leftward shift for a Democratic Party that made deep cuts in cash aid in the 1990s under the theme of ‘ending welfare.’… ‘ The moment has found us,’ said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who has proposed a child allowance in 10 consecutive Congresses and describes it as a children’s version of Social Security.”

Two weeks ago, the Education Law Center—the nation’s top school finance litigation firm pursuing cases for school funding adequacy and equity under the 50 state constitutions—published From Courthouse to Statehouse—and Back Again, a major report endorsing precisely the kind of sustained, research-based advocacy that helped bring about this week’s Congressional shift to expand the Child Tax Credit. The Education Law Center, whose business is pursuing litigation-based school funding reform, warns—based on successful court victories in Massachusetts, Kansas, Washington, and New Jersey—that along with litigation, states need grassroots organizing, research-based communications, and disciplined messaging:

“Securing new resources for schools requires a majority of elected lawmakers to support finance reform and more critically, to fund it. These legislative debates trigger complicated political calculations about taxation, public and social services, the role of government, and, inevitably race, income, and wealth… The profiles in this report demonstrate that labor and grassroots organizations can play a significant part in galvanizing public opinion and breaking down resistance or deadlock inside the statehouse.”

“(E)ach state’s constitution obligates it to maintain and support a system of free public schools to educate all resident children. This means the amount and distribution of school funding—both state and local revenues—is controlled by elected state legislators and governors. Consequently, improving the way public schools are funded and boosting the investment of tax dollars in those schools can only be accomplished through the year-to-year political process of making laws, and passing budgets in state capitols.”

How to shape public opinion? First the Education Law Center advocates the wide dissemination of research: “(S)uccessful campaigns require research at all stages and for multiple audiences… It is imperative that research go beyond academic circles and be tailored and marketed to broader groups and the public at large.” But research must be part of a strategically framed campaign: “(S)takeholder coalitions helped maintain a unified message throughout both the legal proceedings and legislative deliberations. These coalitions also helped contain potential schisms among stakeholder groups, keeping them internal rather than spilling out and muddying the public debate.”

The Education Law Center urges coalitions pursuing school funding lawsuits to raise enough funds to hire a communications director to manage a well framed and extremely disciplined message. And campaigns “are much more impactful when done in close partnership with grassroots parent, community, and civil rights organizations. These partnerships ensure that the interest of the most important beneficiaries of the campaigns—the students themselves—remain front and center.”

The same kind of sustained, research-based advocacy that paved the way for last weekend’s Congressional expansion of the federal Child Tax Credit is going to be necessary, says the Education Law Center, for school funding reform even when the central strategy is through litigation: “(T)he level and distribution of school funding is controlled by elected state legislators and governors. In the end, improving the education of our nation’s children, especially the most vulnerable, depends on building strong, multi-dimensional political campaigns that can place and sustain the demand for well-funded and well-resourced schools squarely at the foot of state elected representatives and governors. Lawyers, when working in deep connection to those campaigns, can use the courts to amplify and advance that demand.”

Education Law Center Exposes Collapse of States’ Investment in Public Schools Since 2008

One of the ways we attribute meaning to what we see is through stories.  Here is the story of my school district. We are among the top districts in Ohio in the local school property taxes we have voted.  But our district was forced to cut teachers and programs this year, and the teachers almost went on strike because of threatened cuts to their health care benefits despite that, in November, we passed yet another local school property tax operating levy. When my children were in elementary school in the 1980s and early 1990s, each school had a nurse and each school had a certified librarian, but now schools share nurses and the libraries are staffed by aides. Looking at this situation from a purely local point of view, many people in my community interpret these facts in a way that blames the district for mismanagement or salaries that are too high, or both.

But a new report from The Education Law Center insists that citizens must expand their understanding of funding public schools beyond the local story: “The political dynamics in state capitols have profound implications for the level and distribution of school funding. Nationally, state sources (mainly sales and income tax) provide 47%, and local sources (overwhelmingly from property taxes) provide 45% of the revenue to support public schools. The federal government contributes the remaining 8%. When state governments allow tax revenues to decline or remain stagnant, public schools, which states are legally obligated to maintain and support, pay the price. Elementary and secondary education on average accounts for 36% of states’ general fund spending, the most of any state government services.”

The Education Law Center’s new report, $600 Billion Lost: State Disinvestment in Education Following the Great Recession, sets the financial crisis in my school district and a mass of other school districts in a much clearer context. The Education Law Center blames state policy over more than a decade as the primary cause of our dilemma. I already had some understanding of the current fiscal problems for the nation’s public schools because, for years, I have been reading reports on this topic from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (see this example).  But the new report is short, up to date, readable, and extremely important for clarifying the fiscal reality for public school districts a decade after the Great Recession and as the result of the fiscal conservatism of too many Tea Party-dominated state legislatures.

If you look merely at your own school district’s finances or even merely at where your own state stands with regard to funding public education, you are missing the larger landscape according to the Education Law Center:  “In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the U.S. lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools. Data from 2008-2018 show that, if states had simply maintained their fiscal effort at PK-12 education at pre-Recession levels, public schools would have had over half a trillion dollars more in state and local revenue to provide teachers, support staff and other resources essential for student achievement. Further, that lost revenue could have significantly improved opportunity and outcomes for students especially in the nation’s poorest districts.”

The report emphasizes that, even after states recovered from collapsed tax revenues caused by the Great Recession, too many state legislatures did not prioritize helping school districts recover: “Yet as economies rebounded, states failed to restore those investments. As our analysis shows, while states’ economic activity—measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—recovered, state and local revenues for public schools lagged far behind in many states. This ‘lost decade’ of state disinvestment has put public schools in an extremely vulnerable position as the nation confronts the coronavirus pandemic.”

The Education Law Center has created an index of “tax effort” that measures each state’s economic capacity to fund public schools against the educational investment the state actually makes.”  Only four states, Wyoming, Illinois, Connecticut, and Alaska have raised their commitment to public education as measured by the Education Law Center’s tax effort index.

What about the rest of the states? “In some states the disinvestment was dramatic. In 2018, the effort in Arizona, Florida, and Michigan was more than 25% below 2008 levels. Nearly half of the states had an effort index that was at least 10% lower than in 2008. High and low effort states alike reduced their effort. Michigan and Ohio were ranked highly in effort in 2008—3rd and 7th, respectively—but significant reductions dropped these states to 16th and 21st by 2018.”  Bar graphs in the report trace the trajectory of each state’s K-12 public education investment.

The Education Law Center challenges state legislatures to counter the effects of the current COVID-19 recession by increasing state taxes: “The ability of states to withstand the impact of revenue losses from the pandemic hinge on enacting and sustaining progressive tax policies… Progressive tax campaigns are building in states across the country. These campaigns typically propose raising income taxes on the wealthy… and dedicating those increased revenues for education and other social services.”

Unfortunately, in Ohio, where I live, the legislature seems committed to expanding school choice instead. The Ohio Senate killed a progressive new public school finance plan in December, and at the same time has insisted on expanding school privatization. The legislature just revised and continues to expand its EdChoice Vouchers, which suck money for private school tuition directly out of local school district budgets through something called the school district deduction.

The Ohio Legislature also supports a large and well funded charter school sector. In his new book, Schoolhouse Burning, Derek Black examines the school finance implications of the expansion of school privatization at public expense during the same decade the Education Law Center describes the states’ failure to invest in public education. Black examines, for example, the growth of charter schools in Ohio:

“While states were reducing their financial commitment to public schools, they were pumping enormous new resources into charters and vouchers—and making the policy environment for these alternatives more favorable. Charter schools, unlike traditional public schools, did not struggle during the recession. Their state and federal funding skyrocketed. Too often, financial shortfalls in public school districts were the direct result of pro-charter school policies…  Ohio charter schools received substantial funding increases every year between 2008 and 2015.  While public schools received increases in a few of those years, they were modest at best—in one instance just one-tenth the size of the charter school increase… In 2013-2014, Ohio school districts, on average, went $256 in the hole for every student who went to a charter… Nine districts sent charters between 20 percent and 65 percent more money than they received from the state—a  hard reality to justify when Ohio was already sending charters other funding on the side.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 35-36)

Federal Coronavirus Relief Act Will Provide Urgently Needed Money for Public Schools, But Not Nearly Enough

Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa contrasts the public education support in the new federal coronavirus stimulus passed this week by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump to the 2009 federal stimulus passed during the Obama administration to address the Great Recession: “Remember the last time we had a big federal stimulus for education? The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ended up being a lot smaller than the coronavirus aid package President Donald Trump signed last week, but it included much more money for education in coping with the impact of the Great Recession. And it also teed up President Barack Obama’s education agenda for his two terms… The majority of the 2009 stabilization cash—$48.6 billion—went out to states by formula for early learning, K-12, and postsecondary education. The remaining money? It was earmarked for Race to the Top and the Investing in What Works and Innovation programs.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Let’s pause for a moment and express gratitude that this week the Trump administration has not earmarked any of what will be desperately needed education relief funding to force states to qualify to participate in a competitive grantmaking process like Race to the Top.  Remember when, just to qualify for money from that particular federal stimulus program, states were forced to grade their teachers according to their students’ test scores and spend the money on rapid school turnaround plans like firing principals and teachers, charterizing schools, and closing schools. In this very significant way, we are all much better off.

But, according to experts, we are also worse off in 2020 than in 2009.  Why?  So far, at least, there is a whole lot less federal money available to meet the challenges public schools will need to address in the current emergency and as they try to get back up and running in the context of what is likely to be a state fiscal crisis. All the things states tax in order to generate the revenue to operate public services are now losing money. Sadly many businesses are closing and many people are losing their jobs. State budgets are likely to be much reduced in the immediate future.

The Education Law Center’s David Sciarra, Jessica Levin, and Wendy Lecker provide the details about the relief package signed into law this week: “In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Congress has provided $13.5 billion in emergency relief to help local school districts and states respond to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the nation’s public schools… The CARES Act includes a $30.75 billion Education Stabilization Fund to address educational needs stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.  About half of that sum is designated for higher education, $3 billion for a Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, and the rest ($13.5 billion) for an Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund.  Most of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund—over $12 billion—will be distributed to Local Education Agencies (LEAs), that is, school districts and charter schools.  States must allocate at least 90% to LEAs as subgrants in the proportion that the LEAs receive Title I funds.  LEAs and states can use their allocations from this Emergency Relief Fund for a wide range of expenditures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures.”

This time, unlike 2009, states and school districts have considerable freedom about how they can spend the funds—any activity authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, activities to support the needs of low-income students, disabled students, English language learners, racial and ethnic minority students, homeless students and students in the foster care system.  States and school districts can use the federal funds for educational technology, mental health support for students, coordinating long-term closures, providing meals, and creating guidelines to help design online programming during the crisis.

The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss just published a column by Derek Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, in which Black demonstrates all the ways the CARES Act is likely to be inadequate to the challenges public schools face in the upcoming months and even the next several years. Why is the size of the federal CARES Act so important for education?  “A century and a half ago, citizens began approving state constitutions that made public education their states’ first priority. They did it for a very good reason. They knew times like these would come. They knew the foundation of society had to be solid. Education should be the last place, not the first, that states look to make budget cuts in the troubled economic times ahead.”

Black reviews what has happened to state public education funding in the decade following the Great Recession: “During the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Congress hoped that most of a $54 billion set-aside in stimulus funds would be enough to save public school budgets, which had been savaged by state and local governments. It wasn’t enough.  States imposed education cuts so steep that many school budgets still have not fully rebounded… Public schools have long consumed the lion’s share of states’ revenues, and for good reason.  Public education, as the Supreme Court wrote, is ‘the most important function of state and local governments.’ It serves as the ‘foundation of good citizenship’ and ‘democratic society.’ Yet, when the economy faltered in 2008, states made little, if any, attempt to shield schools.  Several states even targeted education for cuts. Wisconsin waged a ‘war’ on teacher benefits. North Carolina and Florida cut education spending from about $10,000 per pupil to $7,000 in just three years… States then refused to replenish education funding even after the economy rebounded. The latest available data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that as late as the 2016-17 school year, education funding remained below pre-recession levels in real dollar terms in most states—sometimes up to 30 percent lower.”

Black continues: “Students paid the price. The overwhelming social science consensus demonstrates that money matters to student achievement and current funding levels are woefully inadequate. A 2008 study revealed that the average state provides districts serving predominantly poor students $6,239 less than they need per student.”

Can the members of our state legislatures have failed to learn the important lesson about how funding cuts after the Great Recession damaged opportunity for so many children?  Sadly, Black believes so: “The first signs of this possibility are here. In recent weeks, three states—Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee—have cut teacher salary increases for this coming year—increases intended at this late date to begin repairing the damage from the last recession. Education Week reports that teachers may lose all of an anticipated pay hike in Kentucky, and legislatures in at least five other states have not acted on salary hikes for educators.”

Sciarra, Levin, and Lecker echo Derek Black’s concerns about the limitations of the CARES Act just passed by Congress and signed by the President: “The $13.5 billion in the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund can help states and districts meet the immediate challenge of providing effective and equitable opportunities for all students, though more funds may be needed even in the short-term. States must also prepare for the likelihood that thousands, if not millions, of students will return to school having experienced significant learning loss. These students will require remedial and ‘compensatory’ services, programs and interventions to make up for the loss and put them academically back on track as quickly as possible. Vulnerable student populations will be most impacted and most in need… Congress must move beyond ’emergency’ relief to ‘mitigation’ funding for K-12 education…. States must not react to the pandemic by enacting deep and harmful state aid cuts, as occurred during and after the 2008 recession.  The harmful impact of those cuts fell on the districts, schools and students with the most need and least ability to make up the funds through increases in local revenue.”

Black warns: “If the current crisis is teaching us anything, it is just how hard and important schools’ jobs are. Kids cannot stare at a screen or book for seven hours a day, nor should they. Parents, employers and hopefully lawmakers are painfully realizing just how central school services are to everyone’s lives and the basic operation of the economy.”