Current Events

Current Events


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  • Bill in Tennessee to Expand New ESA Program

    While Tennessee’s recently enacted Education Savings Account program is currently limited to students attending Memphis and Nashville schools, Chalkbeat reported that Representative Mark White and Senator Todd Gardenhire have proposed a bill expanding the program to Knox County Schools, which would cover all four of the state’s urban districts.

    Representative Gloria Johnson, a Democrat from Knoxville opposed to the vouchers, contended, “They’re going to push the envelope until all of Tennessee’s public tax dollars for education are going to private schools and charter schools. And none of those schools are being held to the same standard as our traditional public schools.”

    After much litigation, the Republican-backed voucher program cleared all hurdles in November. Citing the inability of counties and families to prove their case on how students would be harmed by a Tennessee school voucher law, a three-judge panel upheld the program, allowing tax dollars to be funneled directly to families to help with the payment of private school tuition, reported the Associated Press.

    “[The panel] concluded that any concerns raised now,” reported the AP, “are ‘speculative and representative of (opponents’) disapproval of policy.’ Plaintiffs are ‘simply asking the court to wade into a policy debate, something we cannot do.’”

    The ESA provides eligible families with approximately $8,100 to assist with preapproved expenses, including private school tuition.

    While plaintiffs argued that schools and students would be negatively impacted by the voucher program due to the loss of funding for each student who participated in the program, the three-judge panel cited a provision in the law that would replace diverted funds through a state legislature appropriation “school improvement fund” for at least three years, reported the AP.

    If Tennessee ultimately expands its ESA to include all students across the state, it would be following in the path recently cleared by West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida.

    - J. Finegan

  • Renewed Push for Vouchers in Texas

    Parents’ rights groups are advocating for Texas state lawmakers to pass legislation promoting school vouchers, according to an article from Texas Standard.

    Voucher proposals for private and charter school attendance have been discussed in a number of prior legislative sessions in Texas, though past efforts have stalled in the face of bipartisan support from representatives of rural districts. Calls for school vouchers also come amidst increased support and approval for public schools: 68 percent of parents gave their school an A or B rating in a recent poll cited in the article, an increase of 12 percent over the prior 2 years.

    Efforts to pass legislation for school vouchers are not expected to succeed in Texas in the immediate future, but they have gained momentum from ongoing debates around school curricula and related cultural issues.

    The Texas Standard notes that while “not every parent raising curriculum concerns at school board meetings is doing so in the name of advancing vouchers,” it has helped to increase levels of support for voucher policies. Whether this support can ultimately be harnessed to pass expansive voucher policies in Texas remains to be seen. 

    - D. Sparks

  • Kentucky Supreme Court Nullifies ESA Program

    In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court of Kentucky struck down the Education Opportunity Account Act as unconstitutional, reported NBC affiliate WPSD.

    According to EdChoice, the Education Opportunity Account Act of Kentucky was conceived as an Education Savings Account (ESA) program funded through tax-credit scholarships, making it the first such ESA in the country.

    The Kentucky Education Association (KEA), with the support of the National Education Association (NEA) and a coalition of plaintiffs, including the Council for Better Education, challenged the law’s constitutionality, reported WPSD.

    KEA President Eddie Campbell applauded the court’s decision: “This is a victory for Kentucky’s public schools and public-school students. This decision protects the power of the people to decide important questions of public education policy and holds the legislature to account for upholding their oath to support and defend the Kentucky constitution.”

    “We simply can’t afford to support two different education systems – one private and one public – on the taxpayer’s dime, and this ruling supports the concern,” Campbell added.

    Also applauding this verdict, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear tweeted, “Today’s ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court couldn’t be more clear: state funding for private or charter schools is unconstitutional – period. It’s time for the General Assembly to invest in our public schools, our teachers and our children.”

    From supporters of the ESA,  this ruling  generated substantial  criticism, reported WPSD. Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions President Jim Waters accused the Kentucky Supreme Court of siding with "opponents of educational liberty."

    Joining Waters, Kentucky House Speaker David Osborne, according to the Associated Press, said, “We will continue efforts to empower parents and families despite pushback from an education administration more interested in satisfying self-serving union interests.” 

    - S. Karn

  • Religious Charter Schools May Be Around the Corner

    The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Carson v. Makin may have cleared the path to religious charter schools, contended Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor in an advisory opinion.

    “O'Connor cites recent Oklahoma and U.S. Supreme Court rulings to argue that the state can't allow some private entities to receive state funds for charter schools, but bar others based on their religious status,” reported The Oklahoman.

    “The opinion,” continued The Oklahoman, “was in response to Rebecca Wilkinson, executive director of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, who had asked the attorney general's office if her board should continue to enforce the nonsectarian requirements in light of the Supreme Court ruling in three different states that it's unconstitutional to exclude religious entities from benefiting from public benefit programs relating to pre-K, primary or secondary schools.”

    According to The Oklahoman, O’Connor argued, “Under Trinity LutheranEspinoza, and Carson, it seems obvious that a state cannot exclude those merely ‘affiliated with’ a religious or sectarian institution from a state-created program in which private entities are otherwise generally allowed to participate if they are qualified. And that is exactly what this provision does.”

    “Current law,” reported The Oklahoman, “requires a ‘charter school shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations,’ and that a ‘sponsor may not authorize a charter school or program that is affiliated with a nonpublic sectarian school or religious institution.’”

    Writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Nicole Stelle Garnett endorsed O’Connor’s opinion: “O’Connor is right, and other states should follow Oklahoma’s lead. Forty-four states have charter school laws. All, like Oklahoma, have required charter schools to be secular and most, like Oklahoma, also prohibit them from being operated by or affiliated with religious institutions. The constitutionality of these restrictions was at issue even before Carson. I have myself been beating the religious-charter-school drum loudly, especially since the Court’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana two years ago, which clarified that while ‘a State need not subsidize private education . . . once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.’”

    Garnett elaborated: “In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, ‘What about charter schools?’ The answer turns on a complex legal concept unrelated to religion called the ‘state action doctrine,’ which boils down to the question of whether charter schools are, for federal constitutional purposes, private or public schools. If they are private, then, as O’Connor has concluded, the import of Carson and Espinoza is that prohibitions on charter schools being religious are unconstitutional. But if they are public—that is, ‘state actors’—then the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause likely requires that they be secular.”

    Garnett continued: “Whatever states call them, charter schools differ from traditional public schools in ways that matter under state-actor doctrine. Traditional public schools are government institutions. Charter schools are not. They are privately operated, usually by nonprofit entities. Some states, including Oklahoma, also allow for-profits to operate charter schools.”

    The implications of O’Connor’s opinion are huge, concluded Garnett. If the Supreme Court in time concurs with O’Connor, as Garnett predicts, the landscape of K-12 education will be dramatically altered.

    “School choice has gained tremendous momentum in recent years,” Garnett wrote. “Thirty-one states have at least one program that provides public financial help to enable children to attend private schools. This year, two states—Arizona and West Virginia—made eligibility to participate universal. Still, these programs serve only about 1 percent of all K-12 students (approximately 700,000 students). In contrast, 7 percent of all public school students (3.5 million students) attend charter schools. Eleven percent of Oklahoma’s students do. And the per-pupil funding available for charter school students (just shy of $12,000) is much higher than the resources provided through school-choice programs.”

    - S. Karn

  • Washington State's Special Education in Turmoil

    Washington state spends millions on a special education system favoring corporations rather than its children with disabilities, reported The Seattle Times and ProPublica in a joint investigation.

    Unequipped to provide special education to many of its high-need students in public schools, school districts in Washington often send such students to nonpublic agencies such as Northwest School of Innovative Learning (SOIL), owned by Universal Health Services (UHS), a Fortune 500 corporation.

    In this investigation, reporters uncovered “years of alarming reports about abuse and lax academics” at SOIL. The reporters found that SOIL “operated with virtually no curriculum and staff so poorly trained that they often resorted to restraining and isolating students.”

     According to the article, “Northwest SOIL collects about $68,000 in annual tuition per student – more than triple the average per-pupil cost for a K-12 student in Washington – while a student with the highest needs can bring the school as much as $115,000 a year, all paid for with taxpayer dollars.”

     Years of complaints about SOIL have gone unheeded, according to the article: “Despite the complaints, the state took no action to force changes at Northwest SOIL. Instead, it allowed the school to stay open and tap a pipeline of taxpayer money. In the five school years ending in 2021, Northwest SOIL collected at least $38 million and took in hundreds of public-school students.”

     Such negligence is not characteristic of SOIL alone among UHS facilities, reported The Seattle Times and ProPublica: “UHS, which earned nearly $1 billion in profit last year, has long faced criticism that it squeezes patient care to maximize profit at its more than 400 hospitals and residential facilities nationwide.”

    - S. Karn

  • Texas State Board of Education Rejects School Vouchers

    The Texas State Board of Education overwhelmingly rejected plans for a school voucher program. The Republican-controlled board’s decision is indicative of strong opposition to school voucher policies within the Texas Republican Party, particularly among lawmakers from rural districts.

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott and far-right state lawmakers have come out in support of voucher policies and tried to garner political capital from backlash against school curricula and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, in particular, in public schools, according to an article in Reform Austin.

    The board’s decision leaves Abbott an uphill battle when it comes to passing legislation for school vouchers in ensuing legislative sessions. Reform Austin highlights that while “less extreme Texas Republicans have been willing to go along with bans on teaching about white supremacy and the stripping of books about marginalized people from libraries, they have been more resistant to the voucher plot.”

    One Republican lawmaker said, “that vouchers divert attention away from failing public schools.”

    Voucher programs tout the benefits of school choice, but these purported benefits may not be within reach for all families. For instance, parents in rural districts do not necessarily have quality private school options close by, not to mention the fact that traditional neighborhood public schools serve as social, cultural, and economic centers for these communities.

    The Texas State Senate is currently hearing proposals for school choice legislation, including a bill that would provide $8,000 in private school vouchers per student. The proposal would offer districts with fewer than 20,000 students some money to offset lost revenue from declines in enrollment.

    An update on the proposal notes that only 200 people showed up for Governor Abbott’s recent rally for school choice, and it remains unclear whether there is adequate support in the House to pass such legislation. Among many concerns, the proposed voucher amount is several thousand dollars below average private school tuition in Texas. 

    - D. Sparks

  • KIPP Teachers in St. Louis Win Union Representation

    Teachers at KIPP High School in St. Louis are the first charter school teachers to win union membership in St. Louis since the first charter school opened in the city in 2000, reported The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

    “Since the first charter schools opened in St. Louis in 2000,” reported the newspaper, “none of the other 34 schools have unionized. In 2015, teachers at Grand Center Arts Academy voted to join AFT, but the move fell through in negotiations with the Confluence Academy charter network.”

    In a vote overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, two-thirds of the faculty at KIPP High School voted to join American Federation of Teachers Local 420.

    For its part, KIPP declined to comment on how many schools it operates nationwide that are unionized but did state they intended to cooperate with the teachers’ union.

    KIPP previously sued the United Federation of Teachers in New York in an effort to block the enforcement of a union contract in 2018 at KIPP’s flagship school in the Bronx, established in 1995 and the subject of much adulation in the media over the years. That effort to stop teachers from unionizing was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reported Chalkbeat.

    One factor that may have influenced the vote in St. Louis is low pay. “With an average salary of $43,260 in 2021,” reported the Post-Dispatch, “KIPP teachers were among the 10 lowest paying school districts or charters in the St. Louis region. The average teacher salary at St. Louis Public Schools was $48,380.”

    Another contributing factor may have been recent unrest at KIPP High. The school was forced to close for two weeks in order to undergo security updates after three students brought weapons on campus in October, reported the Post-Dispatch

    Charter school leaders have traditionally opposed the unionization of their faculty. “About 11% of charter schools nationwide are unionized, with a majority in states that require it,” reported the newspaper.

    Efforts by teachers at charter schools to unionize typically signal dissatisfaction with administrators  as well as desire for greater voice, according to a recent study from the University of Washington, noted the newspaper.   

    - J. Finegan

  • Conservative Christian PACs Bankroll Voucher Effort in Texas

    The Educational Freedom Movement in Texas and Defend Texas Liberty are spending millions of dollars to get state legislators to back public funding of private education, reported NBC News

    Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott expressed his support for public funding of private school tuition through vouchers and pledged to prioritize school choice in the next legislative session.

    "Empowering parents means giving them a choice to send their children to any public school, charter school, or private school with state funding following the student," Governor Abbott said during a campaign event in San Antonio.  

     According to The Texas Tribune , Beto O'Rourke, a Democratic Challenger of Governor Abbott, criticized him and illustrated that the school voucher plan would hurt public schools. O'Rourke is running newspaper ads that urge voters to "reject Greg Abbott's radical plan to defund" public schools, reported the Tribune

     - S. Karn

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