While your attention may have been on the election, the Supreme Court held arguments yesterday in St. Mary's v Roy, a case out of Colorado in which the central question is if a Catholic preschool which receives public funds may discriminate against LGBTQ families.
While I always await Chris Geidner over at Law Dork, both Chalkbeat and K-12 Dive have coverage worth reviewing, Frankly, it looks pretty bleak.
My hearty congratulations to those across the country who brought in national, state, and local leadership that will better support public education!
(including Texas, where a former school board member will serve as the next Governor!)
If you're rejoicing this morning in the blue tsunami that swept the nation last night, I do not wish to take away from your joy, but I do want to point to some election results on ballot initiatives that are not good for kids.
I will update this when or if I find more.
The backlash’s “why” is simple at its core. Many Americans feel like they never consented to any of this. I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
When Gaggle quarantines a draft, when Securly assigns a kid a rolling “wellness level,” when a detection system decides the shape in a student’s hand is a gun, the software is filing a report about a young person’s intentions. And it arrives first. It shows up carrying the authority of a system that cost the district millions and speaks in the grammar of objectivity, and it lands in front of an administrator or a school cop before the kid has said a word. The student’s account comes second, when it’s generally too late.
Hard to "believe kids" when they're always the ones responding to something that has already been invested, literally, which such authority.
Florida's voucher program and so-called parents' rights push has just run headlong into 2000 years of hierarchy, with the Florida Attorney General receiving, upon his push to force Catholic schools that are receiving vouchers to allow students to attend even if they are not vaccinated, a tour de force letter from the Roman Catholic bishops of Florida, which I really recommend you read.
Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology.
I'll note that the letter does a nice job of laying out why one might required universal vaccination, by the way, something which I'd appreciate more of our Massachusetts politicians reading.
Steve Revilak has been posting highlights from the Arlington, MA archives via his Bluesky account, and I very much appreciated, as a child of the 70's, this one from 1971 about the latest menace on the street of Arlington: BIG WHEELS!
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Maine Educational Policy Research Institute proposes a 90/10 model for calculating how much of their costs districts can afford to cover with local funding. That means 90% of the expectation would be based on property taxes (the current system) and 10% would be based on the economically disadvantaged student rate. Researchers found that rate to be the best proxy for the poverty level in a community.
Note that Maine's formula does include transportation, which Massachusetts does not include. Also this is an "I know, right?" with a different answer:
Johnson said special education is the area of the model that is “the most under stress.” Because of a step in the formula that bases state funding on past spending, the current formula disproportionately privileges wealthier districts.
But before changing the formula, the institute proposes shifting special education to a regional model, wherein districts would collaborate on providing special ed services. Researchers are planning a forthcoming special education-specific report.
Raise a glass today to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, whose decision to block a religious charter school was upheld today due to a deadlocked Supreme Court:
K-12 Dive has the education take here; Nina Totenberg for NPR is here. You know I'll recommend that you read Chris Geidner of Law Dork, who notes the following:
The one-sentence ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court creates no new national precedent, and the tie was the result of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal from the case. A new challenge not requiring her recusal could easily return to the court in short order — especially now that the court has shown its interest in taking on the issue.
Still celebrate the win:
But, with Thursday’s decision, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School’s application to become the nation’s first religious charter school cannot go forward.
...I do want to be sure others appreciate the "pick me" energy coming from Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, one presumes in pursuit of the Secretary of Education position.
It's no good pointing out that if there is no Department of Education, there will be no Secretary of Education; this isn't a crew that thinks this way.
In any case, last month, it made news when Oklahoma's Department of Education issued bid documents for Bibles for every classroom that could only be answered by Trump Bibles, a bid which within the week then was amended, as that would violate state bid laws. Walters has since announced that 500 Bibles have been purchased for AP Gov classes, which I'm sure those students will find not at all useful for their classes.
This week, Walters announced the creation of a new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism (it's always a tell when the state page features a photo of the head of the department), and then sent a video of his announcing this and then praying for President-elect Trump to every school district in the state, ordering them to show this video in every classroom. The Oklahoman reports that they've counted seven superintendents refusing, and they're backed by the state Attorney General whose spokesman said:
Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents' rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights
So that's amazing!
Walters, of course, is being sued by teachers and parents seeking to overturn his mandate that the Bible be taught in public school classrooms. He's also been under several rounds of investigation.
Note: I am sharing this in part because this week, there is a meme going around which compares Massachusetts to Oklahoma in terms of education, voting record, and other things. It is frequently being shared with a sneer.
Knock it off.
The resistance to Walters is coming from IN OKLAHOMA! That's local superintendents facing off against their state department, local parents and teachers suing! This stuff matters a lot.
It's a whole big country out there, and, even though it is summer, there is stuff happening around schools:
People in Worcester may or may not remember this--I believe it was in the fogginess of everything being remote, meetings happening seemingly multiple times a week, and state guidance changing nearly as fast--but there was an effort at one point to implement a surveillance of students' online activity under the guise of mental health. This was (appropriately!) brought to the School Committee, that weighed in against it.
If you're wondering what that then would have looked like, please read this piece from May McCoy in the Kansas Reflector about what it's like to be a student at Lawrence High School in Kansas:
It would be easy to describe what’s happening to students at Lawrence High School as Orwellian, but that would be an easy and not exactly fitting metaphor. It does resemble in general the dystopian novels we used to be assigned to read in high school — “1984” and “Brave New World” — but a more accurate comparison is to a science fiction novella you may have never heard of.
In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” published in 1956 and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002, a predictive policing system is used to arrest people before they have the chance to commit the crime they are expected to. Dick’s story — like the use of Gaggle — pits authoritarianism and conformity against creativity and individual liberty.
Read it, because the sales pitch here to school officials is how "safe" it will make their students, while, of course, doing no such thing. Watch for this one.
...making Walters looks even smaller, dumber, simpler and more ridiculous than he previously appeared, which is hard to do.
Go, Oklahoma districts!
The New York Times Sunday Magazine covered the push to deny undocumented students or even the children of undocumented immigrants an education.
This is of course not only dumb--it poorly serves the country not to educate children who are here--but would reverse current regulation and policy.
That's a gift link. Please read it and share it.
Advocates now emphasize voluntary strategies to achieve integration, rather than mandatory cross-district busing, an approach that can “generate enormous amounts of public opposition,” said R. Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College.
Gary Stein, a retired New Jersey Supreme Court justice who led the suit in that state, said plaintiffs are seeking to create new magnet schools to attract white families into urban districts and to allow students in urban areas to transfer to suburban school.
“We don’t think that forced busing and countywide school districts are options that at the moment are politically palatable,” he said.
...home-school advocates are also facing pressure from an unlikely source: the school-choice movement, which pushes for families’ access to tax dollars for private education. Although both movements believe public schools are failing America’s children, school-choice advocates are more open to accountability measures, such as standardized tests, in exchange for public funding.
After years of pushing vouchers for private-school tuition, those advocates are now championing more flexible spending accounts that could be used by home-schoolers, too. But the proposals have divided America’s home educators, with many arguing that accepting government money and oversight is a surrender of the liberties the movement worked for 40 years to achieve.
And speaking of school funding, the push to create a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma gets a close look in this Politico piece.
Behind the effort to change the law are Christian conservative groups and legal teams who, over the past decade, have been beneficiaries of the billion-dollar network of nonprofits largely built by [Leonard] Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman.
while the Statewide Virtual Charter Board in Oklahoma unanimously voted down the application for a religious charter school, don't expect the issue to go away.
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| Statue of Mary Barrett Dyer by Sylvia Shaw Judson in front of the Massachusetts State House. The quote on the base reads, “My life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth.” Dyer was hanged in 1660 on Boston Common not far from where her statue sits today. |
One can't say, of course, what internal calculations the Chancery made before exercising the clause in the lease that allows them to end it early. I do want to note, again, though, that it raises a very grave question regarding the lease the now-approved Worcester Cultural Academy Charter School has with the diocese.
That lease--currently a lease between Old Sturbridge Village itself and the Diocese--we're told contains the following clause:
Neither Lessee nor any of its employees, servants, agents or invitees shall make any use of the [building] which would be inconsistent with the doctrines or teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, as determined by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester in his ecclesiastical capacity of Ordinary of the Diocese of Worcester in his sole discretion.
It's worth noting how very particular this language is: it does not put what happens in that building under Roman Catholic canon law, or under Roman Catholic teaching as overseen by the Vatican. This is particular to the Bishop as ordinary of the Worcester diocese.
OSV (and dual charter school) Executive Director Jim Donahue at the time this was made public said:Once the school is approved, we will review the terms with the Diocese once more to ensure they are acceptable to them and to us.I would say it is now fair to speculate as to what would be "acceptable" to the Diocese, given their decision of last week.
That this wasn't of graver concern to the Department in their approval process (despite it being brought to their attention) displays a disturbing lack of understanding of the current context of the separation of church and state when it comes to public schools.
Last year's Carson v. Maine Supreme Court decision, rested on the question of the use of vouchers--which are public education dollars--going to religious schools. Maine had barred that; SCOTUS found that this was discrimination. But as many (including me) noted at the time, this opened the question of religious charter schools. In fact, that is where the Oklahoma Attorney General went.
While Article 103 of the Massachusetts State Constitution bars state funding:
for the purpose of founding, maintaining or aiding any infirmary, hospital, institution, primary or secondary school, or charitable or religious undertaking which is not publicly owned and under the exclusive control, order and supervision of public officers or public agents authorized by the Commonwealth or federal authority or both
which makes us a non-voucher state, the state allowing a charter to operate only "under the doctrines and teachings of the Roman Catholic church" as determined by the local bishop would certainly seem to open a door some are eager to, even as it is barred by the state constitution.
The Pilot piece quoted above was quick to tag the Massachusetts provision as part of the Know Nothing efforts of the Blaine amendment era, but also notes that the separation of church and state goes back farther than that in Massachusetts. And it should, with good reason.The Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution is often said to stem from a reaction to the legacy of religious wars in Europe. But here in Massachusetts, we have a legacy much closer to us on the dangers of state making provision for religion.
I opened this post with a photo of the statue of Mary Dyer that sits next to the public entrance of the Massachusetts State House. Dyer was hanged by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on Boston Common in 1660 due to her preaching, after continually being warned not to, the Quaker faith.
She did not adhere to the state faith. And she was killed by the state for it.
By our state, Massachusetts.
Yes, I have had the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision sitting on my desk in a folder for a month, waiting for me to get to it. It's absolutely--as the dissent itself notes!-- one that we're going to see reverberating down to districts.
Usual disclaimers: I'm not at all a lawyer. And I blog only as me. If you have anything at all to do with a school district, good heavens, talk to legal counsel before you do anything!
The simple outlines of the case: a football coach in Washington State prays in the middle of the football field after games. Is he within his rights to do so, or is the district correct in telling him he may not?
This case does have in common with Carson v. Makin, the Maine religious schools case that I discussed over here last month that it's another chapter in the tension between the Establishment and Exercise clauses in the First Amendment; that is, it's "Congress shall make no law" establishing a religion, but also shall not prevent individuals from exercising their religion.
Now, I should note here that Justice Gorsuch, who wrote for the majority, very explicitly (not only speaking to the dissent, but also, it reads to me, speaking to the dissent in Carson, a bit) disagrees that there is a tension, let alone that it's present in this case. To Gorsuch and the majority, the case is simple: the coach just wanted to pray out there as an individual, the district told him he couldn't, and that's an arm of the state--never forget that public schools are a part of the government--preventing an individual from free exercise of their faith.
The New Yorker has done a good job in taking apart the circular nature of this argument.
What the majority never adequately deal with in their argument is that Coach Kennedy was a football coach, standing on a football field, directly after a game, in his coach garb. They argue that others are doing non-coach things in those moments after the game, but this misses that being "coach" doesn't come off that easily. Thus rather than being an individual being denied his rights, he is himself an agent of the state (enjoy that description!) who is imposing his faith on others, thus becoming the state establishing a religion. As noted first in the dissent, and then in Teen Vogue and elsewhere, the coercive nature of the coach's actions on his players absolutely need to be accounted for in discussing his actions and the district's decisions.
As was noted in the Seattle Times after the decision, Coach Kennedy also wasn't conducting a quiet, individual prayer out there on the 50 yard line. He'd deliberately invited public attention to a controversy he nursed with the district. Justice Sotomayor, writing the dissent, went so far as to include photos of a large group surrounding the coach at midfield, some of whom had jumped the field fences to be on the field after the game, contrary to district policy. None of this was an accident.
What is in peril here, of course, is the religious practice or lack of practice of students in our public schools. The rights of the students to be free from coercion by those in authority in public schools is nowhere recognized in this decision.
And of course, this makes a mess for anyone making or enforcing public policy in our schools. Just how much of a mess is clear from some of the legal writing stemming from the decision; see, for example, here and here (both of which I recommend, for what it's worth, for those considering their district policies).
I don't have a magic answer here, though I also will say that I have yet to read legal counsel that does.
Usual disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. This is very much a lay understanding of what's being sorted out here.
The Supreme Court released their decision in Carson v. Makin yesterday, causing a good bit of concern, distress, and words of warning in the education universe. I think we need to answer two questions: what was decided, and how much do we in public education need to worry?
In understanding the case, you first need to know that Maine doesn't run public schools in every school district; about half the districts in Maine don't have a secondary school. The state has had a long tradition, then, of instead providing tuition to a school of the family's choice for secondary school. This means the state effectively then has a voucher system for much of secondary education. Until 1981, this included religious schools; in 1981, the Maine attorney general opined that public funding going to private schools was a violation of the Establishment clause, that is the First Amendment bar on Congress making any law "respecting the establishment of religion." The state then required that any state receiving the tuition payments from the state needed to be "a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the Constitution."
Two families brought suit. The majority (Roberts, writing, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) found for the plaintiffs; Breyer wrote the dissent in which Kagan joined, with Sotomayor joining all but one part (that starts on page 23 of the link above); she filed a further dissent spelling out her objections to that piece (that starts on page 41).
I think the best way of explaining how the majority got there is what both Breyer and Sotomayor note in their dissents: the Establishment clause is held in tension with the Exercise clause which is the "prohibiting the free exercise of" phrase that follows in the First Amendment, but the majority breaks this tension and puts the Exercise clause over the Establishment clause. Congress can't make a law about religion; they also can't prevent people from following their own religion. Effectively, SCOTUS found that by not sending the tuition payments to religious schools, the state was not neutral. Roberts writes, "The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools--as long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion." (p. 10)
I have to be honest: it's hard for me to believe how just...dumb that statement is. What it is in fact is the state refusing to support religion, which is a principle as old as the Republic, and with good reason. Both Breyer and Sotomayer put this better than I have here, and I recommend reading the dissents if that's of interest.
Roberts and the majority have rested much of their argument on the 2017 Trinity Lutheran v. Comer case, which you may vaguely remember had to do with playground resurfacing (no, I am not kidding); the church preschool sued because they couldn't get public funding for their playground resurfacing, and SCOTUS found for the church. There's been an attempt at a distinction between if the funds are being used for religious instruction, but it's clear that many of the schools in question--as it is their point!--infuse their religious perspective throughout their curriculum.
What then does this impact?
At this time, the case and its impact rests on state tuition payments to private schools, or vouchers. Thus it is the states that have vouchers that may need to shift. Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat noted that most states that have vouchers already allow for state funding to go to religious schools.
Coverage from Bangor notes that this then needs to be sorted out with anti-discrimination laws in Maine, as it is a teaching of some of the religious institutions in question to discriminate against, for example, LGBTQ students or families.
What it does not do is require the creation of vouchers; as Chalkbeat has:
Critically, the decision does not require states to offer public funds to private schools. In his majority opinion, Roberts reiterated something he wrote in the 2020 case: “A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”
Thus, this decision does not impact Massachusetts, for example, which is a non-voucher state.
However, Breyer (who doesn't have straight vouchers and charters in his dissent) does note the question this raises about charter schools that want to be religious schools, or religious schools simply flipping to being charter schools. Then they don't require vouchers anymore. That big mess was covered back in February by Chalkbeat. There was some discussion of this on Twitter yesterday; check on the school finance list I keep for some of that back and forth.
But that sick feeling in your stomach over the breakdown of church and state being separate in the U.S., stemming from a healthy concern over the religious wars of Europe? Me, too.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has not subjected anyone to chains or torture on account of religion. And the result of the State’s policy is nothing so dramatic as the denial of political office. The consequence is, in all likelihood, a few extra scraped knees. But the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.Why do we care? As has been bandied about repeatedly over the past few months, there is some connection between this and the argument over school vouchers; thus allowing access to state grants for a religious institution could clear the argument for state support for religious schools.
This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.One should note, however, that Justice Gorsuch dissents specifically from that footnote.
To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground. The stakes are higher. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state. The Court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. Its decision slights both our precedents and our history, and its reasoning weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both.Sotomayor does see this as opening up the possibility of further cases; see the footnote:
The principle it establishes can be manipulated to call for a similar fate for lines drawn on the basis of religious use.And the conclusion:
If this separation means anything, it means that the government cannot, or at the very least need not, tax its citizens and turn that money over to houses of worship. The Court today blinds itself to the outcome this history requires and leads us instead to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment. I dissent.More as I find it.
The separation of church and state doesn't just protect the state-- it protects the church, too. When you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And where federal money goes, federal strings follow. Sooner or later the right combination of misbehavior and people in federal power will result in a call for accountability for private schools that get federal money-- even religious schools. And as the requests for private religious vouchers roll in, folks will be shocked and surprised to find that Muslim and satanic and flying spaghetti monster houses of worship will line up for money, then the feds will have to come up with a mechanism for determining "legitimacy" and voila! That's how you get the federal department of church oversight.
